The basic idea arises from how engaged people are when they play games, even if they're doing mundane things like running a farm or mining ore. If we make the world more like a game, the thinking goes, we can harness all that energy to solve real-world problems.

At Cagle Cartoons, we’re big fans of Twitter (you can follow me @dcagle), so I thought we’d mark the occasion by presenting some of the best cartoons about twitter to come through our Web site.

Rather than simply watch a movie, viewers can interact with characters on websites, experience the world in games, follow leads on Twitter, as well as participate in a vast array of other opportunities on various platforms. Additionally, transmedia will aggregate formerly fragmented audiences by uniting them in one “story world.”

Research by market watcher Datamonitor reveals that 60 per cent of the world's retail banks have no plans to use social media in the future.

Analysts warn that this widespread disregard for collaborative tools means many financial institutions risk losing out to more innovative competitors.

Read more: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2026773/banks-shunning-social-media#ixzz1HDz5GOtK
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Case law from 1924 means financial services companies can't publicly identify an individual who has an account with them – which makes responding to customer queries via quasi-public forums such as Twitter a legal minefield, according to Aden Davies, innovation technician at HSBC.

To be expected, the game is very well designed. From happy pixel citizens to cute tail-wagging dogs, CityVille keeps you emotionally glued to the screen in ways only a behavioral psychologist could understand.

For this post I've decided to deconstruct the "social sharing" of CityVille, levels 1-3. To grow their user base Zynga uses Facebook wall posts and target friend invitations through their "Goal/Reward/Share" system.

This isn't the holy grail; but rather a road-tested 'cheat sheet' for quick wins on your Facebook page. Be aware there's much more to running a brand page than implementing a handful of tactics but we hope that this presentation sparks new ideas for your own pages. We welcome feedback and suggestions.

t a more practical level I use a handy guide as a starting point to construct a business case for investing in social media. There are both tangible and intangible benefits. Intangibles are recorded under a column of Brand Awareness, Reputation and Customer Loyalty. Tangibles are recorded under a column label of Direct Revenue & Lower Operational Expense. Rows are labelled;

Likewise, the Beast was by no means the first project to use fictional websites or blogging as a made-up character. And it definitely wasn't the project that invented the technique of creating evidence of a story and playing it out as though it were really happening. The roots of this narrative style are older than the internet, older even than electricity, sunk deep in the tradition of espitolary novels — arguably invented in Spain in 1485.

Ways of measuring social media

Now, almost ten years later, this type of experience has evolved into something called an “Alternate Reality Game,” a term that, as far as I can tell, nobody likes. There continue to be endless debates over what exactly an ARG is, or what it is not, how to make them, how to sell them, how to make money from them, etc. In 2001, we had no terminology to describe these experiences and had to invent or appropriate our own. One of the terms that sprang up quickly – and which has survived in the lexicon – is “rabbit hole,” meaning an entry point into the experience where a player/follower discovers a seemingly innocuous detail in the real world and follows it into the fictional construct of the game.

Alternate reality games aren’t dead, but they have certainly evolved over the past year, as terms like “transmedia storytelling” and “gamification” have insinuated their way further into the developmental lexicon. In April, the Producer’s Guild of America added the “transmedia producer” credit to their Code of Credits, swiftly followed by the formation of the rival Transmedia Artists Guild in July, which aims to provide a support structure for creators. Prominent figures in the entertainment industry including Anthony Zuiker, Tim Kring, and Guillermo del Toro have all publicly committed themselves to transmedia production. Meanwhile, Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk on gamification as a means of leveraging our penchant for play for social good has reignited interest in serious games.

As you can see, Facebook and Twitter users are pretty similar: A majority of users are outside of the United States for both, about one third login using mobile devices, and the gender breakdown is about the same. But there are some key differences, too: Facebook users tend to be younger, Twitter users are more educated, and Facebook users are more likely to login everyday even if they don't update their statuses with the same frequency.

We have been pushing our "integrated social media" for a few years now – probably sooner than we should have. When we said 'integrated' a year ago generally we meant integrating marketing, communications and customer service. Implicit in that is a second interpretation of integrated, this time to mean the combination of owned, paid and earned media strategies and platforms. That's what tends to get the biggest impact in social media from marcom programs.

ften, our industry can appear complicated, and yearns for simplicity. One such technique to glean simplicity is to develop frameworks which the corporate social strategist can then apply to achieve their business goals. I’ve been working on this “ROI Pyramid” framework for a few months now, and am ready to share

A Facebook campaign which purports to fight child abuse by asking users to change their profile picture to that of their favourite cartoon character has run into controversy.
The campaign, which urges the image swap, has swept through the social networking site and boasts a group page which has nearly 90,000 fans.

he latest one seems to be changing your picture to a cartoon character to raise awareness of abuse against children. Seeing all these ‘happy cartoon characters’ around is supposed to remind us, I guess, of the fact that not all children have such happy wonderful existences. In case, you know, we somehow forgot that the human race can occasionally be absolute arseholes to those who least deserve it.

Last week on December 1st to support World AIDS Day, a small group of celebrities with millions of fans led by Alicia Keyes decided to sacrifice their digital lives to try and save real ones. The campaign, cleverly called "Digital Death" was supported by posters, online ads and a well branded microsite. The premise was simple: a group of celebrities forego using Twitter or Facebook until $1,000,000 in donations are raised for their cause. Anyone involved with the idea might have guessed that this would last for a day or two before the target was met. It has been five days and the donations still haven't even hit $300,000.

Part of the reason why we don’t hear more about compulsive behaviour in games is that the subject has been buried under a mountain of more serious (yet also ridiculous and unsupportable) assertions, such as the notion that games cause violence or rot young brains. The games industry has rightly opposed these neanderthal-like ideas, but unfortunately the battle with the media has created an adversarial relationship and caused gamers to become incredibly defensive – despite the fact that everyone who makes and plays games knows that in rare cases, they can lead to compulsive behaviour, but no one really wants to say or do anything about it.

Ad spending on social gaming increased 60% since 2009, according to eMarketer. No doubt advertisers have noticed that 56 million Americans are playing social games and that the branded virtual goods market is booming. But more than just social gaming’s growing popularity has gotten attention from advertisers. Social games also represent an environment that is largely conducive to advertising.

The hashtag #IAmSpartacus is a wonderful piece of social media play as thousands copied Chambers and sent it trending around the world. Who doesn’t like Spartacus and like to be reminded of the solidarity that his fellow gladiators showed as they all proclaimed “I am Spartacus”?

Over the past few years, because of a combination of Internet disintermediation, recession, and corporate blindness, the assembly line has been obliterated — economically, organizationally, and culturally. In the ad business, the relatively good life of 2007 is as remote as the whiskey highs of 1962. "Here we go again," moans Andy Nibley, the former CEO of ad agency Marsteller who, over the past decade, has also been the CEO of the digital arms of both Reuters and Universal Music. "First the news business, then the music business, then advertising. Is there any industry I get involved in that doesn't get destroyed by digital technology?"

While employees have always been the front line of customer interactions for brands, particularly those in the service industry, a number of factors of late have brought them more to the fore, including a more transparent and socially engaged society, a still-fragile economy where everyday value trumps aspirational brand attributes, and an ongoing lack of trust in corporate America and CEO spokespeople.