DUKKY

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of ARPANet, the progenitor of the Internet that we know, love and can’t live without, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) decided to play a game: They scattered 10 red weather balloons in locations across the country, and challenged people to use the Internet to find them. The winner would receive $40,000 cash.

Just 9 hours after the contest started, a team of researchers from MIT took the prize. How did they manage to find the balloons so quickly? By harnessing the power of social networking and viral collaboration.

Here’s what they did: they offered to share the prize money with people who helped them find the balloons.  People who found a balloon and told the MIT team where it was would get $2,000 for themselves and $2,000 donated to charity. The person that referred them would get a $1000 for themselves and $1,000 for charity. In turn, the person that referred that person would get $500 for themselves and $500 for charity, and so on down the line.

News of the contest quickly went viral, spreading like wildfire through a variety of channels that included social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Dr. Riley Crane, the researcher who headed the project, sees a variety of potential applications for real-world situations that require information to be distributed quickly, such as disaster response (we’ve all seen the impact that social media has had on marshaling resources for Haiti)  and finding missing children.  But the kind of response that the MIT team generated is also a marketer’s dream. So, what can we learn from it?

Probably the single most important lesson for marketers is that if you want something to go viral, people need an incentive to share it. For example, on Dr. Crane’s website, an article about the contest quotes Toshiba Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland, head of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT:

“What was most rewarding about this was how we demonstrated the enormous potential of human networking.  It was great that we won the contest, but more significantly, this exercise showed how building the proper incentives into a viral collaboration can quickly harness a large population to work together to address broad societal needs. It has helped us better understand how information spreads and why people cooperate.”

Of course, in most cases we can’t offer the type of large cash rewards that got people excited about the MIT team’s project.  But that’s okay-while cash may be one of  the best motivators, it’s not the only incentive that makes people want to share.  People share content for free all the time for a variety of reasons: because it makes them laugh, because it tugs on their heartstrings, because it makes them appear smarter, cooler or “in-the-know.”

At Dukky, our promotions can be shared easily via e-mail and social media, harnessing people’s natural desire to impress other people and make them happy by sharing discounts and promotions.

What incentive are you providing your customers to spread the word about you?