Web Marketing on HubPages - Reciprocation

Are you being influenced or manipulated at HubPages?

Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini reveals techniques in promotion and web marketing that have long been used against us. In his book, Cialdini discusses automatic patterns of behavior in humans that get triggered by six key marketing strategies.

Cialdini's insights and findings constitute knowledge that is useful to us all. At the very least, we want to be cognizant of the various web marketing strategies that are being used by marketers on us today. The more we know, the more we will be able to neutralize these web marketing techniques.

Here, I want to focus on how Cialdini's web marketing strategies are used on HubPages.

My purpose is not to describe new strategies for unscrupulous web marketers to use, but rather to highlight strategies that they may already be using on you. In this first article I will focus on Cialdini's first web marketing trigger - reciprocation.

I do not mean to suggest that all web marketers are unscrupulous. Many web marketers provide a valuable service to all of us by writing reviews and collecting useful information to address common issues. However, there are some that will do whatever it takes for the almighty dollar, including stealing content, and using web marketing techniques to manipulate us to say yes when we actually want to say no.

Although the discussion here uses HubPages as a primary example and focus, the web marketing strategies described are broadly used, and you may encounter them in most online communities that you visit.

The most profitable use of reciprocation is in getting you to say yes to an affiliate link. This is where the most money is made by a web marketer.

A hubber did me a very generous favor once, he stumbled one of my hubs and got me about 70 views from Stumble Upon. There were no clicks but I was new then and 70 views made me ecstatic. I thanked him and we had a conversation about getting web traffic. At the end of it, he suggested that I look over some products that may be helpful to me, and suggested that I buy one.

He started promoting a more expensive affiliate product and then retreated to a cheaper one.

This is the reciprocation web marketing technique at work. First of all, the web marketer did me a favor that I greatly appreciated. This already put me in an obligatory and more receptive position. Then he suggested an expensive product which I of course refused. At this point he retreated to the actual product he wanted me to buy.

This all put me in an extreme state of indebtedness because not only did I receive a favor from him, I also rejected his first offer, which made him concede to a lesser offer. These are all well understood strategies for web marketing, as described by Cialdini, but I did not know this at the time, so I was extremely tempted to buy.

Two other common uses of reciprocation on HubPages regard fans and comments.

Many people will add you as their fan in the hopes that you will reciprocate and become theirs as well. This is common practice especially for new hubbers who want to quickly get hooked-in to the HubPages community.

Similarly, some web marketers will make generic comments such as "Great hub", "Your hub has taught me a lot. Thank you", or "I have learnt much from you", without even reading your hub, simply to get some reciprocal comments.

To appear less generic, some may even take keywords from your article and make generic statements about them such as "Facebook is good", or "I have learnt much from your MMORPG guide".

Since both these reciprocation techniques are so commonly used, they are now well recognized as spam web marketing techniques.

On HubPages, if you add too many fans in a short amount of time, your Hub Score will actually receive a penalty. Similarly, hubbers you have just fanned will frequently check your Hubtivity to see if you are fan-bombing within HubPages. If so, you will quickly become persona non grata.

Does this mean that we are safe from the reciprocation web marketing strategy on HubPages?

Have previous HubPages spammers or community hackers diminished the power of reciprocation as a tool of influence?

Not quite. All it means is that the better web marketers have become more subtle and unique in their approaches.

One common reciprocation strategy used on Digg and other popular social bookmarking sites is to find people who give more than they take.

On Digg, this simply means people who vote up a large number of links, but post few links themselves. On Twitter this means finding someone who will tweet more about you than you will tweet about them. Practically, this allows a web marketer to get much more in return compared to what he has put in.

On HubPages, this translates to finding people who comment a lot, but post very few hubs. Even though a web marketer may comment and even read all of their hubs, he will end up receiving more comments from the erstwhile hubber than he gives.

The law of reciprocation can also be combined with what we know about schedules of reinforcement from behavioral psychology.

Studies show that repetition of behavior is enhanced by using a variable schedule of reinforcement rather than a fixed schedule. This relates to both the time and quantity of reinforcement. If you give someone unexpected rewards, at unexpected times for performing a behavior, they will be more motivated to repeat that behavior than if you gave them fixed rewards, at fixed times.

A common example for variable schedules of reinforcement is in games of chance, such as buying a lottery ticket or playing slot machines. In these activities, the size and timing of reward are both greatly variable. Frequently you will win nothing at all, sometimes you will win something small, and very rarely you will win a jackpot that is so big that you will be set for life. This is in contrast to fixed schedules of reinforcement such as your monthly salary, which is always paid at the same time, and of the same quantity.

Getting a salary is a good thing, but it is not something that will make your heart race and give you a thrill. And it is exactly this heart racing thrill, achieved with variable schedules of reinforcement, that makes gambling into such an addictive and successful business.

Variable schedules of reinforcement can be combined with the reciprocation web marketing strategy.

For example, a web marketer can apply a variable schedule of reinforcement to the comments that he makes. Rather than commenting on all of the hubs published by any one of his HubPages fans, he only comments on some of them. The trick is to keep his fan in a reciprocal state, while expending the least amount of energy himself. He can also keep the quality of his comments variable, i.e. most of the times he makes generic comments, but sometimes he actually makes a really good and relevant comment.

By keeping it variable, the web marketer can escape being labelled as a spammer, generate goodwill within the HubPages community, and still minimize the time and effort he needs to use the law of reciprocation against you.

Another variation on the web marketing strategy of reciprocation is to combine it with the law of diminishing marginal utility.

In economics, the law of diminishing marginal utility states that we derive the most utility, i.e. satisfaction, from the initial units of goods that we consume. As we consume more and more of the good, our marginal utility (i.e. additional satisfaction gained) from consuming another unit of the good diminishes so that ultimately, the increase in satisfaction becomes very small.

What does diminishing marginal utility mean in the land of HubPages?

What this means is that new hubbers, or hubbers with few fans, generally value fans and comments a lot more than established hubbers who already have many fans and get many comments. This was certainly true for me. I still remember my first few fans and the people who first made meaningful comments on my hubs.

However, as a hubber acquires more and more fans, and more and more comments, the marginal utility/increase in satisfaction derived from each new one, is greatly diminished. Therefore, if you fan someone who already has a lot of fans, or comment on a hub that already has many comments, the likelihood of reciprocation is much less than if you fan a new hubber, or if you comment on a less popular hub.

The web marketing strategy here is to only target new members and new member hubs, where a web marketer will get the greatest reciprocation rewards for his efforts.

The reflex action after learning of these techniques is to reject all gifts from strangers.

If we do not accept gifts, then we will not feel obliged to reciprocate in kind.

However, it should be noted that we developed this spirit and culture of reciprocation for a good reason. Reciprocation has made it possible for us to develop a system of trade, to specialize in areas of production, and become much more productive as a result. Reciprocation is powerful because it is very useful in our society.

It would be unfortunate to reject all that reciprocation has to offer just to weed out the few unscrupulous web marketers who are using it to manipulate us.

Not everyone that offers you a gift is looking for something in return. Some people simply derive satisfaction from being good to others, and do not have a hidden agenda in addition to that.

Rather than rejecting all human kindnesses, we can all come together as a community, and help identify those that are only manipulating others for their own good. Such exploiters will themselves exhibit a certain pattern of behavior that we can now identify given our new knowledge of reciprocation. We can then publicize this information for others in the HubPages community to see.

Once exposed, such web marketing strategies will lose much of their power.