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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.

My latest book "Welcome to the Fifth Estate: How to Create and Sustain a Winning Social Media Strategy," discusses influencer theory in detail, including a section on the history of influencer theory on the social Web.

When beliefs change everything changes. With each year that passes one thing is certain, things will change. However the pace of change is no longer as usual and instead has become unusual. These unusual changes are influencing our beliefs. Whether for business or personal one change is certain, what used to be impossible is now possible.

Social methods and technologies mesh much better with independent learning, where the student is at the center of the learning experience (learning on their own as opposed to be being taught). They leverage a ring of social, academic, and motivational influences on their way to the goal of knowledge acquisition.

"At Reebok, the cushioning in a best-selling basketball shoe reflects technology borrowed from intravenous fluid bags. Semiconductor firm Qualcomm's revolutionary color display technology is rooted in the microstructures of the Morpho butterfly's wings. And at IDEO, developers designed a leak-proof water bottle using the technology from a shampoo bottle top. These examples show how so-called "peripheral" knowledge - that is, ideas from domains that are seemingly irrelevant to a given task - can influence breakthrough innovation. "The central idea of peripheral knowledge really resonates," says Wharton management professor Martine Haas. After all, who can't think of examples when ideas that seemed to bear almost no relation to a given problem paid off in some unexpected way? By bringing peripheral knowledge to core tasks, it is well known that work groups can recombine ideas in novel and useful ways. But the problem, Haas notes, is primarily one of attention: How do you get workers focused on a particular task to notice - and make use of - seemingly irrelevant information?"

As the fundamental flow of energy through the marketplace transforms from 'push' to 'pull,' organizations will need to become more active and participative social networkers.  New opportunities will show up first on the myriad of non-structured, social media sites that cater to people who want to collaborate to solve problems, start trends, influence the masses and build support.

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.

"Co-Creation allows companies to take the innovation process and turn it on its head. This methodology allows brands to take advantage of the growth of participatory culture and consumer influencers to navigate new market landscapes"

Gamification is the latest buzzword on the street. It ranked a keynote panel session at Enterprise 2.0 in November and it was one of two main topics discussed at the recent Institute for Social, Search and Mobile Marketing (ISSMM) K1 Executive Roundtable.  

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.

Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves-the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity, the capacity to learn from experience. Early results were promising. Computers were programmed to play checkers and chess, to prove theorems in geometry, to solve analogy puzzles from IQ tests, to recognize letters of the alphabet. Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers, declared in 1961: "We are on the threshold of an era that will be strongly influenced, and quite possibly dominated, by intelligent problem-solving machines."

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.

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.

Any aspect of your daily life - most importantly your projects, business, or career - can be helped by critical thinking. You just need to practice it constantly. What's Critical Thinking? Your brain thinks diversely. It can be affected by various factors too, plus the problem of relationships, for example, exactly what the heart says usually overwhelms exactly what the mind suggests.

What do Color, Quora, Hunch, Blippy, and StockTwits have in common? They are examples of companies that generate value for their users by leveraging the concept of the Interest Graph. The list also features some of the most promising startups right now, having raised close to $100 million in venture funding. Pure coincidence?