Purveyors of social media expertise to large corporations are cynics using the worst of human nature to sell snake oil. But, like everything, there’s something to be learned from it.

If you’ve been anywhere near me for the last few days, I’ve stopped you to talk about the recent Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) experiment involving Twitter and balloons. If you want to read or listen, which I recommend, you can find the recording and transcript on npr.org.

The background is that there was a $40,000 prize for finding eight red weather balloons distributed around the country. This nationwide competition took just nine hours. Find eight needles in the haystack in nine hours!

The DARPA balloon in Union Square, San Francisco (photo by DARPA)

What We Learned

It’s still all about incentive—but also about values, style, and how far you are willing to go.

• Team and purpose incentive: The top 10 teams all used social media to mobilize massive numbers of people across the country. One team mobilized one thousand people in one hour.
• Financial incentive: The winning team from MIT used a combination of a payment scheme that rewarded you not only for finding a balloon but also for recruiting other people who might find balloons.
• Emotional incentive: The winning team also had promised to give money to charity.
• Incentive of winning a zero-sum game: There is balance in all things, and some of the front-running teams (and evidently, the competition was won by less than 10 minutes) mobilized big social communities and explicitly tasked them with spreading misinformation to the competition to buy time.

I have a list that sits above my desk detailing the seven human motivations that marketers manipulate for financial gain. I use it as a reminder to consider my own values regularly. They are:

• Flattery
• Fear
• Greed
• Anger
• Guilt
• Exclusivity
• Salvation

All of these are alive and in use in social media, because social media require short, consumable memes. In this time of rapid change and too few true thoughtful strategists, I’m sad to say that purveyors of social media consulting are using exclusivity and fear far too much. This is a pox on our industry.