Cooperation via Social Media

Social media is full of cooperating with one another. Whether it's with friends and family or with businesses and cooperation, there's a large amount of trust and hard work that involves "holding up your end of the stick." I know, for me, businesses that are active on social media are more appealing to me. That includes answering questions, promoting, and overall interacting with customers. I feel like the Prisoner's Dilemma is similar to interaction. When a social media company isn't interactive with it's customers, it's essentially "locking itself in" and not exposing itself in the fullest way possible. This directly applies to Westercon. Because it's social media sites aren't appealing, potential customers don't want to like it. When customers and businesses are on the same page, that's what creates a tighter bond and likelihood to spread. A good example I stumbled across was from Digiorno pizza.

Digiorno knows that it's customers are people who like pizza. Therefore, they took this platform and used it to their advantage to tweet something funny. I do not follow the Digiorno Twitter page, but this tweet popped up on my news feed multiple times throughout the past few weeks. They took out the serious aspect of it. Nobody wants to follow a Twitter page that only posts unentertaining content. This is cooperation because they gave their customers what they wanted, and in return, received a lot of free advertising out of it.

Another cooperating company that came to my mind was Walmart. They have been using their Facebook page to interact with customers and provide the best support possible.

In both these pictures, we can see Walmart interacting with customers who are obviously trying to be funny. Walmart figures out how to deal with these customers in a helpful manner. They establish a relationship by dealing directly with their problems and cooperating with questions that may be "silly."

As far as a more personal level of friends and family goes, cooperation works the same way. Here is a screenshot of a recent post by one of my Facebook friends.

This girl is obviously "making a deal" with her friends. Not many people are fond of the game request notifications we receive on Facebook. She figures out a way to cooperate with the people sending them to her and make it a win-win situation for both ends. 

When people are not reciprocating online, it should eventually die down to nothing. We can use the above example of Candy Crush for this. I'll admit, I was pretty addicted to this game last year when it first came out. I made a deal with all my friends who played that we would give each other lives whenever we ran out. However, there was one person in our "pact" who never gave me lives, so in return, I quit giving her lives. It may be a silly example, but it can be seen in a larger aspect as well. It all goes back to the Prisoner's Dilemma. If you can make a "you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours" type of deal, you both end up winning. Rather than having 5-20 years in prison, you only have one. Or, in the terms we're discussing, if you cooperate with me via social media, I'll cooperate with you. If not, we all end up losing.