trendpreneur

Designers in the games industry have long since known the value of microrewards — the entire massively multiplayer genre is built around the concept. The lowdown: keep your users striving towards the next goal, something that’s achievable and desirable but not too easy. If you follow the MMO approach, make sure there’s always a carrot around the next bend; always something to strive towards, and the illusion of freedom as to which goals you pursue.

Xbox Live gamerscores are a great example of how an achievement system can be built in as a fundamental part of a community, as well as adding longevity to products; gamers get points for various accomplishments within a game, which can be as simple as completing a level or as hard as getting a perfect score without dying. Encouraging gamers to have more points than their friends leads people to seek out easy achievements to pad their scores as well as hard achievements to show off. A title that might have been played through once suddenly gets played through three times just to get more points.

On the other hand, after a certain point, a user’s gamerscore becomes fairly meaningless. There’s nothing you can do with the points, and once your score is large enough to show you’re a hardcore gamer, there’s little motivation to squeezing every last point out of your games (unless you’re the completist type). So, a great start but lacking some longevity.
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Today marks Blog Action Day 2008, when thousands of blogs change the conversation of the world for a day.

The adage ‘make do and mend’ was a wartime anthem, and our grandparents and parents grew up with a thrifty outlook, making the most of what they had. Today, we overconsume, overspend and own far too much stuff — most of which we never even use. If we buy second-hand clothes, we’re being ‘vintage’; if we reuse items, we’re being ‘eco-friendly’. Yet it was all common sense to our grandparents.

How does this relate to businesses, and poverty around the world? Some of the principles of thrift that we’re so painstakingly re-learning are very relevant in the business world, especially if you’re starting on a shoestring. For example, you can source furniture, fittings and even computers from Freecycle; you’d be amazed at what people give away these days. Similarly, instead of sending old items to landfill, consider donating them — someone out there might need it. There are plenty of initiatives that, for example, recycle old mobile phones and send them to developing countries.

From the technology side of things, don’t neglect the power of open source, open communities and open beta. You can get a lot of things — from software nuts-and-bolts to honest feedback and thorough testing — without spending a penny. 

As mentioned in a previous post, you can look for ethical suppliers and buy ethically sourced and fair trade products, ensuring that your morning coffee actually benefits the people who grew it; plus there’s always Gift Aid, and similar ways of giving to charity through business that benefit both you and the charity.

Or you can get direct. Initiatives that let you donate to entrepreneurs in the developing world, who often don’t have anywhere near the help and support we are lucky enough to benefit from, are a great way of making a very personal difference. You can also use the power of the Internet to directly find and mentor people making their own way in the world.

Plus, there are plenty of business concepts you could develop that either fight poverty directly or help encourage this greener, pro-thrift attitude that’s on the rise. Set up clothing swap parties, start a local Freecycle branch, establish a mentoring network for businesses in developing countries, make an online swap shop where people exchange or donate unused licenses and beta keys, etc. 

It’s easy to get involved and easy to start making a change to poverty, even if it’s reducing your own overconsumption and shopping more ethically. If you’re interested in learning more, BlogActionDay has a great list of further reading on the subject.

Managing online identities can get confusing, especially for algorithms trying to understand who you really are…

I’ve had two articles kicking around in saved tabs for a while now: Home Bases and Outposts over at ProBlogger, and How to Build Your Online Brand from Mashable. Both posts are aimed at an audience wishing to extend their online ’self’, mostly for branding or business reasons; the overall message to anyone establishing a web presence is ‘don’t limit it to just a website’. Instead, reach out to different related social sites, build up profiles and relationships, find people to connect with — this extended network, spanning multiple social media outlets, will enable you to reach far further than a standalone website can.

Okay, but we knew all that already, right? That’s why we all have Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and so on and so forth. Whenever the latest hip Web 2.0 site goes into beta, we all scramble to sign up and become ‘friends’ with the great and the good. What’s interesting, to me, is what happens next… [...]

By relying on the power of the masses, popular news-ranking site Digg experienced immense growth, but with its meteoric rise to success came a number of problems.

This article over at Mashable is a really insightful, top-down piece on the problems suffered by Digg. As is inevitable in many Web 2.0 social-based business models, ‘the power of the masses’ all too easily becomes ‘the power of the few’ as the site’s top users, due to factors like influence and time spent on the site, end up with a lot of control. We’ve seen Digg users capitalise off this concept, too, by selling their accounts or charging high fees to submit guaranteed front-page links.

Of course, the advantage of Web 2.0 is that you can tweak and tune the complicated algorithms behind the scenes to try to compensate for this, although Digg’s attempts at doing so met with more criticism from users than praise. Fundamentally, people like being recognised, and being hailed as one of the “top 100″ users of a site is something many strive towards; Digg’s failure to provide many features users have clamoured for, while spending a long time releasing those they did provide, also helped antagonise its userbase.

So many sites revolve heavily around users as a way to get content, popularity, even to make their algorithms work; having a strong community is a true hallmark of a successful Web 2.0 venture, and a consistent userbase bringing in tons of pageviews, adding content every day and keeping the site running is crucial to many of these sites’ business models. So, learn from Digg; if your users are your lifeblood, be very very careful when tweaking the site, implementing bans, and dealing with users in general. Negative feedback about you can be incredibly powerful when it comes to social-driven sites, and a competitor that has a gentler touch with its customers might suddenly steal yours away.

On being eco-friendly, and how you can be a hippy capitalist by trying out a green business idea.

Wandering around with the October air’s sharp chill nibbling gently at ears and nose, kicking up leaves and smelling winter on its way, it’s hard to imagine life without being eco-friendly. The outdoors is a wonderful place; why wouldn’t we want to do our bit in preserving it?

And yet it’s not easy being green. Often we have to go out of our way to choose the environmentally sound option; we have to pay more, shop somewhere different, remember to bring our reusable bags, take trips to the recycling centre. Sticking to lofty principles in the face of effort is hard for many people, and they become ‘lapsed greenies’. I’ve found myself falling into this plenty of times; I’ll buy an eco-friendly brand if I can, but if it’s out of stock, I’ll go for the own brand instead of taking a trip to a different supermarket for one item.

However, there’s really no feeling that quite matches the self-satisfaction of trotting home with a rucksack and hessian bag full of ethical and planet-preserving products, passing smugly by parked cars and feeling both healthy and virtuous. It’s worth a try, and I’ll be looking at a few easy ways you can start on the path to green-ness soon – watch this space!

For today, let’s take a look at some ways your business can benefit from adopting a greener outlook.
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