The challenges and rewards of challenges
We say that Swace is here to challenge you. Let me explain some of the reasoning behind that.
It seems like challenge has become quite a positive word lately. What used to mean difficulty or hard-to-solve issue now means exciting opportunity to prove yourself or interesting thing around which to wrap your head. With technology constantly developing, the reason for the growing popularity of challenges seems at least twofold.
One, technological advances now allow many ways to create and perform challenges. There are tools for tracking, accountability, many options for interactivity, video, and even VR. The more technologically advanced the challenge, the more enticing it can be, at least for those of us fascinated by such things.
Two, those same technological advances have made life much more convenient, leading if not to laziness, then at least to the fact that many people do not experience many challenging things on a regular basis.
Take your regular office worker: they’re probably spending most of their time either in front of a computer, poring over their phone, or slumped on the couch in front of yet another screen. When presented with an alternative, and especially one framed as a challenge, i.e., an opportunity to prove that they are in some way better than others or they themselves expected, their curiosity will likely be piqued, at the very least.
The issue of proving our worth and (perhaps unexpected) abilities may in part stem from insecurities in an increasingly competitive world. It may also be fueled by the incredibly curated experience of the lives of others that social media fosters.
In other words, people don’t tend to post on Facebook when they DID NOT run a few miles or eaten healthy, which may in fact be most days, but when they DO, they’ll brag about it to their friends. Which is very natural, but the effect in our average office worker’s feed is that nearly everyone but they are doing good things for themselves all the time. In pessimistic terms, this causes envy. To put a more positive spin on it, it arouses a healthy sense of competition.
Now, if you are feeling like changing things up and proving your worth, taking something up for a short period of time may appear more doable than vowing to change your lifestyle forever (besides, we all know that such vows normally go the same way as New Year’s resolutions). Yet by using the principles of habit formation, such temporary challenges may in fact have lasting effects. What may start as a game or a dare may prove beneficial enough to stick.
Having done 30 days of yoga, a person may likely discover some real improvements in their physical and emotional state and choose to keep up the practice, even if not in a daily manner. Having eaten a healthier diet for several weeks and felt the increased energy levels that brings, they may be tempted to continue feeling that way, and therefore not revert to their previous nutrition.
In general it is common sense that a challenge raises your awareness of an issue. If you have to think about something every day, it will naturally be in the forefront of your mind, meaning that you will be more likely to act accordingly.
All of the above has direct consequences not only for users, but for brands and marketers as well. If by setting a challenge we can capture the user’s interest, form a habit of interacting with the brand, and very likely get them to keep up interacting even after the challenge is done, then challenges are a wonderful tool to engage the users in a direct and genuine way — without annoying them by social media ads or using them as just another statistic in our annual marketing report.
This is what Swace is doing. Based on studies that claim that social ties and using a dedicated app helps users carry a challenge through, we are centering our platform around community-building social network features such as following, sharing and voting, and challenges which anyone can take part in and anyone can set, so both users and brands reap the rewards. And if you feel like you’re up for the challenge, you can get on board right now by visiting our website, subscribing for news, and sharing us with your friends.
