According to Facebook, 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news blogs etc) are shared each month on the social network, with no sign of slowing.

But how can you manage the flood of information? Here’s is a list of tools and services available, which help you manage your websites and blogs. If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

• Blog Grader shows you how effective your blog is at marketing your brand and see how you stack up against other blogs out there.
• Blogtronix is an advanced social networking tool and micro-blogging site, which helps people in a community, company or group exchange short multimedia messages across the web. Blogtronix is best suited for internal communities, such as companies who are looking to help their employees connect, ask and answer questions, and share work and content.
• Disqus is a social-commenting tool. Disqus allows your readers to include media such as YouTube videos in their comments, receive alerts when their posts have been responded to, and reply directly from their email.
• FeedBurner is a popular analytics package, now owned by Google, which allows you to analyse, optimise, publicise and monetise your RSS feeds.
• Google Analytics, although not specifically for social media, it can provide invaluable insight into which social media channels are driving traffic to your site. In the latest version Google now provide scripts and reports to track Facebook Likes, Twitter “tweet this” and Google +1.
• IntelBuilder Social Media Platform is a service that allows you to manage your website or blog by automatically updating your social networks when you update your website content, distributing to RSS feeds, submitting to bookmarking sites and tracking your readership.
• IntenseDebate, much like Disqus, is a comment system that enhances and encourages conversation on your blog or website.
• Janrain is a tool that allows visitors to your site to easily share your content across their social networks. Janrain also lets visitors sign in to your site with their Facebook, Twitter or other social accounts and tracks their behaviour to help you provide a personalised experience for each visitor.
• Sharetronix is run on the same platform to Blogtronix but is more suited to external communities. In addition to being a micro-blogging site, Sharetronix integrates with Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds, allows for one-click publishing and is SEO optimised so that your content will be easily found by interested parties.
• Twitterfeed is a tool that monitors your RSS feed and updates your Facebook and Twitter accounts when you have a new blog post.

Here’s is a list of tools and services available, which help you create and integrate content. If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

• Context Optional is best for marketers with multiple team members, brands or geographies, this platform helps develop applications for Facebook and Twitter communities and monitor and analyse the conversations taking place on these platforms.
• Crowd Factory’s Social Campaign lets you embed social elements into any marketing experience including videos, emails, ads and more.
• ePrize allows you to create promotions specifically tailored to your social media channels.
• Involver Applications, the creator of the popular “Get Satisfaction” website, Involver provides applications that allow you to easily add polls, RSS feeds, quizzes, music, contests and more to your Facebook or Twitter pages.
• KickApps is a self-service website that allows you to develop and manage social content such as branded communities, widgets, 3rd party plug-ins and social applications.
• Lithium Community Platform can be used to create a social community on your website that provides a place for your brand advocates to converse, tools to spread the word about your product through social channels and generate ideas for innovation.
• North Social can be used to enhance your Facebook page by creating custom applications that allow your brand to do things such as integrate with Google Maps or Yelp, post HD videos, run sweepstakes and more.
• Sprout (not to be confused with Sprout Social) is a cloud based service which creates interactive ads and applications perfect for bringing social content to the web and mobile devices.
• Storify is a tool that lets you collect photos, videos, tweets and other social media content to create a single, integrated story that you can embed anywhere.
• Wildfire Interactive is a web application that helps you to integrate your traditional promotions such as sweepstakes, contests and giveaways with interactive sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

While participating in social media is good, it can be difficult to track how you’re performing. Are you actually reaching your target market? How is your brand perceived? What are people saying about you and your products?

In a previous post, I talked about Quantitative Social Media Monitoring and Qualitative Social Media Monitoring. To continue along the same theme, here’s is a list of tools and services available for comprehensive social media monitoring. If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

• Avenue Social does a lot! In addition to monitoring and publishing to your social networks, Avenue Social builds Facebook applications, fan pages and mobile apps, and analyses the effects of all of your social media efforts.
• Direct Message Lab helps you not only manage multiple social media channels, but it also allows you to create and monitor campaigns across social networks, desktop and social media applications, and mobile.
• engage121 is a comprehensive platform that provides monitoring, one-click publishing, follower and fan management and analytics. It has a customisable interface and with packages tailored for small to medium businesses, corporations, enterprises or local stores.
• Jive Social Media Engagement is a service that pulls data from over 100 million online sources to find out the buzz about your brand. Within the same console you can aggregate and respond to Facebook and Twitter posts, create team workflows, and access key metrics and analytics.
• MediaFunnel is a platform that aggregates, manages and monitors your social media activity, with a focus on hard numbers and measurable outcomes. They also have a few interesting features including their Tweet-to-Lead tool, which allows you to turn all tweets into new Salesforce leads and a mobile component that allows you to receive SMS updates or even text updates to your accounts.
• MutualMind is a service that allows you to listen to what people are saying about your brand, but cuts out all of the noise that may be irrelevant to you. MutualMind helps you manage your campaign with one-click publishing and a framework for multiple team members through which to coordinate.
• Pop.to has a social dashboard, segmentation tools, widgets, social gestures, feed marketing and analytics all in one place.
• Postling is good for small businesses. Postling helps organise and update your social media accounts, alerts you when your accounts are active, searches Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and more to see who is talking about your brand.
• ScrOOn allows you to monitor and manage multiple social media channels, add social components like customer reviews, games and surveys to your existing digital properties and drive people from your social media accounts to your website.
• Sendible is another tool that does it all from aggregating posts, monitoring sentiment, and analysing results. Sendible sets itself apart with their integration with SMS and email newsletters.
• Shoutlet is a one-click publisher that helps you throughout the whole process, from building your presence, engaging with your consumers to measuring your impact. Shoutlet also features e-commerce for Facebook, email marketing and mobile solutions.
• SocialVolt helps create and monitor campaigns and social buzz, manages workflow amongst your team, and helps identify and organise influencers based on what channels they are active in and their interests.
• Sprinklr is professional-grade social media management company. Sprinklr is a one click publisher, social listening tool and analytics team all rolled into one. They help agencies, B2C companies and B2B companies identify prospects, acquire loyal customers, measure social impact and optimise social media campaigns.
• Strongmail Social Studio is a platform that helps you identify and leverage your brand advocates and create direct response campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, they have a proprietary social sharing tool that makes it easier for your fans, followers, email subscribers and website visitors to get the word out about your brand.

