In recent months Facebook has focused the conversation between developers, brand marketers and agencies around Social Design. As Facebook puts it, “Social Design is a way of thinking about product design that puts social experiences at the core.” This blog post will focus around my interpretation and extension of this concept to the conception and
The five key elements of a game mechanics framework.
Taking time to understand game mechanics and the psychology of rewards will lead to more effective games, engaged employees and better business results.
Reward, Affinity and Loyalty programs have been around for years. With the democratization of social technologies and shift in consumer behavior, the time has come to take a fresh look at the strategy and execution of these programs. The majority of large organizations are behind the curve on marrying Reward programs with the social graph, social actions, and game mechanics. This is why most Reward programs are bland; they lack fun and deep, rich consumer engagement.
The Intention Economy is a phrase first coined by Doc Searls (@dsearls) in an article in the Linux Journal in 2006. While people were discussing attention scarcity, Doc argued that knowing peoples intentions was far more important to marketers than getting their attention. An earlier reference to consumer intention was described by John Hagel (@jhagel) in his 1999 book Net Worth as well. If you look at the trend in social consumer websites you can see that their thoughts are starting to seem visionary, and there are some corollaries in the enterprise.
Judging from the number of invites I’m getting for FourSquare these days, its slope of new users must be getting more vertical every day. After using FourSquare for a while, I’ve been thinking about its implications for business – and they’re deeper than you might think, extending far beyond happy hours and local advertising opportunities.