Introduction: What is a Red Balloon Challenge?
The Red Balloon Challenge is an interesting experiment run by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense in December 2009, with the aim of testing the power of social networks.
The challenge was simple: Tap on social networks to retrieve 10 red balloons that were randomly suspended across the country. The first team to find all 10 balloons and revert their 10 GPS coordinates to DARPA will win a prize of $40,000.
MIT’s solution to the Red Balloon Challenge
Among the 4000+ teams who attempted, the solution from a group of MIT students stood out among the rest. Instead of just concentrating on coverage and reaching as many people as possible over the internet, they included an incentive mechanism where anyone who contributed towards identifying a correct location will be rewarded accordingly – the first person who submitted the correct coordinates for 1 balloon will get $2,000, the person who referred that person will get $1,000, and the inviter who invited the inviter will get $500 and so on.
The incentive motivated many people who were otherwise latent to quickly share the challenge among their networks. Within 8 hours and 52 minutes, the MIT team correctly identifies the coordinates for all 10 balloons.
An illustration depicting the recursive incentive system designed by MIT team. Source here.
Incentives distributed along the chain are the key to activating your social network.
However, incentives alone are not the answer to why MIT’s solution was so successful; especially since incentives have been widely used in referral marketing.
“Direct incentive” only gives a reward to the person who made a successful referral directly. On the other hand, MIT’s “recursive incentive” mechanism rewards everyone along the chain who made a successful introduction.
The MIT team found that “recursive incentive mechanism” was far more effective because a person doesn’t necessarily have to pass the message to the correct person. He or she can stand to gain by just sharing requests around. This propels the request to spread much further than a normal referral program. The promise of a staggered reward also spurred people to quickly reach out to others.
“Recursive incentive mechanism” was far more effective because a person doesn’t necessarily have to pass the message to the correct person. He or she can stand to gain by just sharing requests around.
ReferReach taps on the Red Balloon Challenge findings to help you mobilize your network.
MIT’s solution shows that there is a limit in just asking and activating your direct contact. Instead, the power of social networks can be better harnessed when everyone in the network is motivated to spread the request around. This will only happen if every contributor along a successful request-responder chain is rewarded, where everyone is motivated to pass the requests around even though they might not know the final responder.
ReferReach AIR (Ask-Introduce-Response) chain where every contributor along a successful chain can be rewarded.
ReferReach is building a blockchain and artificial intelligence backed system that does exactly just that. Regardless of what your ask is – looking for clients, seeking recommendations, looking for service providers – you can quickly input your request in the app and start sharing within your immediate network on Whatsapp, Linkedin, Facebook etc.
When your immediate network forwards the request to their network, the forwarding chain is captured in the system regardless of the number of times the request has been forwarded. Monetary or non-monetary rewards can be easily distributed along the chain once a correct connection is fulfilled.