Publishers looking to stay connected with their users and acquire new users have plenty of Facebook tools at their disposal to do just that. Here are a few tools that’ll help you manage your Facebook account:

• Buddy Media is a platform that allows you to quickly and easily manage your Facebook presence by scheduling your posts and news feed messaging, helping moderate the comments on your page, and customising the look and feel of your page.
• Conversocial, meant for small to medium-sized businesses, Conversocial lets you set up automatic moderation to delete or flag posts based on keywords, drives all comments to your email inbox, sets up a team workflow and provides limited analytics.
• Facebook Insights is an obvious tool, but if you are managing a Facebook fan page, before you begin looking for more in-depth tools, make sure you check out your Facebook insights page to see how many people are participating, liking stories or leaving comments.
• Mediafeedia is a free service that helps you schedule posts, manage multiple accounts, set up administrators, create custom tabs and notifies you by email of activity on your fan page.
• Sysomos Facebook Page Central offers auto-moderation, email notifications of posts, a dashboard monitoring key metrics and sentiment, and identification of top fans and themes.
• Vitrue is a tool that may not streamline all of your social networks like other tools, but they excel in making the most out of your Facebook presence. Vitrue helps you moderate the comments on your Facebook page, send targeted messages to people who have “liked” your company and more.

If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

The thriving field of behavioural economics has begun to codify these mental weaknesses in terms of social, cognitive and emotional factors. Drawing from the insights of psychology, behavioural economists (such as Dan Ariely, Robert Cialdini, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons) have explained why we buy more things at 99p rather than £1 (the left-digit effect), why we commit to memberships of clubs and other organisations that we’ll never use or attend (optimism bias), why we attribute more value to things we own than things we do not (endowment effect) and why we don’t return purchases nearly as often as we perhaps should (post-purchase rationalisation).

Knowledge of human behaviour is now being used by the giants of the web, from Amazon and Apple to Groupon and Zynga, to keep us coming back to their websites, playing their games and buying their products and services.

Amazon

Amazon has mastered eliminating small frictions, which in turn radically alters decisions and behaviour. For millions of people, Amazon is the default purchasing solution because it has all our credit card and address details on file. Amazon has removed the pain of retyping these details each time we make a purchase. This may not sound like much since many other websites also allow us to save our details, but during the few seconds in which we make our buying decisions, when we are not thinking very deeply, the barrier to entering that data seems too forbidding and we default to Amazon.

That’s not the only friction that Amazon has eliminated, they’ve created smart solutions to the problem of shipping, which has always been one of the biggest psychological hurdles to buying online. The first is Super Saver delivery, which is free in the UK if dispatching to UK locations. This option often tempts customers to add an extra item to their order.

The second, more interesting shipping mechanism is Amazon Prime. For an upfront fee of £49 per year, you get free next-day delivery on the majority of items. Knowing that one shop has free shipping compared to another, makes us less likely to shop elsewhere and because the barrier of shipping is removed, we’re more likely to impulse buy. Furthermore, because investment in shipping is essentially made upfront, we try to offset the investment by purchasing more.

Apple

If, like millions of other people, you’re an Apple customer, you may have noticed that email receipts for your purchases don’t arrive immediately after you’ve made the purchase. Whilst the delay could be related to Apple batch-processing transactions, there is an important psychological benefit to the company: the delay reduces the pain of paying and hence the potential for customers to request refunds.

The mechanism of the transaction remains the same, money is still debited from your credit card, but by not receiving a receipt immediately, the payment is decoupled from consumption and the pain of paying, however small the value may be.

It’s not all bad news for the consumer. Apple made the mistake of allowing apps to sell too cheaply or even for free through the AppStore. There’s an economic phenomenon called anchoring, which occurs when people overly rely on a specific piece of information to govern their thought-process. Once the anchor is set, there is a bias toward adjusting or interpreting other information to reflect the “anchored” information. Once a price point is set, it’s extremely difficult to displace the anchor. iPhone and iPad apps take many hours of work to design and build, but on the AppStore, the expectation now is that they can’t cost more than £4.99, whilst most should cost £0.69. The pull of free is just too strong—dragging down what people will pay for everything else.

Facebook

What has become increasingly clear is that the Facebook actively develops features that challenge our limited ability for self-control, since that is what will get us to come back again and again.

Much of Facebook’s genius revolves around the Wall: a public space that we curate but that other people can add to. Within the universe of the site, where everyone is a “friend”, you feel compelled to respond to Wall posts, to comment on others’ posts to yours and to reciprocate by writing on theirs.

We want our Walls to reflect ourselves or certain persona. It’s analogous to the way we curate our belongings, which itself is a window into our personalities.

The psychologist Sam Gosling has shown you can learn more about people from their possessions than from spending time with them. Walls are basically the same—a storefront window to the self.

Groupon

Groupon has not just revolutionised social-buying websites through offering remarkable discounts, but more importantly by removing the embarrassment of coupon shopping.

The stigma of coupon use is real and broad-based. A 2008 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research found that shoppers would describe people standing near coupon users, not to mention the coupon users themselves, as “cheap” or “poor”. With Groupon, by contrast, the social acceptability is baked into the premise – into the name, even. The perception of crowd behaviour can be a powerful motivator when it comes to modifying people’s behaviour.

Groupon also uses time constraints to further influence behaviour. Consumers have one day to decide whether to buy a coupon. Usually, when we don’t buy something, we have the opportunity to go back and buy it later. But with Groupon, our choice becomes explicit. If we don’t buy the coupon now, we’ll never be able to buy it. Presented with that choice, many customers will consider how much they might regret the choice not to buy. And because people hate feeling regret, they become more inclined to buy it now. Amazon do a similar think by alerting the buyer to the fact that there are only n-number of items left, whilst “bricks and mortar” stores such as Zara regularly update their clothes range to drive demand.

Lovefilm

Lovefilm’s business model is based upon the simple premise: people hate late fees. With the traditional video shop model, customers had a simple choice: accumulate late fees or return the unwatched film. Added to this, traditional shops often only stocked a finite amount of “blockbuster” movies. Lovefilm not only resolved the late fee issue by allowing customers to return films whenever they wanted, but also created a long tail of films; and exhaustive collection from which each customer could assemble a queue.

In practice though, Lovefilm customers end up watching fewer films than they might have expected. Why? One reason is that Lovefilm forces us to choose based on what we think we want to see in the future; and we’re bad at predicting our future habits. This isn’t bad for Lovefilm since it is based upon a subscription model, so it saves on postage whilst boosting profits.

The future for Lovefilm will be in the streaming business, much like Netflix does in the US. With streaming, consumers will no longer need to predict what they want to watch in the future. Instead, watching films becomes an on demand service; we’re paying for the right to watch any film at any time, regardless of whether that is what we end up doing.

Twitter

Much like with Facebook, users want to display a self that is somewhere between their real-life self and how they would like to be perceived, which creates a substantial motivation for constant monitoring and updates to their status list and Wall.

Perhaps the most addictive feature for both Twitter and Facebook is that it allows us to enhance our status relatively cheaply, in a way that was not possible 5 years ago, whilst also providing the ability to share; we get tremendous social capital from being seen as generous and as someone whom other people mention.

Zynga

People become emotionally invested in things they’ve built or created. This emotional investment leads people to value their own possessions or creations irrationally high. The longer the emotional investment, the higher the value. Dan Areily dubs this the “Ikea effect” in honour of how your rickety Swedish bookshelf seems perfect after you’ve put hours of frustrating work into assembling it.

This emotional investment is exactly what Zynga uses to great success with FarmVille, CityVille and other social games. Once someone takes a little time to start building a farm, they become invested in maintain it and hence value it more highly. The more complex and time-consuming the task, the more we fall in love with the creation (assuming the appropriate level of reward) and the more we become engrossed in the game.

The compulsion to create is reinforced by social interactions. Much of the action in these games is about reciprocity: people give you useful things and you’re expected to respond in kind. Reciprocity is a powerful motivator. When someone does us good, we want to return the favour; in FarmVille that translates into spending more and more time playing the game.

Further reading:

• Journal of Behavioural Decision Making – Mixing virtue and vice: combining the immediacy effect and the diversification heuristic
• Journal of Consumer Research – Stigma by Association in Coupon Redemption: Looking Cheap because of Others
• Journal of Marketing Science – Zero as a Special Price: The True Value of Free Products
• Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling
• Foundations of Human Sociality – Measuring social norms and preferences using experimental games: A guide for social scientists by Colin Camerer and Ernst Fehr (PDF 150KB, pp.40)

Monitoring is only one piece of the puzzle, however. It’s important to find out who is saying what, and where the conversation is happening so you can respond appropriately.

