I super excited about this next week for a few reasons. First off because I get to go back to the US for a week. I’ll be in Seattle Mon-Wed and then I’ll be in San Francisco Thur-Fri. The second reason I’m excited which is the whole reason I’m going, is to speak on a panel hosted by my company, Waggener Edstrom, during Social Media Week on Gamification in San Francisco (I’m obviously excited about the topic of Gamification). The third reason I’m so excited is that I finally get to speak with some great panelists:

Marshall Kirkpatrick @Marshallk, who recently stepped down as the editor (but is still a writer) for ReadWriteWeb to build his own stealth startup @PlexusEngine.

Chris Swain, you may be less familiar with but will probably be the star of the panel. He’s a professor at the USC School of Interactive Media and has been studying gaming for years. You can read this 2008 article in Forbes.

Adena DeMonte (@gamificationgal), Director of Marketing at Badgeville. I’m really excited to hear from Adena as she’s right in the thick of this space and has some great real world, hands on experience.

Birju Shah who is the co-founder Sugarcrew.com, which is a startup focusing on using gamification in the healthcare space. I don’t know much about Birju or sugarcrew, but healthcare gamification sounds really interesting.

The whole panel will be moderated by Waggener Edstrom‘s very own President of Studio D, Jen Houston, who was just named by content startup, Kapost as one of the 50 Content Marketers to watch in 2012.

If you’re not familiar with Social Media Week, I don’t know what rock you’ve been hiding under. Check out the site and watch this video.

If you’re in San Francisco area, please come to the panel, it will be held at Citizen Space in SFO. If you can’t make it I’m pretty sure the event will be webcast.

Bonus video promo for Social Media Week:

Related articles

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The car industry has always been extremely competitive and  they, like the rest of the companies out there, are trying to figure out how to leverage social media to increase loyalty and sales.  Ford Motor Company decided early that they wanted to be a leader in using Social Media as a part of their marketing . Their 1st big move was securing Scott Monty as their Global Social Media Lead, who is a revered social media expert with a large following of his own.

Ford Introduces Fan Badges

Recently Ford came out  on their Ford Social site with Ford Badges that you can download and share. Scott on his Google+ profile explained how people could use the badges.  “Post it on your blog, make it an avatar or profile pic, put it on your wallpaper on your desktop, iPhone or Android”. He also said that the badges are  ” just the beginning of a broader program. For now, they’re designed to allow people to self-identify and see who else they share an interest with. You’ll have to stay tuned to see what else is coming.”

Fan or Foe, Who Doesn’t Want A Badge?

People have become completely obsessed with badges in the last couple of years, thanks to foursquare, klout, and several other applications. I know people whose weekends revolve around capturing more  badges for social bragging rights. I can see people who are not big fans of Ford, who find a fun badge, and then post it to there Facebook wall. Ford is smart to get involved with this new way of marketing and its proving to be effective! The Ford Lifer badge (pictured below) for example has had over 10,000 downloads alone. I’d like to see the statistics on how many have been downloaded all together. Maybe Scott or Ford will give us an update soon.

How Does This Help Ford Motors Company?

1) Builds brand loyalty

People like to brag what they are passionate about, especially when their favorite brand has a big rival.  We see this all the time with brands for example Apple vs PC, Coke vs Pepsi, and of course Ford vs Chevrolet. Fans take a side and want something  to show to rub it in their rival friends faces.  Ford  helps in this by giving their fans  a fun and free way to show their pride wherever they want on the web. Both parties are happy because the fan gets a shiny new badge while Ford is getting free promotion and advertising with each share of these badges.

2) Building brand connections instead of recognition

In years past  the best  way to display  your companies brand was to buy a Superbowl ad. Now companies are forgoing the traditional $20 million  30 second super bowl commercial price tag  for social media campaigns. Like when Pepsi did  their  Pepsi Refresh Project where they put that $20 million  into a monthly online contest for people to submit their ideas and compete for votes to win grants to do their  projects.

These type of projects allow people to not only recognize the brand that but to really interact and  connect with it. I’ll be the first to admit that the Super Bowl commercials are hilarious, but are quickly forgotten. With Ford and these badges they are connecting and building pride in their brand with their fans, which is not quickly forgotten.

3) SEO benefits of badges

The SEO side of me has to notice the fact that  all of this social sharing and widget embedding is not only producing a lot of great marketing for Ford , but its also creating lots of links to the site! The lifer badge earlier had over 10,000 downloads, and that’s just 1 badge. Imagine the Thousands or even millions of possible links that these badges are producing back to Ford.com.

