Happy Monday! There was plenty of news to take a look at this week, from a study on brand loyalty to recaps from Gamification Summit 2012. If you missed out on any gamification news last week, you can catch up on our favorite links below.

Study: Loyal Customers Are More Effective Advocates in Social Marketing CMO.com 6/21/2012 We like to talk a lot about increasing loyalty and creating loyal customers, but we often don’t talk about the benefits associated with having a loyal customer base. This study takes a look at the effect of loyal customers on brand sales and marketing. The benefits seem to come from every angle; loyal customers who authentically recommended a brand had a larger impact than those who did not. Additionally, “advocacy programs focusing on loyal customers increased sales by an average of eight percent.” These are great reasons to focus on creating customer loyalty, and gamification is a great way to do that.

Gamification: It’s Like Playing Diablo For Everything You Do Tom’s Guide 6/23/2012 While we don’t necessarily agree that gamification is the same as playing Diablo (but boy do we wish it was!), this article has a ton of great content on what gamification really means, and why it works so well. One of the benefits of gamification is the strong connection to analytics, allowing publishers to “expose users not by what they claim they do, but what they actually do.”

Gamification Day Two: Engage Your Audience, Your Kids and Your Brain Fora.tv 6/22/2012 Fora.tv did a great job covering the 2012 Gamification Summit. In addition to providing videos of all the great speakers, they also ran some summaries during the event. We particularly liked this one highlighting Chamillionaire and his challenges in fan engagement. He talks about what he wanted and how he found the solution with a BigDoor Gamified Rewards Program. You can watch the full video of his talk on Fora.tv as well.

The Chevy Volt reinforces real world gamification Vator News 6/19/2012 We talked a bit about the gamification elements in the new Chevy Volt before, but haven’t seen to many people talk about the experience since the Volt’s release. This is a great look at how a regular driver can be influenced by the game elements on the Volt’s dashboard.

Keith Smith’s Gamification Deck at Vator Spark Vator News 6/20/2012 Vator kindly uploaded Keith Smith’s deck from his talk on monetization at Vator Spark a few months back. Keith focused on how gamification can be monetized and what is important for a successful gamification solution. If you are interested, or you missed the updates from the Vator Spark conference, this is a great chance to catch up.