Here are a few tools to help you manage multiple social channels:

• Awareness Social Marketing Hub is a platform ideal for larger social media campaigns with multiple people monitoring and executing the program. In addition to aggregating social network information, the Hub allows marketers to set up workflows in order to coordinate efforts across a marketing team.
• CoTweet is ideal for companies who have multiple people contributing to their social media campaigns. In addition to organising and monitoring your Twitter and Facebook pages, it allows you to assign updates and social streams to members of your team based either on their expertise or who is “on duty” at a certain time.
• Expion is built with multiple-location business or franchises in mind. Expion allows corporate offices to oversee and manage each of their locations’ individual social media accounts while still allowing store managers or franchisees to have some control over the account. This helps brands maintain continuity across locations while still allowing for regional-based promotions or content relevant only to the local stores.
• HootSuite is a tool that allows you to manage multiple social media channels through one dashboard. If you have a company with more than one contributor to your social media program, HootSuite is a good solution.
• NutshellMail is a tool, much like TweetDeck, which helps you track all of your social media channels. Instead of constant updates, NutshellMail sends you a single email per day describing your accounts’ activity.
• Ping.fm is the most popular site for aggregating your social media channels. It allows you to simultaneously update accounts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Flickr through their web interface, text message, email or instant message.
• PostRank aggregates what is happening with all of your content across the web in a constantly updated feed. This way you can see what type of engagement your content is getting across different channels right as it happens.
• Seesmic allows you to manage your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Ping.fm, Foursquare and Google Buzz accounts all from one simple interface. Whether you want to access your social networks from the web, a desktop application, or your mobile phone, Seesmic has a solution.
• Sprout Social manages multiple social networks from one dashboard, allowing you to optimise your outreach in each channel, identify people interested in your brand and convert them to loyal consumers.
• Syncapse SocialTALK helps you control your presence across different platforms, manage multiple social media accounts from one platform, establish multiple user access levels, and monitor incoming traffic.
• thisMoment, via their recently introduced Distributed Engagement Channel (DEC), uses thisMoment’s publishing platform to combine their design, your content and multimedia user generated content into one “channel” that can be pushed to many different social media outlets.
• TweetDeck, like HootSuite, provides a way to track many of your social media channels on one dashboard. It can be a time-saver and a productivity-enhancer, assuming you’re not easily distracted.

Game Dynamics are constructs of rules and feedback loops intended to produce enjoyable game-play. They are the building blocks that can be applied and combined to gamify any non-game context.

Early examples of gamification are based on rewarding points to people who share experiences on location-based platforms such as Facebook’s “Place” feature, Foursquare and Gowalla.

Gamification is used by marketers and website product managers as a tool for customer engagement and encouraging desirable website usage behaviour. Gamification is readily applicable to increasing engagement on sites built on social network services. One site, DevHub, increased the number of users who completed their online tasks from 10% to 80% after adding gamification elements.

Below are listed 47 game dynamics. The challenge comes from taking these mechanics and employing them in a website setting. If you have some good examples, please feel free to post a comment.

