Leveling Up – A classic game mechanic best known in role playing games. You perform tasks and accumulate experience points, etc. towards raising your level. With the increase in level comes added benefits such as the ability to jump higher, a new weapon, or new content.

We’ve seen this concept manifest in the real world in one of the oldest promotional ideas around: customer loyalty programs. Buy X amount of things and become a Gold Member! Or accumulate X amount of points from purchases and get a free Gizmo!

The issue here is that there’s usually a big disconnect between the effort and the reward.

The first problem is that the rewards are usually so few and far in between that they don’t provide any real incentive. If I just enrolled in a loyalty program at a beer store and I have to spend $200 to get a free glass, what kind of incentive is that? When the prize has no real relation to the amount of time or money spent, then it becomes more of a minor bonus than incentive to buy/do more.

Take a game like Call of Duty: Black Ops as an example of how things should be. In the beginning the leveling up comes fast and (relatively) easy. The rewards are minor, but they’re coming so quickly it doesn’t matter. As you level up, the rewards become fewer and farther in between but much more substantial.

Keeping with the beer store example. Why not give out a key chain bottle opener after $10, a free beer after $20, a cooler bag after $60, etc.

The second problem is that most of the customer loyalty programs that exist are based on one behavior: purchases. The modern purchase cycle has become so connected that there is now much more to reward customers for, beyond the simple buying of your product or service.

Yes, rewards for direct referrals have been around for a while, but what about indirect referrals? Why not reward customers for blogging about their great experience? Wouldn’t it be nice, as a brand, to thank your customers (with tangible rewards) for showing off your great sandwiches via Twitpic or Posting a Facebook gallery of your jewelry?

Badges are nice as a study in psychology, but when it comes to creating memorable experiences and engaging people, we can do so much more.

So obviously I haven’t been putting blog posts together recently. And that’s okay. I’m taking a little break from the “long form” stuff.

I definitely subscribe to the idea that you can’t listen very well if you’re always talking, and I’ve been wanting to listen and read more. Pick up new ideas, get some fresh perspective, etc.

However, you can still find me on Twitter and catch up with my tubmlr for short-form stuff, links, and anything else I find interesting.

In answering a question I had been thinking about, here’s a fun little game of connect the dots.

A German man with a typewriter is responsible for the entire existence of URL shorteners. Here’s how:

25 years ago, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at typewriter in his home in Germany and typed out sentences and questions. Eventually he realized that most lines ended up with less than 160 characters. He decided that this number, 160, was “sufficient” for text based communication.

Hillebrand also happened to be the chairman of the nonvoice services committee in the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM). He pushed for, and got, the 160 character limit that we still use for SMS messaging on phones today. Unintentional Consequences

Moving forward a few years, a little site called Twitter decided that it was going to set it’s status update message size at 140 characters. Why? Because they wanted users to be able to see status updates on their cell phones via text message. Therefore to get the users name plus their message, they had to cut the length.

As Twitter grew, it’s purpose, focus, and usage changed to the point where sharing links became a major element of the service. However, many URLs were too long to include in tweets with any type of context.

Enter services like bit.ly or tinyurl which exist to substitute long URLs with short ones, making it possible to include in tweets.

And there you go. German man with typewriter to SMS character limit to Twitter character limit to bit.ly.

Here’s the original article from 5/09 in the L.A. Times with more background, etc.

I was going to be a corporate lawyer.

Honestly. I had taken the LSATs, was all set for law school and was about to get my business degree. It was go time. But then I bought a book.

Specifically, I bought Small is the New Big, by Seth Godin. If you haven’t read it (you really should), SITNB is basically collected posts from Seth’s blog, but printed and bound. For me though, it was the entryway into the world of blogging, social media, and everything digital.

Once I realized that you could get the same kind of stuff out of Seth for free on his blog, I was hooked. I started to realize the business possibilities of social media (this was almost 4 years ago) so I started my own blog and started reading others with that level of excitement that’s always present when you find something you truly are into.

Over the years, my interest in purely talking about social media has waned. However, this hasn’t diminished my interest in digital, just shifted it’s focus. I began to realize that solely focusing on “social media” as a thing existing distinct and separate in behaviors and interactions, both on and offline, was myopic. Just as I was going through this shift in thinking, I somehow stumbled upon the blog of (brilliant and super nice, as well) Faris Yakob. Over the course of a few days I must have read more than half of his entire catalog of posts. I began to realize that strategy/planning was where more of my interests lied now. I found more blogs from strategists and have been voraciously consuming that type of content for months now.

