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.

So why is it so difficult to measure ROI when it comes to social media? Firstly, it’s difficult to measure the quantitative nature of human interactions and conversation. It can also be problematic to measure the benefits of elements such as time with brand, brand positioning and the building of trust. The benefits of using social media are generally qualitative in nature – for example, social media campaigns can increase loyalty and influence – and as a result can be problematic to monitor. Social media has many different aspects and as such it’s impossible to measure ROI in just one way. Breaking down these qualitative attributes into understandable chunks that we can measure, understand and translate easily into a business context is an essential step in measuring social media ROI.

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

• Argyle Social is less about monitoring trends and sentiment, but more about aggregating your social media accounts and analysing only hard numbers and direct outcomes of your campaigns.
• bit.ly is a ubiquitous URL shortener that not only makes it easier to share links, it allows you to track your own links (or your competitors) by simply adding a + to the end of any bit.ly URL. This feature will let you view how many clicks you’ve received, top referrers, and the location of the clicks.
• Cymfony is a social listening tool that pulls information from traditional media, social media and proprietary data to provide insight, identify influencers and answer your specific market research questions.
• Google Alerts, albeit not strictly speaking a social media tool, setting up Google Alerts for your name, your company name and your products this simple step will help keep you in touch with what people are saying about you and your brand.
• Involver Audience Management Platform offers a dashboard that manages all of your social media applications, monitors communication, and provides analytics based on actionable measures so you can see the true ROI of your actions.
• MediaVantage is designed for PR professionals. The tool gives you instant access to TV, print, online and social media content that is relevant to your brand’s reputation, your industry, or your competition.
• Networked Insights’ “Social Sense” product line offers simple social media listening tools to monitor what is being said about your brand and your industry. Their “Social Sense TV” product allows you to survey the buzz surrounding specific TV shows so that you can make your traditional media spend more efficient.
• Objective Marketer is a site that allows you to create the content and strategy and just steps in to objectively analyse how people have interacted with the content you have posted. By measuring clicks, views, likes and more, the Objective Marketer discovers trends and finds out what is working for your brand and what’s not.
• Radian6 is one of the most popular social media monitoring sites. Radian6 scans an impressive number of social networks, news sites, blogs, discussion boards and video and photo sharing sites in order to find out what people are saying about your brand in these channels. The data is analysed and delivered to your dashboard, complete with presentation ready graphs.
• Spiral16 is a monitoring tool that scours the entire web, not just social channels, to collect digital content about your brand. Their findings are then presented a unique 3D Virtualisation that allows you to quickly find the information that is relevant to you and your brand.
• Spredfast is an analytics platform. Spredfast tracks and measures your campaign’s effectiveness based on content output, how many people were reached and if they were engaged. They also offer a benchmarking feature that allows you to compare the effectiveness of your campaign against other strategies in your industry or against similar campaigns in different industries to see where you stack up.
• SWIX is a tracking tool that goes beyond clicks and measures how much people are engaging with your social media content. SWIX shows you your performance on over 70 distinct audience and engagement metrics across 20 of the most popular social media platforms.
• Trackur monitors who is talking about you and what they’re saying on the web based upon a set of keywords you enter. You can see how influential the people and sources talking about you are so you can man- age your reputation accordingly.
• Trendrr is a site that analyses blogs, micro-blogs, search engines, social networks and even video to see what people are saying about your brand and provides numerical analysis to help you understand what it all means.
• Viral Heat is an analytics-based social listening tool that shows you more than a stream of mentions, but allows you to see each mention and analytics about it as well as overall trends concerning your brand.
• Visible Technologies is a monitoring tool that provides you with a dashboard of analysed data on what people are saying about your brand and helps companies delegate responses and workflow.

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.

Here’s is a list of a some of the services available. (If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment).