1. Achievement – A virtual or physical representation of having accomplished something. Achievements can be easy, difficult, surprising and funny and can be accomplished alone or as a group. Achievements are often viewed as rewards in and of themselves.
   Example: A badge (Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah), a level (Tiny Wings and Angry Birds), a reward (Fruit Ninja), points (Doodle Jump and Pac-Man), really anything defined as a reward can be a reward.
2. Appointment Dynamic – A dynamic in which to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take some action. Appointment dynamics are often deeply related to interval based reward schedules or avoidance dynamics.
   Example: Cafe World and Farmville where if you return at a set time to do something you get something good, and if you don’t something bad happens.
3. Avoidance – The act of inducing player behaviour not by giving a reward, but by not instituting a punishment. Produces consistent level of activity, timed around the schedule.
   Example: Press a lever every 30 seconds to not get shocked.
4. Behavioural Contrast – The theory defining how behaviour can shift greatly based on changed expectations.
   Example: A monkey presses a lever and is given lettuce. The monkey is happy and continues to press the lever. Then it gets a grape one time. The monkey is delighted. The next time it presses the lever it gets lettuce again. Rather than being happy, as it was before, it goes ballistic throwing the lettuce at the experimenter. (In some experiments, a second monkey is placed in the cage, but tied to a rope so it can’t access the lettuce or lever. After the grape reward is removed, the first monkey beats up the second monkey even though it obviously had nothing to do with the removal. The anger is truly irrational.)
5. Behavioural Momentum – The tendency of players to keep doing what they have been doing.
   Example: From Jesse Schell’s DICE 2010 talk: “I have spent ten hours playing Farmville. I am a smart person and wouldn’t spend 10 hours on something unless it was useful. Therefore this must be useful, so I can keep doing it.”
6. Blissful Productivity – The idea that playing in a game makes you happier working hard, than you would be relaxing. Essentially, we’re optimised as human beings by working hard, and doing meaningful and rewarding work.
   Example: From Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk wherein she discusses how World of Warcraft players play on average 22 hours per week (a part time job), often after a full days work. They’re willing to work hard, perhaps harder than in real life, because of their blissful productivity in the game world.
7. Cascading Information Theory (also known as Progressive Disclosure on the Web) – The theory that information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative.
   Example: Showing basic actions first, unlocking more as you progress through levels. Making building on SCVNGR a simple but staged process to avoid information overload.
8. Chain Schedules – the practice of linking a reward to a series of contingencies. Players tend to treat these as simply the individual contingencies. Unlocking one step in the contingency is often viewed as an individual reward by the player.
   Example: Kill 10 orcs to get into the dragons cave, every 30 minutes the dragon appears.
9. Communal Discovery – The game dynamic wherein an entire community is rallied to work together to solve a riddle, a problem or a challenge. Immensely viral and very fun.
   Example: DARPA Network Challenge; a competition that explores the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilisation. The cottage industries that appear around McDonald’s monopoly to find “Boardwalk”.
10. Companion Gaming – Games that can be played across multiple platforms
    Example: Games that be played on iPhone, Facebook, XBox with completely seamless cross platform game-play.
11. Contingency – The problem that the player must overcome in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.
    Example: 10 orcs block your path
12. Countdown – The dynamic in which players are only given a certain amount of time to do something. This will create an activity graph that causes increased initial activity increasing frenetically until time runs out, which is a forced extinction.
    Example: Bejewelled Blitz with 30 seconds to get as many points as you can. Bonus rounds. Timed levels
13. Cross Situational Leader-boards – This occurs when one ranking mechanism is applied across multiple (unequal and isolated) gaming scenarios. Players often perceive that these ranking scenarios are unfair as not all players were presented with an “equal” opportunity to win.
    Example: Players are arbitrarily sent into one of three paths. The winner is determined by the top scorer overall (i.e. across the paths). Since the players can only do one path (and can’t pick), they will perceive inequity in the game scenario and get upset.
14. Disincentives – a game element that uses a penalty (or altered situation) to induce behavioural shift.
    Example: losing health points, amazon’s checkout line removing all links to tunnel the buyer to purchase, speeding traps.
15. Endless Games – Games that do not have an explicit end. Most applicable to casual games that can refresh their content or games where a static (but positive) state is a reward of its own.
    Example: Farmville (static state is its own victory), SCVNGR (challenges constantly are being built by the community to refresh content).
16. Envy – The desire to have what others have. In order for this to be effective seeing what other people have (voyeurism) must be employed.
    Example: My friend has this item and I want it!
17. Epic Meaning – players will be highly motivated if they believe they are working to achieve something great, something awe-inspiring, something bigger than themselves.
    Example: From Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk where she discusses World of Warcraft’s ongoing story line and “epic meaning” that involves each individual has motivated players to participate outside the game and create the second largest wiki in the world to help them achieve their individual quests and collectively their epic meanings.
18. Extinction – Extinction is the term used to refer to the action of stopping providing a reward. This tends to create anger in players as they feel betrayed by no longer receiving the reward they have come to expect. It generally induces negative behavioural momentum.
    Example: Killing 10 orcs no longer gets you a level up.
19. Fixed Interval Reward Schedules – Fixed interval schedules provide a reward after a fixed amount of time, say 30 minutes. This tends to create a low engagement after a reward, and then gradually increasing activity until a reward is given, followed by another lull in engagement.
    Example: Farmville, wait 30 minutes, crops have appeared.
20. Fixed Ratio Reward Schedules – A fixed ratio schedule provides rewards after a fixed number of actions. This creates cyclical nadirs of engagement (because the first action will not create any reward so incentive is low) and then bursts of activity as the reward gets closer and closer.
    Example: Kill 20 ships, get a level up, visit five locations, get a badge.
21. Free Lunch – A dynamic in which a player feels that they are getting something for free due to someone else having done work. It’s critical that work is perceived to have been done (just not by the player in question) to avoid breaching trust in the scenario. The player must feel that they’ve “lucked” into something.
    Example: Groupon. By virtue of 100 other people having bought the deal, you get it cheaply. There is no sketchiness because you recognise work has been done (100 people are spending money) but you yourself didn’t have to do it.
22. Fun Once, Fun Always – The concept that an action in enjoyable to repeat all the time. Generally this has to do with simple actions. There is often also a limitation to the total level of enjoyment of the action.
    Example: the theory behind the check-in everywhere and the check-in and the default challenges on SCVNGR.