Also the effects of Social on SEO has been a big topic this year, and its only getting bigger.  Google is starting to have search results be influenced by the connections of  the searchers social networks. Which means with these badges the searchers results could be influenced to include links about Ford that usually wouldn’t appear. I think that this will be a great advantage for Ford in the future when social signals are an even bigger part of seo.

Whats The Next Step?

Again Scott Monty said that these badges are just the beginning of a bigger plan. What do you think is next for Ford Motor Company or what would you like to see happen? As always I look forward to your comments.

The theme’s been going around. Mahandra Palsule (@scepticgeek), who’s an editor at Techmeme also wrote about the topic and sparked my comment:

I’ve actually been pondering how the ubiquity of social media + data with mobile context has turned “social” into something seemingly unsocial.  It’s cool that I can open an app and pull up information about locations aggregated from thousands of other’s updates, rating and pictures, but their just data at this point, there’s nothing social about it. Then add to this the shifts in the Web from open to proprietary platforms. and all of a sudden social media is starting to indeed look anti-social.

But I’ve been thinking more on the topic and decided to record a video yesterday while I was in Brussels. I apologize for forgetting to turn off the music and some bad framing. My only excuse is that this was really early in the morning.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Wired Cover from 2010

Today is my five-year bloggiversary. I launched this blog right after I left my job as the head of New Media for a small consulting agency. It was my first job in this space and the beginning of a long and wonderful journey.

This blog has been the catalyst – the “platform” – for my amazing (how-did-I-ever-get-this-lucky) career up until now. It’s crazy to think back over the last 5 years. It’s even crazier to think about the next 5.

Some quick facts about this blog:

• I’ve always hated the name. Seriously, I just wasn’t able to come up with anything better at the time. It was kind of a hasty decision.
• I’ve had just over 200K unique visitors and over 300K page views.
• 1,127 posts have been posted and 3,870 comments.
• Between Amazon affiliate links and Newstex royalties I’ve probably made between $300 to $500. Not sure, because I don’t really care.
• This is my most popular post, by 3X any other post.

Wired cover from 2001

I find it very timely that the market is in such a state of transformation today. With many people declaring everything from blogging to the open web as dead.

I actually really believe that our space is going through another significant shift and I’ve been very restless for the better part of a year, wondering what I’m going to do next.

I love blogging and that’s not going to stop but very soon, I’m probably going to make a very significant change in the way that I continue to participate in this space. I haven’t fully decided what that will be or how it will all play out but, as always, I plan on keeping you in the loop. (Or I won’t change anything and we’ll forget I ever mentioned I would.)

So as far as the last five years go, I can only say THANK YOU, to all of you for participating and contributing. Blogging is a very real part of my thought process (hence why I won’t stop) but you guys make it fun and keep it from being like work.

Here’s to the next five years, no matter what that looks like.

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• Blogging Is Making A Comeback For Marketers (wall-notes.com)
• Three Things I’d Do Differently If I Started Blogging Today (wall-notes.com)

These are all pulled from New Comm Biz Lite, which also stream on the left hand side of this site. I use Tumblr for the quick thoughts I have and typically post between 5-10 posts a day there. I use it so I can limit this blog to the longer more thoughtful posts. Let me know if you found this any more valuable.

Sometimes (often times) it’s because the startup in question is failing and the acquiring company can get a good deal and save a bunch of people from a lot of headache. This is pretty much the case of every geolocation startup that’s been acquired.

Sometimes it’s because of the team involved is so valuable and talent is in such high demand, other larger startup companies are willing to pay a premium. I think another factor is companies want to avoid future competition, so acquiring a young hot startup, kills two birds with one stone. I think both of these last two reasons were the primary reason Facebook bought FriendFeed several years ago.

The Dirty Little Secret Of Silicon Valley’s Startup Boom.

And there’s no shortage of startups looking for seed investments. They are told that they must have a business plan, they must address market opportunities of at least $1 billion in revenues; industry sector expertise is important; do the team members have prior experience? Are there enough tech leads in the team?

We are repeatedly told that these, and many other factors, are important to investors.

But aren’t most of those “factors” BS? Take a look:

The plan is to sell these tiny businesses to larger companies in the shortest time possible.

But in the vast majority of cases, the buyers aren’t interested in the startup’s business, they are acquired for their engineering talent alone.

