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Foursquare’s badges have become so iconic that one company created physical versions to sell to fans.

(Credit: Nerd Merit Badges)

Earning badges and climbing a ladder of “levels” used to be the respective domains of Boy Scouts and devoted video gamers. No more: It’s officially the hottest craze in social-media marketing to make your customers think they’re playing a game.

A niche discussion site, Gravity, instantly informs new users that they’ve earned a virtual “New Kid on the Block” badge, and when they upload a profile photo, they get a “Photogenic” badge–and there are plenty more where that came from. An upstart daily deals site called HomeRun is attempting to take a bite out of market leader Groupon by letting repeat users rack up points by participating in and rating deals as well as referring friends; once they have enough points, they’re eligible for high-end “private reserve” deals like wine tastings and charity ball tickets. On Thursday, news outlet The Huffington Post unveiled a set of graphic “badges” to designate participation in comment discussion and moderation.

“From the very beginning we’ve taken the position that we wanted a large degree of engagement on the part of our audience, our readers,” Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau told CNET. “What you’re seeing with the badges is the public reflection of what we’ve been doing for a while now, which is to allow people to be community moderators. Now we give them a badge so that they’re recognized as such.” There are also badges for frequent commenters and particularly “networked” readers.

“Game mechanics,” as this sort of points-and-achievements gimmick is called, is tough to get right: Turning everything into a contest may grab some extra attention at first, but it can easily veer into the annoying. Leaving a well-researched comment about foreign policy on a news story only to earn a cartoon badge for your effort, for example, may seem a little bit inappropriate. But don’t be fooled. Gimmicky game mechanics aren’t really the “World of Warcraft”-ization of marketing: they’re the first entry of customer loyalty programs, long the sort of thing that even the customers themselves didn’t know much about, into the age of Facebook and Twitter. This business tactic is here to stay, even though the “Animal House” badges might not be.

“I like game playing when it comes to really any kind of service,” Gravity Chief Product Officer Steve Pearman told CNET. “It’s just a question of identifying what are the right kinds of games to play.” At least for now, the games du jour involve racking up what often amounts to little more than bragging rights.

Sometimes, though, there’s money involved. HomeRun CEO Jared Kopf says that the still-in-beta start-up’s various gaming features–from the “private reserve” achievement unlocking to a feature called “Avalanche,” in which buyers can watch the price of a deal drop as more people spring for it–are designed to legitimately make commerce more exciting.

“We were trying to determine a mathematical model for concepts of seduction, of addiction, of excitement, and although it wasn’t a perfect model we could begin to understand the principles behind what made things feel exciting,” he said. HomeRun’s team has experience in convincing users to commit some eyebrow-raising acts in the name of social media: most of them are former employees of Slide, the original home of the sheep throw.

The little company that ignited this fad was almost certainly Foursquare, which may be on its way to finally convincing mainstream Web users that sharing their precise location with their friends is more fun than creepy. Part of how it was able to do this was through a system of points and achievements which let users compete against their friends, strive to become the “mayor” of a venue by checking in the most, and earn virtual badges based on activity: the “Swarm” badge for checking in somewhere where at least 50 other Foursquare users have made their presence known in the past three hours, or the “Warhol” badge for going to ten different museums and art galleries.

Marketers have jumped on the trend, with restaurant reviewer Zagat, TV networks Bravo and The History Channel, coffee chain Starbucks, and even software maker Adobe partnering with Foursquare to let users earn sponsored badges. Even the staid Wall Street Journal has caught the Foursquare badge fever, this week heralding the arrival of its New York metro section–in clear competition with The New York Times–with three New York-specific badges. One of them rewards Foursquare users who “check in” at least once to all five of the city’s boroughs; it has yet to be seen if the quest for the “Urban Adventurer” badge will actually drive snooty Manhattan residents to Staten Island.

The badges all mean, for the most part, literally nothing, though Foursquare is attempting to build a business model out of tying real-world rewards to in-app achievements. A handful of local businesses around the country now let the “mayor” of a venue obtain special deals. On Wednesday, PepsiCo unveiled a whole sort of loyalty program centered on Foursquare check-ins, a sign that more sophisticated implementations of Foursquare data are on the way.

“Badges are at the risk of becoming the new banner advertisement,” Foursquare director of business development Tristan Walker admitted to CNET. “A lot of folks ask, ‘How can you make this scalable?” and I say, ‘Do we need to? Can we make it scarce, and make it really high impact for our users?”

To that end, Foursquare requires users to “follow” most brands before being eligible to earn their respective badges. “Sure, people can get sick of it,” Walker said. “I think people will still go to the people who are doing it smart. We’re never going to give up on game mechanics.”