23. Interval Reward Schedules – Interval based reward schedules provide a reward after a certain amount of time. There are two flavours: variable and fixed.
    Example: Wait n minutes, collect rent.
24. Lottery – A game dynamic in which the winner is determined solely by chance. This creates a high level of anticipation. The fairness is often suspect, however winners will generally continue to play indefinitely while losers will quickly abandon the game, despite the random nature of the distinction between the two.
    Example: Many forms of gambling, scratch tickets.
25. Loyalty – The concept of feeling a positive sustained connection to an entity leading to a feeling of partial ownership. Often reinforced with a visual representation.
    Example: Fealty in World of Warcraft, achieving status at physical places (mayorship, being on the wall of favourite customers).
26. Meta Game – a game which exists layered within another game. These generally are discovered rather than explained (lest they cause confusion) and tend to appeal to ~2% of the total game-playing audience. They are dangerous as they can induce confusion (if made too overt) but are powerful as they’re greatly satisfying to those who find them.
    Example: hidden questions / achievements within World of Warcraft that require you to do special (and hard to discover) activities as you go through other quests.
27. Micro Leader-boards – The rankings of all individuals in a micro-set. Often great for distributed game dynamics where you want many micro-competitions or desire to induce loyalty.
    Example: Be the top scorers at Joe’s bar this week and get a free appetiser.
28. Modifiers – An item that when used affects other actions. Generally modifiers are earned after having completed a series of challenges or core functions.
    Example: A x2 modifier that doubles the points on the next action you take.
29. Moral Hazard of Game Play – The risk that by rewarding people manipulatively in a game you remove the actual moral value of the action and replace it with an ersatz game-based reward. The risk that by providing too many incentives to take an action, the incentive of actually enjoying the action taken is lost. The corollary to this is that if the points or rewards are taken away, then the person loses all motivation to take the (initially fun on its own) action.
    Example: Paraphrased from Jesse Schell “If I give you points every time you brush your teeth, you’ll stop brushing your teeth because it’s good for you and then only do it for the points. If the points stop flowing, your teeth will decay.”
30. Ownership – The act of controlling something, having it be your property.
    Example: Ownership is interesting on a number of levels, from taking over places, to controlling a slot, to simply owning popularity by having a digital representation of many friends.
31. Pride – the feeling of ownership and joy at an accomplishment.
    Example: I have ten badges. I own them. They are mine. There are many like them, but these are mine. Hooray.
32. Privacy – The concept that certain information is private, not for public distribution. This can be a demotivator (I won’t take an action because I don’t want to share this) or a motivator (by sharing this I reinforce my own actions).
    Example: Scales the publish your daily weight onto Twitter (these are real and are proven positive motivator for staying on your diet). Or having your location publicly broadcast anytime you do anything (which is invasive and can should be avoided).
33. Progression – A dynamic in which success is granularly displayed and measured through the process of completing itemised tasks.
    Example: LinkedIn uses a progress bar to motivate you to complete your user profile, whilst Mendeley combines the progress bar with a statement suggesting what content needs to be completed: “Fill out your research profile to increase your impact in the Mendeley network and to enable your colleagues to find you.” Levelling up from Paladin level 1 to Paladin level 60.
34. Ratio Reward Schedules – Ratio schedules provide a reward after a number of actions. There are two flavours: variable and fixed.
    Example: Kill 10 orcs, get a power up.
35. Real-time vs. Delayed Mechanics – Realtime information flow is uninhibited by delay. Delayed information is only released after a certain interval.
    Example: Realtime scores cause instant reaction (gratification or demotivation). Delayed information causes ambiguity which can incentivise more action due to the lack of certainty of ranking.
36. Reinforcer – The reward given if the expected action is carried out in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.
    Example: Receiving a level up after killing 10 orcs.
37. Response – The expected action from the player in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.
    Example: the player takes the action to kill 10 orcs.
38. Reward Schedules – the time-frame and delivery mechanisms through which rewards (points, prizes, level ups) are delivered. Three main parts exist in a reward schedule; contingency, response and reinforcer.
    Example: Getting a level up for killing 10 orcs, clearing a row in Tetris, getting fresh crops in Farmville
39. Rolling Physical Goods – A physical good (one with real value) that can be won by anyone on an ongoing basis as long as they meet some characteristic. However, that characteristic rolls from player to player.
    Example: Top scorer deals, mayor deals.
40. Shell Game – a game in which the player is presented with the illusion of choice but is actually in a situation that guides them to the desired outcome of the operator.
    Example: 3 Card Monty, lotteries, gambling.
41. Social Fabric of Games – the idea that people like one another better after they’ve played games with them, have a higher level of trust and a great willingness to work together.
    Example: From Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk where she suggests that it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone because you need them to spend their time with you, play by the same rules, shoot for the same goals.
42. Status – The rank or level of a player. Players are often motivated by trying to reach a higher level or status.
    Example: White Paladin level 20 in World of Warcraft.
43. Urgent Optimism – Extreme self motivation. The desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.
    Example: From Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk. The idea that in proper games an “epic win” or just “win” is possible and therefore always worth acting for.
44. Variable Interval Reward Schedules – Variable interval reward schedules provide a reward after a roughly consistent amount of time. This tends to create a reasonably high level of activity over time, as the player could receive a reward at any time but never the burst as created under a fixed schedule. This system is also more immune to the nadir right after the receiving of a reward, but also lacks the zenith of activity before a reward in unlocked due to high levels of ambiguity.
    Example: Wait roughly 30 minutes, a new weapon appears. Check back as often as you want but that won’t speed it up. Generally players are bad at realising that.
45. Variable Ratio Reward Schedules – A variable ratio reward schedule provides rewards after a roughly consistent but unknown amount of actions. This creates a relatively high consistent rate of activity (as there could always be a reward after the next action) with a slight increase as the expected reward threshold is reached, but never the huge burst of a fixed ratio schedule. It’s also more immune to nadirs in engagement after a reward is achieved.
    Example: Kill 20 ships, get a level up. Visit a couple locations (roughly five) get a badge
46. Viral Game Mechanics – A game element that requires multiple people to play (or that can be played better with multiple people).
    Example: Farmville making you more successful in the game if you invite your friends, the social check-in.
47. Virtual Items – Digital prizes, rewards, objects found or taken within the course of a game. Often these can be traded or given away.
    Example: Gowalla’s items, Facebook gifts, badges.

