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In any industry, the need to manage your brand's community is pressing. Companies have invested significant resources into building community on social networks, but as Facebook and other social media sites continue to block access to your user data, smart marketers and business leaders are realizing that the real value of social engagement is found on their own web properties and applications. Gamification offers a means of applying the benefits of social engagement directly to your properties. It is a proven business strategy that enables businesses to influence the behaviors of your entire community, and exceed your user-driven business objectives.

Gamify Your Marketing Strategy and Reward Social Influencers" by Mara Lewis, Co-founder and CEO, Stopped.at Leveraging gamification principles as part of the user experience and value proposition magnifies the effects of recognition and subsequently, the engagement of all users, power or casual. These principles help to package and promote recognition across the site so users interact and respond to it more often and to a greater extent.

Social ads are increasingly assuming mainstream status, as brands focus on devising newer ways to engage user attention. While traditional advertisers focus on targeting users with contextual ads wherein ads are served on the basis of content, in social advertising factors such as peer and social influences as well as recommendations are taken into consideration for targeting users. Rapid increase in social media activities in the recent years has driven advertisers to take up social ads.

The more we win, the more we want to play. Human beings are competitive animals, even when we claim not to be, and rare is the individual who doesn't take pleasure in winning. Gamblers understood this long before Bugsy Siegel broke ground in the Nevada desert. Both Las Vegas and the minds behind rewards and fidelity programs have spent decades capitalizing on the human need to win. The video game industry would vanish if it didn't continue to exploit our thirst for competition-and victory-with its aggressive approach to keeping games fresh, challenging, and in many cases, incredibly addictive. Along the same lines, social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn have employed "gamification" to engage their constituencies, keep them coming back for more, and perpetuate their business models with new users. As these tactics are proving to be invaluable in consumer-facing applications, companies are beginning to adopt gamification strategies for nongaming business activities like employee engagement, sales force motivation, and relationship building with partners. Far from being just another entry in the buzzword lexicon, gamification is changing the way companies do business.

Games are fun-well, unless you're playing with your super-competitive friend. And we all have one, don't we? Still, for the most part, games are entertaining-and that's why gamification has taken off as a technique to entice people to adopt various applications and processes. Gamification is defined as the use of game design techniques, game thinking, and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts. In other words, gamification gets people interested in something they otherwise wouldn't notice while also encouraging them to compete in game-like activities.

To some people, gamification - the method of applying game mechanics and philosophy to nongaming applications in the real world - is a dirty word. Video games, after all, are more than just their mechanics: Some have elaborate narratives, fantastic musical soundtracks, and appealing graphics that all come together to create a seamless experience. When you strip a game down solely to its mechanics, it can seem cheap, soulless, and even exploitative when it comes to businesses and corporations using gamification for their own interests. But gamification isn't about creating games. It's about enhancing user engagement, something game developers know how to do. And as witnessed at this year's recent Gamification Summit held in San Francisco, game designers are clearly interested in helping this new industry with its growing pains.