These two events, purchasing Small Is The New Big by Seth Godin, and chancing upon Faris’ blog were my pivot points. They essentially changed my life by opening up entire areas of interest to me. In my instance, this happened to be via a few smart people, but I realized that brands and events can have the same effect.

Brands like Harley-Davidson, Apple, Fender, and Ford do this to people. Things like Halo, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and LOST do it too. So does getting a set of chef’s knives, your first lacrosse stick, or a book on how to code HTML.

Pivot points change us, move us in a new direction. It doesn’t matter if it’s a book, brand, or friend, we need to realize that simple things can have profound effects on our lives.

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a few minutes and go check out The Wilderness Downtown. It’s an interactive film/music video by Chris Milk featuring the Arcade Fire’s “We Used To Wait”.

It’s also the coolest thing you’ve seen in a browser in a long time.

What Milk, Arcade Fire, and a team at Google have done is create something that blurs the line between tech-demo and art. It’s really a little of both. Not only does it showcase the power of technology in creative hands, but it shows people that staying on top of new developments in markup and it’s capabilities is for more than just code-monkeys.

However, there is one area where this otherwise awesome effort falls a little short: connectedness.

If I want to learn more about Arcade Fire, where are my links to Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.? Where’s the link to the iTunes store to check out more of their stuff?

If I want to learn more about HTML5, where are the links to code repositories, tutorials, and discussion forums where coders are exploring all of the new possibilities?

I know this wasn’t built to be a marketing vehicle, per se, but by not providing any ability for users to follow up or learn more they’re really missing out on a great opportunity to capture some good vibes.

So this was making the rounds this afternoon. Looks to have originally popped up on The Sell! Sell! Blog. It’s a must read. I’ll catch up with you when you’re done.

With all the social media, engagement, crowdsourcing, transmedia, and UGC sentiment flying around lately, sometimes we forget that people don’t want to have to do anything with our brands or ads. It reminds me of Your Brand Is Not My Friend but to a higher degree. Sometimes a good value prop is all we really need.

This (fictional?) situation, along with a lot of what is being pushed lately, strikes me as one of those “if you have to ask, you’ll never know” scenarios, in that if you’re trying to manufacture brand interaction, you’ll never get it. It shouldn’t be our job to beg, borrow, and steal people’s attention and time. Instead we should focus on creating an environment that encourages, facilitates, and highlights that kind of engagement.

Kid build a room full of furniture out of your FedEx boxes? Send him more and see what he can do. Start a contest and buy actual furniture for whoever builds the best FedEx box furniture.

Bros Icing Bros? Let them run with it but start a campaign encouraging people to be Brosponsible ™.

You get the idea. Now leave me alone…for some reason, all I can think about it sausages…

I could summarize them, but that might take the fun out of reading them. All these posts are absolutely worth your time.

All strategies are note equal – From The Head of Zeus Jones

Cutting Clippings and Musings on The Same – Talent imitates, genius steals (Faris Yakob)

The Ethics of Online Secrecy – The Blog of Mike Arauz

Designing for failure – Alexander Chung

56 Sage Street: the story behind the game – BBH Labs

So I’m getting into Making Ideas Happen by Behance’s Scott Belsky. It’s a great book so far, and it’s already got me thinking about what it is that makes “doing something” as difficult as it is.

It seems like there are an endless amount of “thinkers”, people who simply wax theoretical on things but never actually follow through. To the same degree, there are plenty of “doers” as well, people who exist solely to execute the vision of others. What we really need more of, and what I’m endeavoring to be, is “thinkers-and-doers”, a hybrid that not only has the creative ability and long-term vision, but also the drive and follow through to bring those ideas to fruition.

I started thinking about all the things that keep me from following through on my ideas, and over time, most of them could be systematically discounted as “not really great reasons”. Then I got to thinking about what would be some legitimate reasons for not acting.

Here’s two:

1) It could hurt someone - Doesn’t matter if it’s physically, emotionally, or monetarily. If you’re idea/action could lead to harm, you better think it through. Now I’m not talking about “bucking the status quo” or “fighting the man….man” but things like “I’m going to run this investment pool with a Ouija board!” or “I’m pretty sure I can jump this motorcycle over that preschool playground!” – you see the difference.

2) You can’t adjust/amend/iterate – If your idea is being presented, ran, launched (physically), or otherwise needs to be in a final form, running with anything other than a complete version would be shortchanging it. Things like paintings, rockets, pilot episodes, etc. need to be ready before they go.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against action, in fact I’m all for it now, but sometimes you have to know when to take a little more time to make sure it’s right.

Those are just two that I came up with, do you have any more?