You can read more about “Gamification” on the Gamification Wiki or on the Wikipedia Gamification page.

The second aspect regards building ways that enable fans of a brand or company to promote a message themselves in multiple online social media venues. Fan pages in Twitter, MySpace and Facebook follow this model.

The final aspect is based around online conversations. Social media marketing is not controlled by the organisation and it is naive to think it ever could be. Instead it encourages user participation and dialogue. A badly designed social media marketing campaign can potentially backfire on the organisation that created it. To be successful social media marketing campaigns must fully engage and respect the users.

Only recently Nestlé fell foul of trying to control a conversation on Facebook about their alleged use of palm oil, by stating users should not parody the Nestlé or Nestlé-owned brands’ logos.

…we welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic – they will be deleted.

Of course, this contributed to people doing exactly that, whilst Greenpeace also fanned the flames via both Facebook and Twitter!

Social media isn’t just about big networks like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, it’s about brands having conversations.

(Lloyd Salmons)

How does this all translate into a social media marketing strategy? Here are some thoughts:

1. Listen to Conversations — Tap into the online conversations to find out what people are talking about, where they are talking and with whom they are talking.
2. Establish a Share of Voice — There are a multitude of conversations happening every day, indeed every second. When you join the conversation, what share of the voice do you have, or indeed want to have?
3. Set Goals and Benchmarks — Using the information and insights gained from following and engaging in conversations, you can then set the goals you’d like to pursue in social media.
4. Find Bloggers and Communities — This is really an extension of point 1. You have to know where the conversations and discussions are taking place so that you can allocate time and effort and get the best return on time invested. Finding the conversations isn’t as hard as it sounds; the first stop would clearly be via services such as Twitter and the faithful, yet still important, RSS feeds.
5. Identify Key Influencers — What and who are the key influencers? Where can they be found? What are they saying? Understanding the social graph–the connections between people–will also allow you to identify who the key people and organisations are.
6. Develop a Content Strategy — Success in social media largely depends on the quality of your content, whether this is generated by you or bookmarked or cited on blogs and services such as Twitter.
7. Pick the Right Tools — What tools should be using? Should you be on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn? What about MySpace and Bebo? Do you know your target audience and market? If so, what tools are they using? Twitter is fundamentally different from Facebook, which is in turn fundamentally different from LinkedIn. They may all be classed as “social media”, but apart from some cross-over, they have their own target markets.
8. Create and Deliver Compelling Content — This is the difficult part. Once you know where the conversations are happening and what is being talked about, you need a content strategy and bright ideas. These bright ideas need to be compelling and naturally flow. Contrived content won’t pass muster amongst your readers and followers. You need to contribute and enhance the conversation, not repeat it verbatim.
9. Engage and Facilitate Conversations — Social media is all about two-way conversations. The writer is no longer preaching to an audience, the audience is now a fundamental part of the equation. Readers are no longer passive bystanders, their responses to your content serves to enhance the content and your ideas.
10. Measure the Results — With all this social interaction comes a multitude of data; tweet history, web analytics etc. But what does it all means is the crucial question. Social media ROI can be measured, but what you measure is really up to you; whether it is tangible metrics such as sales and website visits, or intangible metrics such as influence and clout.

A well-planned, managed and authentic social media programme, based upon listening and responding to your audience will result in deeper and stronger relationships with your customers and brand stakeholders. By tapping into and implementing the knowledge and ideas of your customers and followers, you will be able to deliver what the customer wants and your products will vastly improve.

• Building a Social Media Team by Amber Naslund. If you’re considering deploying a team to tackle your social media efforts, this is a great read. It discusses why you might need a team, how to assemble one, roles and responsibilities, and more. It includes a look inside Humana’s social media “Chamber Of Commerce” and how their interdisciplinary team is driving social media efforts at their company.
• Content by Cory Doctorow. Doctorow, one of the voices behind the blog Boing-Boing, is well-known for his opinions on technology, DRM, and the future of content. His ebook is a collection of some of his best work and is an insightful read.
• Customer Service — The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media by Brian Solis. Engaging with and empowering your customers as an extension of your marketing efforts isn’t new. However, in the era of social media, there are new tools and philosophies to more effectively listen and engage with customers and cultivate a more significant community, enhance your brand, build relationships, and hopefully create evangelists along the way.
• Fish Where the Fish Are – Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle by Chris Brogan. This ebook is meant to get you thinking about how social media ties to the more traditional buying cycle. It’s a quick read that can help introduce you and your team to social media.
• Getting a Foothold in Social Media by Amber Naslund. A rundown of some of the basic, fundamental elements of building a social media plan, especially directed at smaller and medium-sized businesses, but certainly consistent for companies of any size.
• Let’s Talk — Social Media for Small Business by John Jantsch. The latest version of Jantsch’s great book includes a lot more information about Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. He also offers some thoughts on managing the social media beast.
• Social Media and Network Starting Points by Chris Brogan. Organisations have a lot to consider once they decide they want to jump into social networks and social media. There are many opportunities to slide off the rails, or worse, to let the effort fall into disarray. Brogan offers some thoughts based on a question he received about guidelines, a toolbox, and how to grow a community.
• Social Media Time Management by Amber Naslund. If you’re struggling with information overload and how to sort your priorities in social media, this ebook will give you some practical, actionable ideas for managing the firehose. It includes some thoughts on resource allocation and time commitments for social media strategies inside a business, as well as 9 strategies for keeping the social media monster manageable.
• Social Media Tips — Sharing Lessons Learned to Help Your Business Grow by Jeff Hayzlett from Kodak. Hayzlett and his team put this book together to share some of their thoughts and firsthand experiences using social media for their business. Hayzlett takes the time to use social media like Twitter and Facebook because in today’s media landscape it’s vitally important to be where your customers are. Kodak has always embraced this marketing philosophy, and today that means being active in social media.
• The Art of Community by Jono Bacon. Bacon is the Community Manager for Ubuntu, one of the largest open source software projects. In this book he talks about the ins and outs of building, cultivating, and managing a community from the ground up. This is a must-read for anyone interested in community development.
• The Essential Guide to Social Media by Brian Solis. An executive outline of social media tools and resources needed to listen and participate, guiding PR, customer service, product development, and marketing.
• The New Rules of Viral Marketing by David Meerman Scott. The smart marketers profiled in this ebook tell you exactly how they used viral marketing and provide advice in their own words.
• The Simple Web — A Philosophy for Getting What You Want by Skelliewag. As bloggers and Webmasters, we want most or all of these things: more visitors, more subscribers, more comments, more money, more inbound links, and more people saying good things about us. Our wants aren’t in question. It’s the how that gets us. It’s the how that has us reading a dozen blogs a day, trying to find the answer (or at least a little piece of it).
• The Social Media Starter Kit by Amber Naslund. This great book covers some of the most popular social media tools and technologies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogging, as well as some productivity and supporting tools to make social media task management easier and more fluid.
• What is Social Media? by Antony Mayfield. This book answers one simple question: What is social media? From iCrossing, this book runs down all the basics, from how social media is being used to providing definitions of the ever-changing jargon that personifies social media.

