The Champfrogs Checklist: Status

To get people talking about your ideas you can mint social currency to enable people to gain status.

Now we’re finally at the end of the Champfrogs Checklist. It feels good, doesn’t it, ticking off all the items on a checklist? It gives us a sense of progress, a sense of completion. Maybe we can earn a status upgrade when we turn in a fully stamped card!

This is what this last topic is all about: giving people a sense of moving upward, a sense of gaining status. We call it social currency. People like playing games that earn them more status among others. They use social currency to achieve a positive impression among their family, friends, and fellow workers.

To get people talking about your ideas, and spread the message, as creative networkers we can mint social currency. We can allow people to earn credits while they are promoting our ideas along the way. One way of doing this is to leverage game mechanics and provide visible symbols of earned status that people can show to others. It is called gamification and it’s all the rage these days.  You can see it applied publicly on social networks (with likes, friends, and followers), on Q&A websites (such as Quora and StackOverflow), and on the mother of all personal ranking websites: Klout.

Another way to implement social currency is a bit more private, and a bit more subtle, but nevertheless effective. I enjoy every moment I see my friends’ eyes glance with envy at the silver and golden luggage tags of various frequent flyer programs I have dangling on my suitcases. I know the airlines have answered successfully the question:

What Is the Social Currency?

(image: Tax Credits)

Also read:

• Champfrogs Checklist: Goal
• The 40 Best Influence & Persuasion Books

This is part 10 of a 10-part series about the Champfrogs Checklist, a simple tool for change agents to match their ideas for change with people’s intrinsic motivation and desires. The full checklist consists of Curiosity, Honor, Acceptance, Mastery, Power, Freedom, Relatedness, Order, Goal, and Status. The Champfrogs Checklist article is available for download via the Management Workout mailing list.