Andrzej Marczewski

Gamification Expert, author, consultant and designer. I love to write about it, talk about it and bore people to death with it! If you really want to get to know me, check out the About page.

Stop trying to sell me stuff and just talk to me

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Comms Stop trying to sell me stuff and just talk to me

It amazes me how humans seem to have this need to turn any new form of communication into a sales and marketing tool.

Okay, so I suppose I know why, money. We all want to make money.

When post was invented, we got junk letters. When the phone was invented we got cold calls. Fax led to sales faxes and email gave us spam.

Now in the world of social communication we have the exact same thing. Make mention of a product name on twitter and you are instantly bombarded with rubbish.

However, it doesn’t have to be like this. I don’t know if I have ever met anyone who has fallen for “wow I got a free iPad just by clicking this link”, but I am sure some have. What I do know is that I personally have been encouraged along the way to buying something by companies that have struck up a conversation with me over twitter, not just told me they want to sell me something. Read More ...

Weight loss success and Social Media engagment

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For me to lose weight and for increased social media engagment, there are certain things that need to be done. Reduce a few things, increase a few and add a few others.

In the case of me and weight loss;

I need to reduce the fatty foods I eat, increase the amount of healthy stuff I eat and the amount exercise I do and add enthusiasm and dedication to the cause.

And so it is With social media.

Reduce the amount of information just pushed to the audience, increase the involvement of the target audience and add enthusiasm and dedication to the cause. Read More ...

HP Touchpad – what can the industry learn?

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Hp touchpad 370x229 HP Touchpad 8211 what can the industry learn

Unless you have no interest in technology (then why are you reading this?), you will have seen that HP have given up on the Touchpad and WebOS already. I think it was something like 49 days it lasted, one more than the Microsoft Kin. FHKVPNJZ8Q2H

This has prompted them to instigate a kind of Fire Sale of all Touchpads. In the US they went down to $99, selling out in hours. In the UK, amazingly, several retailers have followed suit, dropping the price to just £89 for the 16GB version and £115 for the 32GB version. This represents a drop of hundreds of pounds (£64 for the 32GB). Again, within hours they had all sold out. The websites of some of these retailers went down almost the minute they announced the price drop (dabs.co.uk for instance). Read More ...

Catching the Klout

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Catching the Klout Catching the Klout

The other day, I made a funny. Mark Schaefer even re-tweeted it to a decent response. Based on his comment about the Social Media metric site, Klout, I suggested that it kind of sounded like an STD.

On reflection, it occurred that this was not so far from the truth. Klout is a bit like a disease, once you have caught the bug it is hard to get rid of.

Klout is very important to Social Media types, it is one of the most trusted metrics available for measuring your influence, importance and success as a social media user. Based on secret squirrel like calculations, you are assigned a score, your Klout. At this moment in time mine is 46, down from 49 a few weeks ago. Read More ...

Reviews – Resetting the Value baseline

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[dc]A[/dc]s a person who runs a games review site, I am extremely fortunate and get to try out not just games, but gaming related hardware. Anyone who has seen my site will know there are quite a few headset reviews as well as reviews of gaming mice.

Just recently though, I have had a slight crisis over how I perceive value. One of the things people often criticise reviewers for, is the lack of connection they have to average buyers. I always thought that I was pretty good at this, but I may have slipped a little! Read More ...