(via Pamorama)

Human beings are social creatures–not occasionally or by accident, but always. Sociability is one of our core capabilities, and it shows up in almost every aspect of our lives as both cause and effect. Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups. The aggregate relations among individuals and groups, among individuals within groups, and among groups forms a network of astonishing complexity.

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, 2008

Unlike real-world friendships, The Web has affected the number of relationships you can have and maintain and the intimacy of those relationships, enabling us to create different types or groups of friends. The astonishing complexity that Clay Shirky identifies is suddenly made infinitely more complex and abstract through digital media.

We now have communication tools that provide the flexibility to match our social needs and as a result are discovering new ways to make friends. These tools — better known as social media or social software — provide us the ability to share, cooperate with one another and indeed take collective action, all outside the traditional clubs and groups to which our parents would have been acustomed. These tools have had a profound affect on how we distinguish or describe friendship.

An online friendship is better described along a spectrum defined by the actions people take and how we feel about them.

Mike Arauz (permalink)

Mike Aruz identifies 7 stages of online friendship in the above visual. These are:

1. Passive Interest — This is the easiest level of engagement. It asks the least of your friends, and achieves the least commitment from us. But, it’s the crucial starting point. I follow my curiosity to you, I’m interested in what I find, and I choose to pay attention. This stage is epitomised by repeated visits to profiles, blog readers, and the so-called fans and followers.
2. Active Interest — This is when I care enough to let you know that I care. It’s a small step, but a big opportunity for you to identify key members of your audience who are candidates to move along the spectrum. We don’t yet expect a response, we’re just letting you know that we’re listening. This is commonly experienced on Twitter, where you can respond to my tweets, even if I’m not actively following you. I can then decide whether you’re worth looking up. It’s really the starting point of a conversation; Hey I’m interested in what you have to say, you may be interested in what I have to say.
3. Sharing — At this point the audience member starts to become a fan. You and your work become part of my identity as I use it to talk to my own friends about what interests me. I also have made myself more valuable, because I am now partly responsible for the spread of your ideas. This is typified by retweeting comments and links, using social bookmarks to save useful web pages and posting references and content to my own websites and social network profiles.
4. Public Dialogue — This is the first phase that requires action on your part. I have either demonstrated an Active Interest or have Shared your work with my own friends. You foster a relationship by responding to my interest in a public forum such as Twitter and to some extent Facebook. By doing so, you make the rest of your friends aware of my existence, and welcome me to the group. This is signalled by @replies in Twitter, referrals in a blog post, references posted on other [important] websites and profiles.
5. Private Dialogue — At this step, we begin to transform mutual interest into mutual trust. This really is the “major hurdle” that has to be overcome for a “digital friendship” to really mimic those found in the real world. We are willing to share thoughts, ideas, experiences with each other directly. We trust each other with direct access, which has increasing value in an increasingly always-on world. Direct messages on Twitter are just the beginning. At this stage we freely exchange private contact details such as mobile phone number and email address, which allows us to take the conversation beyond the social networks and into a more intimate realm.
6. Advocacy — At first glance, Advocacy looks a lot like Sharing. But, the crucial difference is that Advocacy means that I am making an explicit recommendation of you to my friends. I am in effect putting my reputation on the line for you; there is the implied understanding that with this recommendation comes the obligation not to let me down. It’s too easy now to simply share, all it takes is one click on your bookmark tool bar. Choosing to actually say, “This is important. It’s worth my friends’ time. And I’m willing to risk my own reputation to convince my friends to check it out.”
7. Investment — The pinnacle of online friendship. This is the most difficult achievement to recognise or quantify. But it’s the most important because it represents the willingness of your friends to take action on your behalf. Investment may not be entirely altruistic since your wins may become my wins. It’s a little like the self-propagating “old boys” or alumni network, which, while sometimes seen in a negative light, are successful in maintaining and extending relationships.

Some people have several hundred Facebook friends, thousands of blog readers and tens of thousands of Twitter followers; I’m thinking more @stephenfry than @whatterz here! Where these relationships were once considered merely an audience, they are developing into what people are now considering as friendships. I’m not so sure friendship is really the right choice of noun quite yet, since offline interactions are still important, but people who can cultivate meaningful relationships online have a lot to teach not only other people, but brands who are trying to figure out how they fit into the world of social media.