The Cow is a Lie – Engagement and Points for the Sake of Points
10,000 Nerd Bucks if you get the title reference.
Sifting through my reader this week, I came across what I consider to be one of the most maddening yet incredible start-up stories, courtesy of Mashable. A start-up called Wander has launched a mind-numbingly simple game – you click the image of a cow and you get a point. If you like or tweet the game, you get 100 points. The points serve no purpose at all, but the leader has one billion points on the aptly named “Utterly Pointless Leaderboard.”
Let that sink in for a minute: one billion points in a time suck of a game that serves absolutely no purpose other than to earn points. Go ahead and curse the human condition, punch a wall, whatever – I know you want to.
Mashable points out that Wander’s game is the homage to Cow Clicker, a Facebook game designed to illustrate the pointlessness of, you guessed it, Facebook games. Sort of like “You Have to Burn the Rope” for the social generation, I guess.
But the stark simplicity of the game combined with its massive popularity is telling – no one has any idea what Wander does (even Mashable), but their name is going to be everywhere. This is a solid lesson for PR pros, and not just one in gamification (although that’s a pretty key point here).
Attaching client names to something, anything, which promises engagement, will have some kind of benefit. It may not be the booming success reaped by clicking a stock photo of a cow, but the exposure gained will surely be greater than standing quietly in the corner of the social world.
So tweet, create Facebook pages, have YouTube videos, create social contests…the list goes on for quite a while. But just think – if clicking a cow can have such booming effects for a mystery company like Wander, just think what a similarly well-conceived endeavor can do for your organization.
--John Terrill