9rules.com is one of those rare social communities that really “gets” how to keep users around.
Addictive Social Site Qualities
1. First and foremost, a points system with things to “buy” with points earned by interacting often with the site and members. You can buy better layouts for your profile for example. You don’t need anything in the 9rules store, but you want a lot of it. Weird thing about social networks.
2. At 9rules you get “badges” for completing milestones like your first 9 friends (I still don’t have enough, lol) and earning your first 100-10,000 points. Again, it’s all about marking your turf, being superior, and catering to such ridiculous but universal desires that arise in a social setting.
While on the subject of Badges…
3. LOTS of things to do and tools to use. 9rules has “clips,” “notes,” and all kinds of ways for you to contribute and get recognized as a valuable member of the group. Clips lets you post URLs and review them, like Digg. Notes let you do much the same thing but not link back to any particular site. And both have comments so others can join in, earn points by commenting, and feel more superior than people like me who fight the urge to be popular on such sites because of what ELSE that says about you. (No life, perhaps?)
Don’t get me wrong. Right this moment I realize that I could be earning badges. But I am fighting the urge by turning YOU on to 9rules so I won’t feel so bad about my indulgence.
Marketing on Addictive Social Sites
For marketing purposes there are tons of ways to get juice from such networks. Look for the ones that “get it” and give you multiple opportunities to showcase your superior intellect, your penchant for finding funny things and posting them, and your keen awareness of everything that’s going on in the world.
In the process you can pick spark the attention of influencers who can send you a lot of traffic.
Some of the “purists” on such networks might get offended that I mention marketing. But make no mistake about it, every single person on such a network is marketing! It’s a whole social economy! You have to “market” to earn enough social currency to move up in the mico-society.
Social networking and social marketing are therefore identical to each other. Just because you aren’t “selling” a product doesn’t mean you are not selling a product.
It just means that some people are better at masking their marketing than pure marketers who don’t know the rules.
Apparently there are only 9 of them.