Posted By Will Morgenweck on 21 Dec 2010 01:45 PM
A rewards system is coming in AS 2.0 complete with an API. However, rewards is more of a system for retention of existing members, not viral growth. We should probably start another topic related to rewards and retention.
True.
Even the "spam your friends" is not particularly viral, by my definition.
"Viral" can be planned but it always feels like it's an organic thing to the public. It feels like it just happens and is incredibly difficult to capture, bottle and sell.
One of my most successful campaigns was built around a referral reward system. My site offers a VIP section with special files not available to anyone else. I made a reward where for every 50 people you referred, you got 1 month of VIP access.
People were posting on all their social media spots, using their sigs on other forums and spamming their friends in IM and email. I just sat back and watched the people rolling in.
There are a few downsides to this. First, you will get some people gaming the system. Someone might post fake links such as "click here to see Miley Cyrus nude". I had my system set up to log referrers so I could see where the clicks came from and if an inordinate amount of clicks came from 1 site I would investigate, and I could nullify the credits. I was also able to program in exclusion lists so that I could automatically ignore clicks from sites I knew were likely to be spam links.
Second, you might find that boost in users is a pain to deal with. Either system resources or human resources like mods may be taxed with the influx of new users asking the same newbie questions.
Third it does require some effort to maintain so you might want to consider it a limited time event. This also helps to get people active right away.
I still get users from these referral links and I stopped offering it 2 years ago.
I would love to see a dedicated sub forum for sharing these types of ideas amongst the AF/AS customers.