Dana Boyd Taps a Powerful Tool

I posted something along these lines a while ago in Feedback Loops or rewarding the Things We Want. Its good to see that it still works, but we need also to ask how we can make better use of the idea.

   

Over the last month, I've been driving Mimi's Hybrid on and off. One of my favorite things about the Hybrid is that it tells you how many MPG you're averaging over time. I find myself driving around town trying to maximize that number, getting uber excited when it goes up and super sad when it goes down. It reminds me of when i used to try to maximize my miles per hour when going from Boston to New York only this is more environmental. Yet, it's not the environment that i'm concerning myself with - it's all about number games in the same way that people obsess over every pound on the scale or the calories in every bite.

The basics would seem to be

   
1. Real time feedback of the relevant information
   
2. Distance from goal (be it ideal driving behaviour, household or community energy or water consumption targets, aggregated job progress if you want to be a slave driver)
   
3. Comparison with personal best
   
4. Comparison with current best performance (there's a touch of the Stakhanovite in me obviously, but it is feedback like this that drives YouTube, MySpace and half the blogosphere)
   
5. Graphing improvements or deterioration
   
6. Tools that enable me to make a difference

If my actions don't make any difference I'll lose interest, if the targets are too hard to reach, the same, but reaching my own PB, and beating it may well be enough to lift all performances and those who really want to compete, can.

For example, I have no interest in how many hits Weinberger or Doc Searls get, I'm not in that league, but if Sitemeter tells me that my moving average is easing slowly up, that is almost good enough for me.

We are competitive beings, we actually enjoy getting better at something and built into our social structures is an even more powerful tool. We compare ourselves to others and we measure our success, status, self image and satisfaction based not on some absolute standard but on where we stand in relation to those about us. We are, in two words, socially driven.

Its about time organisations at every scale started making use of something that practically every successful Internet business so far has embodied.