Incentive & Reward Programs Need More UGC

UGC?  What is UGC?

User. Generated. Content.

Old School – New School

In the days of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble incentive programs to drive more rock breaking at the quarry came with elaborate communication plans.  Big budget program announcements (if you were doing a group travel program the budgets were almost obscene), monthly 4-color update mailings, teasers before the launch of the program, elaborate “pre-trip” (that’s what the industry calls the stuff you got if you earned the trip – badges, passport wallets, “while we are a way” refrigerator magnets) – all were the norm for programs.

All pretty expensive and all one-way communication.  The goal was to get the audience excited and engaged in the program and keep them thinking about earning rewards. 

All designed and written by the agency and the client.  Every comma, verb, semi-colon reviewed and argued about before sending to the printer.  Time consuming and expensive.  Communications budgets could exceed 10% of the program budget.

But new school is different. 

New school is flash emails, video sent via email, html emails with links back to the program site (which is really just and electronic version of the stuff we used to print and mail.)  Incentive companies and clients took to e-delivery of program communications like a fat kid to a Twinkie.

A lot of reasons for that – no typos (oops… fixed it in real time – no lingering evidence… no reprints), no postage, no paper, and ultimately … a lot less cost.

And unfortunately… a lot less creativity and I’d suggest a lot less engagement.

Get Your Social On and Get Engagement

With the advent of e-delivery and online communication of program information I think we’ve lost a lot of what made these programs exciting an interesting.  Now it is too easy to “not see” the communications.  When you’re not online – you’re not seeing the “brochure” that used to sit on the corner of the desk.  When you’re not in your email client you’re not seeing the progress report that used to be tacked on your bulletin board. 

Getting the most out of your investment in rewards means we need to drive more communication about a program and we need to drive more engagement.  Now I know companies aren’t going to go back to the Stone Age and start printing a bunch of stuff but there is a big way to get your audience more involved in the program – and at price points that make a ton of sense.

Enter UGC

I’m a bit surprised there isn’t more of this in the industry.  It would seem a natural progression of program communications.  When you have 60 billion videos watched each month on Youtube and 36 billion photos uploaded to Facebook I smell a trend.

So what does this have to do with your incentive and reward programs?  Well…

Why don’t you allow participants in the program develop and drive the program communications? 

Social Program Communications – A Snapshot

Hey… we live in a social world where we connect everyone to our twitter links and Pinterest posts.  Why not just go with the flow here and get participants involved in the “social” side of program communications.

Here’s a short list of what I’d include (believe me – I got tons more…)

Pinterest for Award Goals

• Let each program participant pick their goals and pin them to a board for the rest of the company to see (some sound psychological reasons for doing this.)  Not into Pinterest?  Then what about a simple drag and drop image to a flickr file that is shared by the participants.

Program Blog Instead of Static “Web Page”

• Too many programs use static websites to announce and describe the program.  What if you used WordPress to create a living, changing site driven by participant engagement?  Allow participants to update their feelings about the program to a blog about the program.  Let them link to their Facebook page and twitter accounts – put that stream on the website.
• Get some managers and employees to talk about what they’re seeing the program do and what they are doing with the program.  Again… the impact of communications from “people just like me” is much more powerful than some management wag telling you how great the program is.

Interactive Progress Reports

• Let the participants go out and see how their performance stacks up with other – use sliders in little Apps that let them drag a slider to one product to another to see how increases would affect their award earnings. 
• Let them issue challenges to each other and then report progress on these challenges to the program population.

For Group Travel Programs – A Natural

• Flickr file for all pics taken on the trip – share and download as you see fit.  Had a great dinner with some new friends but didn’t snap a pic – but they did… upload and download baby. 
• Contests for funniest pic, most romantic, etc.
• A blog specifically focused on the award trip.  Updates on different restaurants on site… different activities… new relationships.  You name it they will blog about it.  It’s easy and I’m guessing there are a fair number of people now on these award trips that either have a tumblr account or use wordpress.com – blogging is not a foreign concept to many of these folks.
• Hashtags for twitter while on site (and for those back home that might want to keep track of what’s going on.)  Before the trip see if you can capture twitter handles and create a list of all attendees.  Share the list and allow people to follow each other on site.  I use twitter a lot at conferences to see where people are and what they are doing – why wouldn’t a group travel award have the same dynamic?
• Set up a Youtube channel and let participants upload videos of what they are doing.  Share and compare.  Participants be sending to friends and family.  Is there a better way to get people who didn’t go on the award trip excited about potentially going next time?  Doubtful.

What Say You?

I’m just scratching the surface.  Social communication and user generated content is here and now.  Why not take advantage of it? 

What do you think?  How would you use UGC to amp up your reward program?

(See what I did just there – I asked for your input and then provided a way in the comments for you to give me ideas – which now everyone can see – so we all get smarter.  That is UGC.)

Neato huh?

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