But game mechanics themselves will mature–much as the viral channels backing Slide’s sheep-throwing evolved into the basis for Zynga and Playfish’s highly profitable productions. In due time, they’ll probably look like their pre-social-media cousins: loyalty programs, credit card points, and referral programs. Think about the devotees of complicated airline “mileage” systems, whose behavior was satirized in last year’s film “Up In The Air.” In the movie, George Clooney plays an obsessive business traveler who says of his addiction to frequent flyer miles, “I don’t spend a nickel, if I can help it, unless it somehow profits my mileage account.”

Still, even with Facebook Connect all over the Web, airlines aren’t broadcasting to your friends list that the miles earned on your trip to Rio just bumped you up to the Gold Elite membership class–well, they aren’t yet. Consumer incentivizing has been, at most, a process only visible to the consumer in question (unless they choose to brag about it) and sometimes even more opaque than that. Generally, you don’t know how your drugstore loyalty program card is tabulating your purchasing history, but you’re relatively confident that it will churn out discounts for you on a reliable basis.

“Most people wouldn’t look at their airline miles on a credit card and say ‘this is a game,’ but it’s a very well executed game mechanic,” Gravity’s Steve Pearman said. And that’s a sign that in the long run, the blatantly “game”-like elements will be toned down. After all, this really only makes sense if users really feel that it’s worth competing with others or showing off a sort of status.

“You have to be a social network. You can’t just create something where there is no social network,” Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau said of the company’s decision to integrate badges into its commenting community. “We’re not a game site. We’re not going to reward people for things that don’t make sense for them on The Huffington Post.”

And yes, it makes sense for badges to be displayed on Huffington Post profiles to give a bit of insight into who the trusted and regular users are in a community of highly opinionated armchair pundits. It makes the whole thing easier.

Meanwhile, maybe you’ll want some insight into how you could modify your purchasing behavior to achieve better discounts in your local supermarket’s loyalty program, but do you want it to issue you a “Heart Attack” badge when you buy economy-sized jars of mayonnaise for the fifth time, and then share it on your Facebook profile?

Probably not.

Disclosure: Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau formerly served on the board of former CNET parent company CNET Networks while in a previous role at Softbank Capital.

Faris Yakob is the chief innovation officer, MDC Partner, holding company of ad agencies including Crispin Porter Bogusky and kirshenbaum bond senecal partners and the former EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson NY.

A decade has flown by since Y2K arrived without a bug and digital marketing has grown up alongside it.

The emergence of a new media system is typified by a period of transposition, where the behavioural grammar of the previous system remains dominant. The first television shows were radio shows with people talking directly into camera. The first films were stageplays that had been filmed. And the first marketing forays online took what we knew about media and branding from broadcast media and applied it to a whole new space.

But digital is different.

Digital is not a channel. It’s a suite of platforms, channels and tactics that will, ultimately subsume its parents entirely.

Digital marketing is not simply a new place to disperse persuasive symbols, but the emergence of any entirely new behavioural grammar, as companies and their customer begin to engage with each other in entirely new ways in entirely new spaces, where everyone has an equal voice.

In the spirit of which, here are ten behaviours that will hopefully help the century grow into a surly adolescent, and then mature adult.

1. Earn your own attention

The internet is the great dis-intermediator – it connects everything to everything else – so companies can communicate directly with customers, bypassing the traditional media traditionally used. However, this opportunity brings with it a new set of challenges. Previously mass media aggregated attention and brands bought it. To earn your own attention you have to do things, create content, that people elect to spend time with.

2. Stop saying viral

‘Viral’ was the magic bullet of digital marketing – the panacea that saved us from fragmented media and disaffected consumers. But the viral metaphor is unhelpful. It suggests that we can create something that is self-propagating, when in fact what we mean is that lots of people have chosen to pass something around, for their own social reasons. Focusing on those reasons is much more helpful than asking for a ‘viral’ for there is no such thing.

3. Be nice or leave

Social media is going to get more and more important – it presents an entirely new way for companies and customers to interact and comes with many specific challenges and opportunities. The grammar of social media is different from the grammar of commercial media. The rules, the motivations, the etiquette are all social. So learn to be nice or leave. Stop thinking like a company and act like a person.

4. Socialise your mainstream media

People need things to talk about, and often those things appear in other media. In fact, social media breathes life back into the idea of watercooler moments, as backchannels on twitter allow people to discuss what they are watching in real time. Ensuring that your mainstream media feeds and feeds off social is best practice from here on in.