Related articles

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• Facebook acquires Gowalla (wall-notes.com)

B&N has been in a long slow battle with them for years. They launched Nook and then spun it out. I (half jokingly) suggested Best Buy should buy them and condense operations.

But it’s about to get very real for B&N. I think they have one or two years left in this current path. They’ve got to change something, and something drastic in my opinion. There’s a great NYT article I came across this week that I found and really gave me the sense that B&N doesn’t have long left.

I’ve asked before what book publishers should do and I got some great responses. But what should the largest physical book store do?

If you were the CEO, what would you do?

Barnes & Noble, Taking On Amazon in the Fight of Its Life.

What began as an almost quixotic effort to catch up with the Amazon Kindle has now grown into a 300-person operation in the heart of Silicon Valley. Mr. Lynch has hired engineers, software developers and designers, who are today spread among five low-slung buildings.

In one room, a virtual wallpaper of Nook color devices hangs in rows neat as a checkerboard. A common area holds a foosball table and a cooler of VitaminWater. Some of the walls are made of silver-colored mesh. Some of the cubicles are lime green.

But there are also reminders of the old Barnes & Noble. Over here is a basket of actual books, including “Travels With Charley” and “The Little Prince.” Over there on a wall are enormous vintage covers of books like “Of Mice and Men” and “The Great Gatsby.”

It was Nick Carraway who told Jay Gatsby, “You can’t repeat the past.” That warning seems to hang over these offices. A sign above one group of engineers says: “We are changing the future of bookselling.”

For all the bells and whistles and high-minded talk, Barnes & Noble doesn’t exactly have the cool factor (or money) of, say, a Google or a Facebook.

Ravi Gopalakrishnan, the first engineer whom Mr. Lynch hired and now the chief technology officer for digital products, said his techie friends were incredulous when he joined Barnes & Noble.

“They were all wondering what I was up to,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan, 46, said. “I’m a technology guy — why I was working for a retail company? They thought I was nuts. There were a lot of e-mails that said, ‘Barnes & Noble?!’ ”

Related articles

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• Amazon vs. Wal-Mart. Haven’t we seen this before? (wall-notes.com)
• Rumor: Barnes & Noble to release a “fifth e-reading device” in the spring (technologytell.com)
• Does Barnes and Noble WANT To Kill the Bookstore? (geardiary.com)
• Rumor: Barnes & Noble to release a “fifth e-reading device” in the spring (technologytell.com)
• Does Barnes and Noble WANT To Kill the Bookstore? (geardiary.com)

There is a lot of hype around gamification right now. Some people take issue with my enthusiasm. The debates are nothing new really. It’s the usual debates, rants, diatribe, and guru posturing we saw around blogging, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 (and every other 2.0), crowdsourcing, virtual worlds, microblogging, augmented reality, geolocation and every other digital development we’ve seen over the last 5-7 years. And gamification won’t be the last to cause a ruckus.

So I thought I would try to add a little bit of clarity around gamification by covering what is gamification, what it isn’t, what gamification is good for and what it isn’t and finally what I see as the real promise of gamification. First I always like to start looking forward by looking backwards.

Some Historical Perspective:

When people talk about gamification people usually think about points, badges or turning crowdsourced tasks into games. Gamification is not really new. We’ve been “gamifying” things as long as there were tasks to be done or metrics to be gamed.

The big sign you see in manufacturing plants that reads something like: “This facility has been accident free for 75 days.” is a form of gamification. Points: 75 days. Badges: The big sign. There are other examples like when grocery stores used to give out stamps with your purchases and when you collected enough stamps you could trade them in for dishes. Credit card points are another example. More modern examples like Foursquare, Get Glue, Klout and Fold.it the folding DNA game are the ones most commonly thought of.

But I remember the first time I saw gamification in action and thought, “I’m being gamed.” It was 5+ years ago when I first signed up for LinkedIn and after filling in just the basic information was told that my profile was only 45% complete (or some low-grade number). My initial reaction was that I was being told I was incomplete, “I can do better than that!” of course I instantly realized I was being gamed, but it worked. This kind of profile completion status is very common now.

Gamification: What is it?

When people talk about gamification, there are usually talking about one of two things:

• Using game mechanics in user experience (UX) design.
• Turning some kind of task into actual gameplay.

Game mechanics is what we most commonly think of when we think of adding points and badges to something. LinkedIn’s profile completion status is another example. Game mechanics draws on our innate desire to earn points, collect things and all those other behaviors that makes playing games so much fun. For more on this read this excellent post on how scvngr uses game mechanics.