• BackTweets is used to search for particular links on Twitter. It also has an advanced search option, which makes your searching more flexible.
• Emotion Stream is a data mining research project that searches for emotion patterns on Twitter. The goal behind this project is to develop algorithms to find trends about what is making people happy in real time by using Twitter data.
• Klout allows you to track the impact of your opinions, links, and recommendations across your social graph. It collects data about the content you create, how people interact with that content, and the size and composition of your network. From there, it analyses the data to find indicators of influence and helps you interpret the data.
• Monitter, as its name implies, is a simple Twitter monitor that let you “monitter” the Twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are talking about in real time.
• Spy is an easy-to-use tool that visualises the conversations on Twitter, Flickr, blogs and other social networks and enables you to listen in on the interactions you’re interested in.
• Twazzup is a dashboard that monitors Twitter; it will tell you every time your keywords are mentioned in a tweet. It will also categorise your results by link popularity, contributors, tagging clouds, and users. Unique features like avatar mouse-overs that give more details about that user’s relevant tweets make Twazzup a surprisingly powerful and valuable social media monitoring tool.
• TweetBuzzer lets you see which brands get talked about most on Twitter. You can see and track the top tweeted brands in a 24 hour, 7-day or 30-day period.
• TweetEffect lists all the Twitter updates that had an effect on your follower numbers. Updates that made people leave are displayed in red, others in black.
• Tweet Grader is a tool from HubSpot that allows you to check the power of your Twitter profile. It looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers, and the level to which you are engaging the community. It takes just a few seconds to generate your free report.
• TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyses your last 1000 tweets and works best on users who have posted more than 1000 updates. It also works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than as a content distribution platform.
• Tweettronics is a tool to analyse, discover, track and engage with Twitter conversations about your products, brands and topics.
• TwiBuzz is a tool that tells you how often people are using Twitter to tweet your favourite keywords in real time. It plots the current and historical tweet rate in tweets per minute (TPM) for your search terms. TwiBuzz tracks a predefined list of terms, but you’ll find that it’s easy to add to that list. Once a term is added, TwiBuzz will have its first TPM data point for that query within a few minutes.
• Twitalyzer is a tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on dozens of useful measures of success in social media. This powerful tool can help you measure the influence, popularity, velocity, and generosity of your Twitter account.
• Twitscoop is a real-time visualisation tool, which enables users to “mine the thought stream”, provided by Twitter. Its algorithm cuts every English non-spam tweet into pieces (“tags”), and ranks them by how frequently they are used versus normal usage. It detects growing trends in real time, identifies breaking news, and monitors specific keywords. It also creates custom graphs that display the activity for any given word on Twitter.
• Twitter Counter is a great Twitter service that offers updated statistics of your followers, the users you’re following, and daily tweets. You can also compare absolute growth of multiple twitter accounts or contrast them with your competitors’ expansion, enabling you to track, measure and redesign your strategy.
• Twitturly tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a quick, real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Each time someone tweets a URL to his or her followers, Twitturly takes note of it and applies it as a vote for that URL. The more votes a URL has in the last 24 hours, the higher it ranks on Twitturly’s Top 100.

Generally speaking, sentiment analysis aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic or the overall contextual polarity of a document. The attitude may be his or her judgment or evaluation (appraisal theory), affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing), or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader).

The rise of social media such as blogs and social networks has fueled interest in sentiment analysis. With the proliferation of reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency for businesses looking to market their products, identify new opportunities and manage their reputations. As businesses look to automate the process of filtering out the noise, understanding the conversations, identifying the relevant content and actioning it appropriately, many are now looking to the field of sentiment analysis. If web 2.0 was all about democratizing publishing, then the next stage of the web may well be based on democratizing data mining of all the content that is getting published.

So what tools are out there? Here are a few:

• Alterian SM2 is a more in-depth than some other social media monitoring services. Alterian provides advanced user behaviour statistics, demographics, location, positive or negative tone, and trending topics for your brand as seen across a host of social media outlets and websites.
• Attentio is multilingual tool, which means you can receive results and understand the buzz about your brand worldwide.
• BrandsEye helps you manage your online reputation by finding all of your brand mentions, the reputation of their source, the sentiment and even flags mentions that you may require immediate attention.
• Brandwatch allows you to find out how many mentions your brand has across the internet, where they are coming from, and how far the comments have reached.
• Collective Intellect goes beyond monitoring what is being said about your brand online, and analyses specific posts and snippets of posts to get the true sentiment surrounding your brand. Additionally, they identify who the influencers are for your brand.
• Heartbeat is geared more towards brands interested in the day-to-day monitoring of buzz, as opposed to in-depth market research. Though the amount of information is more limited with this tool, the user-defined dashboard makes it easier for marketers to quickly find the information relevant to them.
• Lithium Social Media Monitoring is similar to Google analytics and monitors virtually every online social media channel and provides you with an overall score of how well your brand is doing.
• PeopleBrowsr, via the products Research.ly and Analytic.ly, offer sentiment monitoring, trend reporting and audience profiling. Their main claim to fame at the moment is their recent announcement that they provide 1000 days of Twitter history.
• Sentiment Metricsis a tool for bigger businesses, enterprises and B2B marketers. The tool monitors your brand’s presence not only on social media sites but on blogs and forums as well. Additionally, their profiles of users who are talking about your brand allow you to engage with people interested in your brand.
• Radian6 is a social media monitoring tool that gives you a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web.
• Social Mention is a free web-based application that lets you search popular channels such as blogs and micro-blogs to find brand mentions and analyses the sentiment towards your brand. You can also set up alerts so that you will be told any time someone mentions your brand.
• Social Radar is a listening tool that allows you to visually see information flow between influencers, identify key conversations and determine tone. Additionally, Social Radar’s historical data about your brand goes back to 2007, so you can see how your influence has changed over time.
• Sysomos MAP provides access to millions of conversations dating back to 2006. The software helps monitor what people are saying about your brand, determine sentiment, and identify influencers. MAP also provides detailed demographic and geographic information and competitive analysis.

Sentiment analysis, together with opinion mining, is becoming a promising topic in the field of CRM 2.0. As a direct consequence of the concept of Web 2.0, CRM 2.0 refers to all CRM solutions where the customer becomes active with the products and services provided by the enterprise. As customer profiling becomes more effective and enterprises can move towards one-to-one marketing.

Social media has become an important source of information for enterprises: the word-of-mouth effect can be highly positive or highly negative, as far as prospect customers’ sentiment towards brands and products is concerned. Thus, it is clear that sentiment analysis and opinion mining will shortly become a key component of modern and more innovative CRM solutions.

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.

Define the Objective

Don’t let Nestle’s Facebook Page issues happen to you. Determine how you want to portray your brand socially. You should also develop a plan for engagement in more routine situations. This includes knowing the goals, knowing the business and knowing the voice.

Before beginning anything, the first step is discussing the goals and objectives at the highest level. It may sound simple, but the most important attribute to display here is the ability to listen. Then base the strategy around several big ideas that help solve the challenges unique to each project.

Consider these scenarios: when a blogger raves about your product, how do you turn this goodwill into collaboration that benefits both parties? How do you create customer advocacy programs? How do you internalise and execute on feedback about your, or your competitor’s product? How do you deal with disaffected customers? What about irate bloggers? You need to think through all these scenarios and figure out how you will activate the right resources within the organisation.

Decide Where and What to Monitor

The notion of the social customer should reflect not only your current paying customers, but also potential customers and industry thought leaders. Monitoring can help you figure out where these people are, and therefore what channels are best for you to listen to and engage.

Monitoring is keyword-based, and thus selection of the right keywords is important. At the very least, you should be tracking your company name, brand names, product names, names of key executives, competitor names, competitive product names, industry keywords, and your tagline or most recent marketing efforts (e.g. Did you run a special promotion for St Valentine’s Day, Mother’s day or August Bank Holiday?).

Implement

Even the best plans go unrealised without resources. Implementation is something to think about on the front end. Many people consider social media “free”, but in reality it’s a real commitment and requires a lot of time and attention.

Test and Track

After you implement, you need to make sure you’re paying attention to successes, failures and your brand perception.

Conversations are happening across many channels and social networks all over the world. To make matters even more complicated, the signal-to-noise ratio is not in your favor. This is why your monitoring must be intelligent and actionable. You should be triaging all the social media messages that come across your field of vision, so that you can focus on what’s most important.

Some good tools for keeping track of your brand online include:

• Alterian
• Brandwatch
• Google Analytics
• Radian6
• Sprout Social
• Trackur
• Visible Technologies

• 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.