5. Decrease the latency in the system

There is a correlation between the amount of time it takes for information to be transmitted, the amount of time it takes to have an effect, and the corresponding cultural decay rate. The real-time web of twitter and facebook has brought the cultural latency rate down to almost zero. In response, companies must act faster, responding in real time, to keep apace with its customers.

6. Abundance is more interesting than scarcity

Media used to be relatively scarce, which is why we have traditionally compressed things down into the smallest possible units, propositions and 30 second parables. Online, media is not scarce – it is practically infinite. In response companies can create vast reams of content and let it sit online forever until customers find their way to – a complete inversion of the current model of commercial content creation. New Balance launched its 365 range with 365 short films.

7. The audience, isn’t

The one-way direction of mass media led us to think about customers like Victorian children: seen and not heard. Digital culture is intrinsically participatory so, if we want people to engage with us, we should do things that give them a role. It can be as simple as voting or as complex as Nike Plus. People tend to be more interested in things that involve them, vain as we are.

8. Ideas that create content

Historically we have used content to create relationships with consumers, to express our offers and create premium prices points. In a world where the tools of creativity and capture become more democratic everyday, where a generation has grown up that demands to be heard, we should be creating ideas that create content, rather than ideas that are content.

9. Be useful for where they are

The promise of location-based marketing is upon us, as foursquare turns a game for geeks into a platform for loyalty programmes for Starbucks. The dangers are obvious – spamming people with offers as they walk by a store – but the possibilities are endless. The key thing is geotility – making your product, or service or content, useful for wherever they are.

10. Be awesome

In digital spaces, nothing stirs the soul and opens the wallet like awe. Be it Kobe jumping over a speeding car or a system that pulls data from your car and tells you how to drive more efficiently, things that make your jaw drop are the very stuff of marketing. Indeed, a study of the New York Times most emailed articles revealed that readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe. So do something awesome and it may just go ‘viral’ [just don’t call it that].

farisyakob.com
@faris

Originally posted on Harvard Business Review.

The digital landscape is being reshaped by the news that Facebook opening up its social graph. Twitter, too, has made waves by acquiring companies that made third-party services for Twitter.

But if you take a closer look, this is part of a more macro trend that transcends two social platforms–despite their emerging dominance. That macro trend is ubiquitous sharing: What are you doing? Where are you doing it? Who are you doing it with? What do you like? These used to be things we kept to ourselves or shared with our friends and family. Now we’re willing to broadcast them to whoever is willing to listen.

Social media has led to “social sharing,” the broadcasting of our thoughts and activities. It’s not a fad. It’s a sociological phenomenon, accelerating at light speed. The latest incarnation of social sharing: A platform called Blippy allows you to connect to your social system and share what you bought and how much you spent at retailers like Target, Netflix, Amazon, and Zappos, to name a few. Not only can you log-in to these services quickly from an existing social network, but you can share across multiple networks. Knowing what people are buying when, and how much they’re willing to spend is creating a feeding frenzy among marketers looking for the ripple effect.

Not even the drumbeat of privacy concerns seems able to slow down the trend. It was recently reported that Blippy members’ credit card information was showing up in Google’s search results. Blippy is still going strong though. We are becoming ever more willing to share ever more information with the world. Here just a few some implications to consider when it comes to the changing face of sharing in a social age.

Data Gathering

The more we know about an individual, the easier it is to sell something. Someone will amass socially shared data (this is where Facebook is placing bets) and businesses will tap it for profit. Google’s integration of archived tweets reveals that even real time data can be sorted and mined. A business may not own the data from all of the sharing, but it’s likely they will want it.

Knowledge Sharing & Collaboration

Conflating internal and external social sharing could profoundly affect how we work. Newer internal platforms such as Chatter from Salesforce not only borrow from the Facebook school of platform design, but they also integrate with external networks such as Twitter. The future of social sharing for the large organization could be making the two worlds come together in a secure fashion for the enterprise.

Content Distribution

Social sharing becomes the ultimate form of distribution. Any business or individual who produces a form of digital content in any form will be tweaking how easily the content can be shared, whether by adding a like button or designing the content itself to be sharable.

Social Currency

Sharing on the social web acts as a form of currency. Sharing useful information that might help someone within your network scores you points and builds equity. Finding a deal and sharing that with others can put you in someone’s favor, and maybe then they will find you a deal. It’s important to recognize that all this sharing isn’t some useless impulse. There are reasons why people are willing to share so much. Creative expression is part of it but also, there’s often a benefit, value, to the individual who shares.

Social sharing is a major behavioral shift, the most important so far of the 21st century. And the information we choose to share with friends, co-workers and even strangers, is re-defining the idea of what’s private and public before our very eyes.

