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.

So, what tools are available? Here are a few tools that’ll help you manage your Twitter account:

• Backtweets, a tool dedicated solely to Twitter, provides reach and impressions stats, alerts you whenever someone tweets a link to your website, identifies influencers and integrates with Google Analytics to see how Twitter activity is affecting your website traffic.
• BrandChirp is a service, which makes it easy to find the people you should be following. You can search for new followers by location, who they are following and keywords that they have recently tweeted about.
• ManageFlitter is a service that makes it easy to manage your followers and remove those that are no longer relevant or tweeting.
• Mentionmap is a visual tool that maps out your Twitter network so you can see who you interact with most and what they’re saying. It’s a cool tool to find relevant people to follow.
• Proxlet is used to filter the relevant stuff on Twitter. When you’re being bombarded by a few overly enthusiastic friends or by chatter about a conference you aren’t attending, Proxlet allows you to mute users, filter tags, or block apps to cut out the noise. The best part? It works with other Twitter applications like TweetDeck.
• Qwerly, “People Search for the Social Web”, lets you search for people in order to help you get a feel of their social presence. They also have a cool feature that allows you to add in the contact details of everyone you are following.
• Salesforce for Twitter is a web-based CRM tool is now allowing existing customers to pull tweets from their Twitter account into the tool, making it possible to assign leads and monitor activity as you would with other contacts in the database.
• SocialOomph allows you to automatically follow those who follow you, send direct messages automatically to new followers. Though this is essentially a Twitter tool, the professional edition handles Facebook as well.
• Sulia, formerly TLists, allows you to search public Twitter Lists, but the stats that accompany the lists are great and allow you to see how often the list pushes tweets and what they’re talking about.
• Twaitter lets you schedule tweets, set recurring tweets, create and manage your “tweet calendar” and even translate tweets, all from its web interface.

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.

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.

This has several implications to the “Twitter ecosystem” as a whole and Jeremiah Owyang has broken down the impacts:

The entire article can be read on Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategist blog.

• You can micro-manage your audience (eg. customers only see product release information, and not events aimed at prospects)
• You can task different parts of the organisation with running separate channels
• You may choose different Twitter tools and clients based on the audience (eg. event coverage could be handled through Tweetdeck whereas you might want in-depth social media monitoring tools for crisis management)

(via Delphine Remy-Boutang, Social Media Marketing Manager at IBM)

The important message advocated by the above strategy is this: Twitter isn’t simply a broadcast medium for marketing messages — that is only one facet — it is a medium for user engagement and two-way conversations.

What are the Tweet-specific elements? According to Twitter:

• @reply — This is a Tweet which begins with @username. This is distinct from the presence of @username elsewhere in the Tweet (more on that in a moment). An @reply Tweet is considered directly addressed to the @username and only some of your followers will see the Tweets (notably, those who follow both you and the @username).
• @mention — This is a Tweet which contains one or more @usernames anywhere in the Tweet. Technically an @reply is a type of @mention, which is important from a parsing perspective. An @mention Tweets will be delivered to all of your followers regardless of is the follow the @mentioned user or not.
• @username/list-name — Twitter lists are referenced using the syntax @username/list-name where the list-name portion has to meet some specific rules.
• #hashtag — As long has there has been a way to search Tweets people have been adding information to make the easy to find. The #hashtag syntax has become the standard for attaching a succinct tag to Tweets.
• URLs — While URLs are not Tweet-specific they are an important part of Tweets and require some special handling. There is a vast array of services based on the URLs in Tweets. In addition to services that extract the URLs most people expect URLs to be automatically converted to links when viewing a Tweet.

Other important syntaxes found in a Tweet

• RT @username — This is known as a Retweet. Similar to @mention, this type of Tweet refers to when a Twitter user is forwarding a Tweet, from another Twitter user, to their own followers. In essence the Tweet is being re-broadcast (generally without any editing).
• D @username — This is known as a Direct Message. Direct messages are similar again to an @reply, however, there is only one recipient of the message. The D @username element must appear at the beginning of the Tweet and only the referenced @username will be sent the message.
• via @username — Much like retweets and therefore similar to an @mention, this type of Tweet refers to when a Twitter user is forwarding on a Tweet, from another Twitter user, to their own followers. The Twitter user forwarding the Tweet may have edited the original, but out of courtesy have mentioned the originator.
• QT @username — This is known as a Quoted Tweet. It’s not often used outside Japan but is in essence a retweet.
• ^ (Co-Tag) — Known as a Co-Tag or sometimes a cotweet, this syntax appears when more than one person has access to a specific Twitter user account. It is a form of signing. For example, if I were to contribute to a corporate Twitter account, I may sign-off as ^SW (my initials).
• cc @username — Very much like an @mention, the carbon-copy syntax is a relic of the email world, but is useful for highlighting to a specific Twitter user a Tweet, whilst not necessarily directing the content of that Tweet to them.