To get more clarity into the referrer points earned on SDN we ran a one time query regarding it. The list further down are all email URLs, which we are using to determine the company of an SDNer, with 2000 referral points or more.
Leading the pack are the three biggest anonymous email provider: Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail. (I totally forgot that there is Hotmail. Man am I glad that I don't have to use that anymore.)
Then there is Wipro with over 17K points. You need to have referred 850 SDNers to earn this many points. Wipro has over 50K employees, true not all of them in IT, but there are many many active Wipro employees on SDN. That they are able to get 850 referrals is very plausible. These points are only 17% of their overall points record. There are companies with a worse record.
Email URL | Referral Points | Total points | Referral / Total Points |
|---|
| Yahoo.com | 37,080 | | |
| Gmail | 28,460 | | |
| Hotmail | 17,900 | | |
| Wipro | 17,730 | 103,324 | 17.2% |
| Intelligroup | 15,840 | 59,960 | 26.4% |
| Satyam | 7,740 | 30,763 | 25.1% |
| Rediffmail | 7,700 | | |
| Yahoo.co.in | 5,480 | | |
| Accenture | 3,060 | 20,508 | 14.9% |
| Cognizant | 2,560 | 37,643 | 6.8% |
| Infosys | 2,000 | 6,224 | 32.1% |
Why do we give out points for referring new members to SDN? Unfortunately the number that is always asked first regarding an online community is it's size. How many members do you have? That we are much more active than communities that claim to be10 times the size of SDN doesn't matter for most. It is sad, but Analysts and Press judge us primarrily on number of members.
Word of mouth is our favorite way to get new members. "SDN is great. It helps me a lot all the time. Go check it out." If I get such an endorsement from a friend I don't walk, I run with my browser over to SDN. Putting your reputation on the line by endorsing us is very generous and we are honering that with 20 points.
With 400,000 members there will always be some that try to game the system and usually they get cought. To make it harder we introduce a new simple rule: Only your first 5 referrals every week are counted. If you have more than 5 friends who want to sign up within a week, tell them to space it out.
My dream is a system where you get 5 points for referring a friend, but you get 50 points if your friend crosses the 250 points mark, because you mentored him or her to be an active participant on SDN. Unfortunately we are not set up for that. (Yet?)
Beyond SDN: The National Youth Leadership Forum for Technology (NYLF) invites every year hundreds of promissing kids for a week of talks and games to the Silicon Valley. I do my little part by holding a 1.5 hour interactive session on July 13 at 2:45pm. This time I call it the Come Alive Session as in: What the world needs is for you to come alive. Check out the Good to Know blog where I collect stories and insights that help while growing up. I am collecting these. What was the one thing that made the biggest difference for you in your youth? Or what is the one thing that you do know now that really would have made a differnece when growing up. Send me an email (see Business Card) or post a comment to the blog .