Brilliant.

This is awesome.

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Image via Snorgtees

Do you “cross the streams?” In other words, do you co-mingle your personal and professional social networks? This is a tough question to answer. In this essay (which is also my Adage column next week), I present the pro-side of the argument. I also opened up this discussion on Facebook.

As I travel the world, however, I am hearing distinct argument for keeping these separate. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and I discussed this yesterday. He (correctly) called me “an edge case.” So with this in mind, consider this Part I. In Part II I will look at the case against “crossing the streams.”

As always, I am eager for your views. Help me learn. This is a very confusing topic for many people.

Professional, Personal Social Circles Converge…and Confuse

About a year ago I became Facebook friends with Rob, the dealer sold me my car in 2007. Now I don’t have any connection Rob other than this single transaction. Yet whenever I bring in my wheels for service, he is able to recall some nugget from my activity stream. You see, Rob is smart. He is using social networking to maintain a level of “ambient awareness” about his customers’ total lives and he lets us do the same about him. This instills trust. And trust is the future of business. In all likelihood this helps him drive more sales.

Social networking is rapidly blurring the edges between our professional and personal spheres. Many of us co-mingle colleagues, clients, friends and family within our social networks. Others do not.

While the long term effects are uncertain, this convergence is creating mass confusion among marketers and other corporate types who for years have worked to ensure these circles remain separate. They maybe fighting a losing battle since this train left the station long ago.

The days of us yelling “yabba dabba doo,” sliding down the dinosaur’s tail and leaving work behind at five are long over. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices, we are constantly connected to our work. On the flip side, we don’t hesitate to stay close to our personal networks while we’re in the office.

Social networking is amplifying and accelerating this existing trend. It’s forcing all of us to make choices about how public we are willing to be – and what, if any boundaries we want to maintain between our networks. Regardless of your individual stance, this subtle, yet important change is going to reshape how you and your colleagues do business.

The societal norm, it seems, is tilting more toward what thinker Jeff Jarvis calls “new publicness.” This is especially true among younger workers. And while there are certainly major pitfalls – ask anyone who lost their job over questionable Facebook photos from a weekend party – there are clear benefits as well. Caveats aside, I believe that that those who allow these circles to overlap will build stronger ties all around. At our heart, we’re all human beings, not automatons. If we open up and let our customers, colleagues and partners see even just a little bit of our total activity streams, we will break down barriers, instill trust and more lasting business relationships.

This isn’t black and white of course. Each individual will have to decide just how public he/she wishes to be and to what end. This is why Twitter, a public channel, may not be right for everyone. Yet Facebook, which allows the user to tailor his/her specific updates just to a single network, could be.

The good news, however, is that publicness is not an all or nothing equation. You can start small, as many are. Some employees, for example, are solely using internal social networking tools like Yammer to update their colleagues on their day-to-day activities. Other more extroverted types, meanwhile are tweeting their passions. Some even log their total lives on FourSquare, all in full view of their professional and personal networks.

Ultimately this is an individual choice and it must take into account a lot of factors, including corporate policies and industry norms. But in an age where transparency begets trust, there’s a lot to be gained on an individual and institutional level for those who decide in some way to live some of their lives in public and converge networks. Just ask Rob, who I will definitely buy from again.

Tags » essays social networking

[It] was conceived to use the potential of the wonderful seen towards the Gulf of Mexico from each space of the house without sacrificing the privacy and the comfort of its inhabitants, with that intention, the building owns two personalities that contrast, which is observed in the big difference of its facades one of them mostly designed to be seen from the inside, giving all the importance to the views of the sea whereas the second facade was designed to be seen from the outside.

The main concepts were to achieve making the form and the structure as one piece, and by request of the client, all the spaces must be connected so in this case we choose the long terraces in the main facade as a semi-public space to share all the spaces together at the same time with family and friends.

Nike president and CEO Mark Parker discusses a conversation he had with Apple head honcho Steve Jobs in this short clip from Fast Company’s “Innovation Uncensored” conference. Jobs’ advice for the sporting goods company? “Get rid of the crappy stuff.” Simple, yet brilliant.

Yep, it has been scientifically proven: the accuracy of people in describing charts with ‘chart junk’ is no worse than for plain charts, and the recall after a 2-3 week gap was actually significantly better. In addition, people overwhelmingly preferred ‘chart junk’ diagrams for reading and remembering over plain charts. In all, the researchers conclude that if memorability is important, elaborate visual imagery has the potential to help fix a chart in a viewer’s memory.

