Social Flights is a complicated game. Aviation is a complicated business. This makes Social Flights a challenging business model as much as a great opportunity for those who can figure it out how to play for keeps.
The Challenge
The challenge is to bring on as many as 5000 independent Travel Tribe leaders distributed broadly across a wide geographic area. Their task will be to strategically build flight plans for private aircraft in their communities. Community leaders will be compensated financially for driving revenue … much is common to a traditional sales channel.
However, each of these community leaders will have already accumulated a vast set of strategic knowledge and experience that can benefit Social Flights across the system. Likewise, Social Flights needs to bring each of them up the ladder of domain specific knowledge in the aviation business.
For compensation, Social Flights offers a tiered affiliate program that pays out various levels of commissions on flights booked according to the affiliate’s tier. One concern is that this strategy may not create an incentive to share information broadly if one is protecting their own tier standing or their own order of influence.
Cascading Information
Another approach would be to use a cascading information system. This is a gamification theory that suggests: information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative.
Initially, information would be released by social flights in our initial training program. Later, other players of the game can release information to each other in specific packets defined by the flight scenario. Such packets of information can be rewarded with other packets of information – or access to more scenarios. The Cascading information theory promotes loyalty, engagement, influence, and time involved in the game of building flight plans.
Gaming the game:
From the onset, Social Flights encourages gaming the game. This means that we expect to learn a great deal about our business by watching other people play it. There are far too many scenarios and permutations of business strategies for us to predict how and where they would apply. All we can do is specify a baseline game scenario form and watch the ways the game is gamed.
In a sense, Social Flights would also be subject to the Cascading Information Theory, thus demonstrating how a corporation would enhance their own engagement, loyalty, influence, and time-quality in the communities where they operate.
(reference: Gamification.org – wiki; Cascading Information Theory)
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