Take A Peck

I stumbled upon a very interesting post from Pat Coyle, Executive Director of Digital Business for the Indianapolis Colts, over at Sports Marketing 2.0. Pat is starting a social network for Colts fans, and has been posting about the status, successes, and challenges relating to the project.

In the post referenced above, Pat discusses social currency, which is basically some measure that reflects an individual’s worth/credibility in a social network. An example of this would be the number of friends someone has on Facebook, which shows (to some extent) how popular/friendly someone is.

Pat asked for help with establishing a social currency for the Colts social network. I commented on this issue with two main points:

1) You can’t just set up a social currency. It has to be connected to some higher purpose or value and mean something. Take the Facebook example. Friends and wall posts serve to help people stay in touch/connect with their friends. Though they also are social currency in that they can be used to establish one’s value/credibility in the network, that’s not their main purpose.

2) There should be a reward for social currency. While this is not the case with Facebook, with the amount of social networks available now, there’s got to be an incentive for people to spend time with a new one. Maybe if the network is cool enough on its own, there doesn’t need to be an additional incentive, but this is a definite maybe. In the Colts case, rewarding active/passionate fans could be simply offering signed merchandise or exclusive fan experiences to the fans with the most “Colts Cred”–their experimental version of social currency.

Would love to hear your thoughts on social currency and how to build it as it relates to online communities.

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