Incentivizing Creative Viral Participation

A few weeks ago, my friend Dan and I were discussing the possibilities for social networking in 2008 and how the work we were seeing in 2006 was only scratching the surface. I touched on this a little bit in this blog I wrote about niche networks and trusted networks.

In my blog, I noted that smart campaigns will do more with social networks than build big friends lists and microtarget voters - they would use large networks and personal information to find their way into niche and trusted networks. Really smart campaigns would find a way to tap the creative capacity of those networks:

The second option is to go deep - find a way to completely decentralize social networking outreach so that your followers go viral and invade all the niche networks on your behalf. In this model, your FaceBook and MySpace friend are a jumping off point; a baseline pool of social capital that you microtarget by lifestyle and use to create Evangelists who carry your message into "trusted" and/or specialized networks.

The real challenge - the holy grail - will be getting something viral to rise back up to the national level out of the depths of the niches.

Everyone knows what Jib Jab was in 2004; with the rise of the social web, millions of Millenials are out there with the production skills, the tools, and the creativity to repeat that feat. Smart campaigns will use their social networks to tap that creativity. If successful, photoshopped images, machinima satires, home movies like this and this will proliferate - spreading among the niches to which they appeal and out of which they arise. Some will stay in their niches and energize those supporters. Others will go national like Jib Jab.

Some of this will rise organically, but is there a way to incentivize this type of political participation? I think the answer is yes. More after the jump:

Two relatively new video sharing sites - Revver and Metacafe - offer an interesting answer to this question.

Both of these video sharing sites pay video producers for content uploaded to the site. Producers are paid each time their videos are viewed - Metacafe at a rate of $5 per 1,000 views, Revver at an undisclosed and 'variable' rate.

The monetary amounts are small if you don't get a lot of views, to be sure, but organizations with large mailing lists and high interest/engagement among their members (read Presidential campaigns) offer creators a real chance at making some money if their videos take off within the community. Not a bad incentive to produce non-traditional campaign media.

Of course, this could also be a potential fundraiser for the campaign.  Creative campaigns that are well liked and trusted within creative communities will likely be able to get idealistic supporters to donate their profits back to the campaign, and campaigns that are producing quality video of their own could use this model to recoup some of their production costs.

One non profit with a loyal following of cultural producers - Creative Commons - is already employing this model to raise money for their organization.

Smart campaigns will set up some experimental programs and follow suit.