I am sure Tufte is not going to like this…

The findings have been described in the paper “Useful Junk? The Effects of Visual Embellishment on Comprehension and Memorability of Charts” [hci.usask.ca]. About 60 participants were asked to look to 14 different information graphs created by Nigel Holmes (see also his book Designer’s Guide to Creating Charts and Diagrams) and their equivalent, custom-made ‘plain’ versions. The ‘chart junk’ charts were all designed to attract the eye, engage the reader, and sometimes provide a particular value message over and above the presentation of the data itself. In fact, the researchers deliberately chose the most extreme type of visual embellishment that they could: namely, the full cartoon imagery used by Holmes.

The participants then answered questions about each chart’s topic and details, such as ‘What is the chart is about?‘, ‘What are the displayed categories and values?‘, ‘What is the basic trend of the graph?‘ and ‘Is the author trying to communicate some message through the chart?‘. Half of the participants then answered the same questions again, after about 5 minutes of playing a game, and half after around 12 days. The experimenters then recorded any correctly recalled charts (e.g. ‘I remember one about the price of diamonds‘).

“The illusion of objectivity (as used in minimalist charts) and the use of evocative imagery (as used in Holmes charts) are perhaps just different approaches that work at different ends of the rhetorical spectrum. Designers and readers should remember that a Holmes chart is not necessarily more biased than its plain counterpart – but it may be more effective at conveying the value message that is part of the overall argument.“

Via Eager Eyes.

This is what i’ve been trying to articulate for months. Visualisations of data that make what you are reading easier to stomach.

These days you can share just about anything online. Sharing your personal taste with the world might seem a little egocentric, but it’s also a great way of getting recommendations from others too.

From TV shows to mobile apps, here’s our guide to sharing what you love online.

TV shows and movies

Miso takes the Foursquare format of check-ins and badges and translates it to movies and TV shows. When you’re watching something, just log the fact using this iPhone app and you can automatically share your viewing habits via Twitter or Facebook. You can even link up your Foursquare account to check-in at your current location at the same time.

You’ll earn badges for repeat viewing of different genres and you’re able to see what your friends are watching and see what shows are “trending” right now. It’s a little ‘bare bones’ at present and it’s uncannily similar to Foursquare in its design. That said, it’s still an alpha product that launched mere weeks ago so if you’re a TV addict, it might be worth getting in on the action now and seeing how it develops.

Music

Music was the first form of entertainment to be easily shared online, thanks to Last.fm. Over half a decade later and the service is still the best way of letting others know what you’re listening to. Supporting everything from desktop music players to MP3 players, mobile phones and even the XBox 360 and some internet radio stations, Last.fm reaches to just about anywhere you can play music digitally.

The true joy of Last.fm is that once you’ve ’scrobbled’ a decent amount of music it really can recommend new artists and songs to you quite accurately, and the charts it builds of what you’ve been listening to know your music taste better than you do.

Desktop apps

Publicly sharing the desktop apps you use might seem a little strange but Wakoopa has built up a loyal following by allowing users to do that. Beyond simply publishing a feed of the apps you use via services like Twitter and a widget for your website, the service keeps track of your productivity by tracking your app usage on a graph.

Wakoopa will also recommend other apps you might like based on your usage and a social side of the service makes it easy to see what your friends are using. [Disclosure: The Next Web’s parent company is an investor in Wakoopa]

iPhone apps

With so many apps in the iTunes store, choosing the best can be difficult. Appsfire is a service that allows you to share which apps you’re using with others quickly and easily. Available for PC, Mac and as an iPhone app, the service taps into your iTunes account and lets you create lists of apps to recommend with others. A link to your recommendation list can then be shared with others easily.

Beyond friends’ recommendations, the Appsfire website provides ‘VIP’ app lists from well known bloggers including our own Editor in Chief, Zee. A version of Appsfire for Android apps is currently in private beta and will be available to all soon.

Gadgets

If you’re a gadget obsessive, gdgt is the site for you. Run by former Engadget head honchos Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, it allows you to build up lists of the high tech gear you own, would like to own and have had in the past. The site allows you to compare lists with friends, see what others are saying about gadgets you’re interested in or review them yourself.

As with most of the services in this list, there’s Twitter and Facebook integration and dynamic recommendations based on what you’ve shared. As a reference source for information about new gadgets and a place to discuss them, Gdgt can’t be beaten.

Martin Bryant UK Editor, The Next Web
Martin Bryant is based in Manchester, UK. A co-founder of the city’s monthly Social Media Cafe events and award-winning blogger, he is Digital Content Editor for Marketing Manchester. His main interests are developments in the social web that relate to the mobile and music industries. Twitter, Personal site

Tough to watch but incredibly powerful message.