Awarding fans badges has also become a key component in the “gamification” of the online social media experiences. Social media companies such as Foursquare, GetGlue, and others have popularized badges as a way of rewarding, engaging and motivating users. In the context of online social media, badges can be considered “virtual goods” – digital artifacts that have a visual representation. Badges can be awarded to users who complete specific tasks or activities, or reach a certain score or level of participation, or they can simply be given away as means of spreading your marketing message.

Social Media Badge Applications:
Over the last year, we have built a number of badge applications for Facebook and Twitter applications that enable fans to promote their favorite artist with a dynamic music badges (see below) which get posted on their Facebook wall.

Newsfeed Badge “Player”:
Once posted on a fan’s Facebook newsfeed, viewers can interact with the dynamic music badges. Once expanded in a viewer’s newsfeed, the badge can play one or more tracks and allows the viewers to purchase the album or click by including links to iTunes and/or Amazon.

Comprehensive Campaign Component:
It is also possible to integrate badge marketing into other, more comprehensive marketing campaigns. For example, this Nirvana Nevermind 20th email subscription application adds a marketing badge to make it more interesting and interactive on both Facebook and Twitter.

Last year at Comic-con 2011 we helped video game publisher THQ organize a QR code-driven web-based scavenger hunt to promote the release of their upcoming Voltron game. The idea was simple (See video below): 5 standees with QR codes were stationed in different locations around Comic-con and fans were encouraged to find and scan all 5 QR codes in order to enter in the “Hunt to Form Voltron” Sweepstakes. The result was buzz and interest around Voltron at Comic.con 2011. PRNewser named it as part of “4 Comic-Con Efforts That Hit the Mark”, Turner PR’s “5 Ways Social Media has Changed Comic-Con 2011”, and great coverage in blogs like Mashables and others (see results section below).

Overview:
This diagram illustrates the basic flow of the scavenger hunt. We were asked by the THQ marketing team to put together a comprehensive flow diagram to help partners and stakeholders understand how the promotional campaign would work (this is just one of the graphic pieces from that flow chart).

Web-Based Application:
Participants would simply scan each of the 5 codes using their mobile phones to unlock a badge. The Metablocks Scavenger Hunt application would keep track of each unlocked badge by associating it with the participant phone or email address.  Participants were able to share their badges on Facebook and Twitter (this helped created viral buzz around the campaign).

Marketing and Promotion:
The key to the success of any Scavenger Hunt is promotion and THQ did a great job of promoting the campaign. As part of the marketing, we created an attractive poster that was used at Comic-con.  The scavenger hunt poster summarized the key aspects of the scavenger hunt and prizing elements. A version of this poster was also added as a tab on the Voltron Facebook page. At the show, the THQ team also handed out physical badges (see photos below) and postcards to promote the campaign.

We also created a scavenger hunt microsite to help promote the campaign.

THQ worked with Comic-con and had staff members promote the scavenger hunt at the show. This included creating and promoting the campaign via video content as well. This was distributed through their YouTube channel and other media outlets.

Results:
THQ summarizes some of the results in the infographic below (from this Behance post).

– Check out more photos here

The promotion generated a tremendous amount of buzz at Comic-con 2011 and was covered widely by bloggers including PopArtistsVille.com, Building Social Bridges, PRNewser, MovieViral, TurnerPR, and Mashables.   

Adding the ability to save & share your high score via Twitter or Facebook, is a great to make social gaming apps more viral.  We recently added a social media score board and sharing capabilities to the interactive video and game from We The Kings.

Facebook Leaderboard:
We worked with S-Curve’s video partners to integrate the sharing functionality directly into the We The Kings video/video game. Users who successfully played the game were able to share their high scores to the leader board via Twitter or Facebook. The sharing application forced players to share their score (through the social media channel of their choice) in order to get on the leaderboard. We also create an iframe version of the leaderboard that was accessible through the band’s website. You can try the game for yourself by clicking here.

Sharing Applications:
Below are the Twitter and Facebook version of the score sharing applications

SoundCloud is an online audio distribution platform which allows collaboration, promotion and distribution of audio recordings.  A number of our music label partners use SoundCloud to promote their artist tracks. All of our social media application platforms make it easy to integrate third-party widgets and API into both Facebook and Twitter applications. Our goal is to give our clients great flexibility when it comes to application deployment. To that end, we have made it very simple to incorporate SoundCloud widgets into all of our applications. Here are some examples below.

Tweematic (Twitter Wall) with SoundCloud widget:

Facebook Album Premiere Application with SoundCloud widget: