Happy Friday! For many of us this was a short week, so you might have spent a lot of it trying to catch up from missing a day. If you lost track of gamification, social media and customer loyalty news don’t worry! You can catch up here.

Using Social Media To Manage Relationships Through The Sales Funnel Business2Community 9/6/2012 Every marketer and sales person is thinking about how to manage customer relationships effectively. This is a great article on how to use the power of social media to build brand affinity with customers in various stages of the sales funnel. The value of social media in building customer relationships validates the success of gamification as a great way for brands to encourage and manage their customers in a variety of ways, including through their social networks.

NFL.com Gets Gamified Just in Time for 2012 Kickoff Gamification.co 9/5/2012 We highlighted the NFL Fan Rewards program last week, but now that it has been up and running for a while, the gamification experts over at Gamification.co highlighted why this implementation is a huge step for gamification and brand loyalty programs. Of the program, Ivan Kuo says, “The NFL brand’s full commitment to a site-wide implementation must be one of the biggest gamification implementations on the web today.”

The 100-Second Guide to Gamification in Education Edudemic 9/2/2012 This infographic has been around for a while now, but in case you haven’t seen it, it is worth a look. Highlighting the potential for gamification in education, elements of gamification valuable to education as well as a few examples of existing programs makes this a densely packed infographic full of great information.

Social Media Marketing Encourages Customer Loyalty Through Interaction Social Focus by CG 8/30/2012 We talk a lot on this blog about building customer loyalty through social media and game mechanics, but it’s always great to hear someone else talking about the value of these tactics. There are some great tips in here (even if she doesn’t include gamification) and it’s worth a quick look if you are interested in brand loyalty and how to create loyal users.

Game design, gamification, game mechanics and games-based learning Doug Belshaw 9/2/2012 As the marketing specialist at BigDoor I spend a lot of time looking at the #Gamification tag on twitter. There has been a ton of activity talking about the Coursera Gamification course led by Kevin Werbach in the last few weeks. This is a great read by someone taking the course and thinking critically about how we interact with games and game design.

Best of Startup Day: Keith Smith on how to avoid failure Geekwire 9/6/2012 We know this isn’t really gamification news, but everyone has had to deal with failure in their lives at some point. Our CEO Keith Smith talked about how to avoid failure and how to deal with it when it’s unavoidable in his 2010 Startup Day talk. Some of his advice, “Be prepared to make sacrifices” “Build and develop the people that are going to be able to bail your ass out” and “Layout the problems that you have, identify those that can kill you, and work on the ones that can kill you the fastest”.