Gameplay, is just that; its turning something into a game. The fold.it example is a good one. Personally I think contests also fall into this category. Gameplay by default deploys game mechanics but it’s more obvious a game. An example of the difference would be Foursquare vs. scvngr. Foursquare has a competitive element to it but it isn’t quite a full-fledged game (although there are apps that build on top of Foursquare to create games) while scvngr is meant for users to create challenges and then earn points and rewards based on completing those challenges.

The lines between the two aren’t perfectly cut and dry so don’t get too hung up on the differences.

Gamification: What it’s good for, and what it’s not?

I think the applications of gamification are vast, but for the purposes of this post I’ll try to stick to the areas where it has already been proven to work. (I’ll save the speculation for the last bit.)

Gamification and crowdsourcing are, in my mind, natural bedfellows. Gamification can unite leaderless groups around shared goals and objectives. It can turn a crowd into a movement. The rewards – in the case of game mechanics – and the rules  - in the case of gameplay – provide direction often times much better than a real leader can. Gamification  also (if done right) provides a clear objective with a self relevant strategy.

Gamification is also ideal for encouraging behavior, especially behaviors someone is already prone to do. In my LinkedIn example, I wanted to set up an account and I would have eventually filled out my full profile but it is in LinkedIn’s best interest if we fill out our profiles sooner than later. This is why the profile completion status prompt works. Additionally, many of will naturally share our location with our friends, there’s a lot of advantages to my friends knowing where I am. But giving me badges and putting me on a leaderboard with my friends definitely encourages me to check in more often. Fighting with my coworkers for the mayorship of my office is fun. The people who play the fold.it game are probably naturally interested in science and helping out a good cause, making it a game, encourages them to play even more.

What gamification won’t do is make boring tasks, I have no interest in, suddenly compelling. Gamification won’t compensate for your crappy user experience. Gamification is not a panacea for your boring marketing plan or you’re struggling business model.

The Hidden Promise of Gamification:

Enterprise Crowds: One really potential, powerful use of gamification is in empowering crowds. It’s already proven effective here, but I think we have yet to see it work in the enterprise. In a recent research paper, Beyond Social: The Crowd Based Enterprise, on GigaOm Pro (subscription required) @dcoleman100 tweaks the typical definition of what is a crowd:

A crowd is a connected group of people like a community or social network. However, the difference is that a crowd has a purpose, a goal or an outcome that is the reason for its existence.

This is definitely the case of all the great crowdsourcing or even gamification examples. The crowd formed together for a purpose, but being a crowd, they typically lack a leader. In today’s modern, ever flattening, enterprise, especially in the tech world, large enterprises, with their hundreds or thousands of employees, are starting to resemble more of a crowd, than a traditional organization. I still believe that gamification holds massive amounts of untapped potential in a management free (or at least management lite) company.

Better Design: One of the more powerful outcomes of social media is that it’s forcing companies to humanize, their behavior and language. It’s forcing decision-making down further into the front ranks and its empowering employees. These were all results of social media tools giving voice to and amplifying your average consumer.

Likewise, I believe that gamification will force better design on archaic enterprise systems and help create better collaboration tools. Companies won’t be able to slap badges onto their crappytime entrysoftware and expect better results. You won’t be able to add points and a leaderboard to your competition and expect more participants, if your product sucks and/or your targeting the wrong audience. Yes Foursquare heavily uses gamification, but they have a great mobile experience.

In order to fully realize the potential of gamification companies are going to have to first accept that their internal tools have to be as well designed and usable as the well designed Web tools and apps customers are flocking to.

Related articles

• Some wild speculation about UX in 2012 #Gamification (wall-notes.com)
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• Gamification from a Company of Pro Gamers – Lithosphere Community (lithosphere.lithium.com)
• ‘Gamification’ engages otherwise uninterested customers (vator.tv)

Granted we’ve seen the rise of small “social media” specialty firms and a lot of companies rightfully choose to keep much of social media with their in-house marketing teams, but when it comes to external vendors, PR gets most of the social media dollars.

It’s all about to change:

In 2011 we saw the ad world wake up to their slowly disappearing budgets and demand from clients for social media ideas. 2011 saw a lot of great campaign work from ad agencies like the Old Spice campaign, Coke and VW, just to name a few. But in 2012 the war cry has been sounded and PR needs to expect a full frontal attack from ad agencies as well as those PR agencies that for some reason still haven’t got on the bus.

