Internet Marketing, Gamificaiton and Social Process

Emerging Social Process

Came home early today to work on writing the gamification engine for Cure Cancer Starter (teased pieces of what I am working on to Design Revolution). Since this task is the very definition of what Atlantic BT's Founder Jon Jordan calls an invading Russia in the winter task I started trying to cut it down into manageable pieces by reading blog posts, case studies and white papers.

The all sucked (pretty much) because most white papers and case studies don’t tell stories. The gamification websites I visited will remain nameless, but if your nurturing systems don't suck too you know who you are LOL. I couldn’t find a website using a social share widget. Social share widgets tell you friends who’ve visited or read what you are thinking about reading.

SOCIAL media marketing isn’t very inline to the sales process yet. Watch Gary Vaynerchuk explain how he used social media as a fishing pole to create a $60M empire in my Riffing With The Big Dog post. Now read this excellent guest blog on Atlantic BT about the Great Social Media Customer Service Race where major brands produced epic fails on social media.

Gary understood proactive service beats all in today’s Thank You Economy (the name of his book). Major brands aren’t answering their social "mail" even if URGENT is marked on it. To ignore social media is to ignore a ringing phone. Who does that?

Toward A Social Process
This post is about how I expected to come home and read, read and read and then write. I ended up emailing, Tweeting and using Facebook. At first I felt like I had to stop all the play time and buckle down then I realized social is how I work now. Yes I write, like now, with everything off. I’ve been writing Cure Cancer Starter’s Functional Specifications for about 5 days and am about ready to jump off the roof.

The realization our creative process is social is a good one. I feel less guilty, feel more connected and supported. Social is and isn’t a “game”. It is a game in that we are quickly able to compare our scorecards and see growth. It isn’t a game because social media is so pervasive it is the process now.

I think I saw this idea when I wrote Social Media Marketing The Most Valuable ROI, but I focused on changes in individual psychology (mine lol). Social media marketing's conditioning is seeping deeper. Call this trend the emergence of Émile Durkheim’s collective consciousness or Jung’s synchronicity, or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's FLOW (great book) or Marty’s last frayed nerve (lol). One of the many lessons having the Big C taught was when a new you emerges don’t fight it surf it :).