Bellow you’ll see two articles about the recent layoffs, especially around marketing and advertising, from the CPG ad spending giant P&G. The stories include some very bold statements by their CEO that digital and social have much better ROI than traditional advertising. That’s a call to arms if I’ve ever heard on. And believe me the ad industry will respond. They’ve got more riding on this than PR does: bigger budgets, more staff and a more precarious foothold on the path forward.PR can expect ad agencies to spend a lot of money and a lot of people at it.

Couple with this trend the huge revenue push Twitter and Facebook will be pushing through their advertising offerings. This will give ad agencies a unique seat at the table.

PR has the edge (but working for a PR agency, I’m biased) but I believe the best path forward is not to circle the wagons or close ourselves off but to actively partner more broadly. Agencies need to remember two things:

• Do what’s best for the client and their customers first and the money will come.
• Paid, Owned and Earned (POE) work better together.

P&G CEO To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It’s Free To Advertise On Facebook

P&G said it would lay off 1,600 staffers, including marketers, as part of a cost-cutting exercise. More interestingly, CEO Robert McDonald finally seems to have woken up to the fact that he cannot keep increasing P&G’s ad budget forever, regardless of what happens to its sales.

He told Wall Street analysts that he would have to “moderate” his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be “more efficient” than the traditional media that usually eats the lion’s share of P&G’s ad budget.

This is coming from the man who increased P&G’s ad spend by a staggering 24 percent over the two years through October 2011, even though sales rose only 6 percent in the same period.

P&G to Cut 1,600 Jobs, Bank on Digital for Long-term Savings

Chairman CEO Bob McDonald said he expects P&G’s advertising costs to moderate as it moves more spending into digital media, where the sheer number of options and availability of largely free distribution drives down expenses. In the short term, however, heavy spending on the 2012 U.S. elections is likely to put upward pressure on P&G’s TV costs, he said.

“In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that return on investment of the advertising when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient,” Mr. McDonald said. He cited the 1.8 billion in free impressions generated by the Old Spice campaign in recent years, adding “there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world.”

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I love this photo. I use it at the start of almost all of my presentations lately. It’s of a couple that’s expecting a baby, sitting on the floor of a Target, comparison shopping and looking up reviews of baby monitors.

This was taken early 2011 so this US, PEW research is not surprising to me at all:

More than half of adult cell phone owners used their cell phones while they were in a store during the 2011 holiday season to seek help with purchasing decisions. During a 30 day period before and after Christmas:

• 38% of cell owners used their phone to call a friend while they were in a store for advice about a purchase they were considering making
• 24% of cell owners used their phone to look up reviews of a product online while they were in a store
• 25% of adult cell owners used their phones to look up the price of a product online while they were in a store, to see if they could get a better price somewhere else

Taken together, just over half (52%) of all adult cell owners used their phone for at least one of these three reasons over the holiday shopping season and one third (33%) used their phone specifically for online information while inside a physical store—either product reviews or pricing information.

Detailed findings—online product reviews and calling friends for purchasing advice

There are a number of demographic patterns in these survey findings. Specifically:

• Cell owners ages 18-49 are significantly more likely to use their phones for online product reviews than are cell owners ages 50 and older. Cell owners ages 65 and older are especially unlikely to do this—just 4% did so this holiday season.
• Urban and suburban cell owners are roughly twice as likely as rural cell owners to have recently used their phone to look up online reviews of a product they found in a physical store.
• Non-white cell owners are more likely than white cell owners to look up online product reviews, and those who have attended college are more likely to do so than those who have not.

One in five “mobile price matchers” ultimately made their most recent purchase from an online store, rather than a physical location

When asked what happened on the most recent occasion where they used their phone to look up the price online of a product they found in a store, these mobile price matchers point to a range of outcomes:

• 37% decided to not purchase the product at all
• 35% purchased the product at that store
• 19% purchased the product online
• 8% purchased the product at another store

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• Study: Shoppers turn to mobile phones for bargains and reviews (digitaltrends.com)
• Why Bricks & Mortar Retail Will Continue to Get Harder – Mobile Price Comparisons (blumenthals.com)
• Mobile Retailers Can Still Get By With the Minimum. For Now (marketingvox.com)
• Everyone except grandma is comparison shopping via mobile, study finds (venturebeat.com)
• 52% Of People Used Their Phone To Help With Holiday Shopping (inquisitr.com)
• Half of U.S. shoppers rely on phones for in-store research – Tech News and Analysis (shanecrombie.com)