Want to show your support to your favourite brand, cause or event? Wish to reward your frequent customers and increase brand loyalty? Find a way to endorse your friends and colleaques?

Don’t worry, there’s a badge for that!

What Foursquare and Gowalla didn’t know, when they first created badges to reward user check-ins, was the massive snowball effect of badges they were about to start, now swiping over the social web like there’s no tomorrow. Everybody’s gotta have one.

Brand Awareness and Loyalty

As Loic Le Meur,  founder and CEO of Seesmic, reminds us, building your online brand is NOT about you, it’s about highlighting others. Badges work as a great vehicle for endorsing and highlighting others, while at the same time strengthening ones own online presence and brand.

Brands are quickly catching up on combining marketing efforts with game mechanics and social networking. One of the interesting companies in the space helping brands to achieve their goals is GetGlue, a social network for entertainment. Users can check-in and rate tv shows, movies, music and books to discover new favorites, see what friends are into, earn badges and even get a free copy of the sticker sent in the mail, for free. In September, over 500 000 users had created 10 million new unique ratings and check-ins, the official and authorized badges coming from major brands like HBO, FOX, Showtime and PBS.

As GetGlue explains it: It’s about emotions, enabling users connecting with the content. Check-in to Mad Men, anyone?

Connect with content, reward engagement and frequent users is also something CNN iReport aims to do by launching “On the campaign trail” badge for those participating in the iReport Election Challenge. More badges and surprises are reported to be released.

Even Q&A service Mahalo Answers has hopped on the train of badges, finding them a great and complementary way to engage and reward its frequent users.

Besides from encouraging user activity and increasing brand loyalty, badges can also be a way to create scarcity around, as to increase search engine ranking, of a brand, company or an organization.

Basno is a new platform that offers authenticated badges either to be sold or given away to users. With help of unique serial numbers, embedding unique invisible watermarks, and creating 2d bar codes for each instance of any badge on the platform, Basno aims to increase the value of digital goods through limited issuance of badges. The badges are stored in a vault, but can be shown on all major social networks.

Social recruiting

As many other industries, recruiting is also being disrupted by the social web, offering new ways to find, refer and match talent with job openings. In addition to competition from professional social network LinkedIn, now listing over 70 million members and one million company profiles, there is an increasing number of niched services like Endorse, helping people connect through friendly recommendations, and Twitter stream filling up with hashtags hunting for talent. How the yet to be launched Work Market, a marketplace for employers and workers with promise to make work work, is to disrupt the recruitment business, remains to be seen.

Founders of Estonian Emp.ly, a social recruiting service expanding the reach of job postings via social networks, are also creators of Talentag, your social CV online. Talentag makes it easy for people in your network, professional or private, to give you career boosting kudos in form of badges and thumbs up. By answering questions and giving thumbs up, or down, a chart with personality traits, such as cheerful, friendly, sophisticated, trustworthy, or giving, gets added to ones profile. Fast, easy, and yes, a playful way to endorse someone in your network. All endorsements can then be displayed and distributed on Facebook. Sign up with your Facebook or Linkedin account and see whether you also are to be endorsed as a Social Media Rockstar?

Talentag also offers event organizers a possibility to let event participants claim and display event badges on their profiles. A quick and visual way of listing my past events from Plancast or LinkedIn, for example.

As a good general rule of thumb when designing to include any type of social endorsements in your service, neither badges nor recommendations are simply just to be given away, they are to be earned.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She is also a mentor for startups at Seedcamp. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

by Michelle Lentz

Seesmic Desktop launched in previews yesterday. I just got my hands on it and I love it. Seesmic Desktop was created by the same folks who created Twhirl, and seems poised to give Tweetdeck a run for its money.

I know, I installed Nambu the other day and was thrilled too. I’m fickle. Not only is this a bit more stable than Nambu, it gives me the same features but includes those bonus things I liked so much in Twhirl. Seesmic listened closely to the Twhirl users and incorporated what we asked for: columns, groups, and one Home column, and search.

Seesmic Desktop is an Adobe Air app, so it will run on both your PC and your Mac. Like Tweetdeck, you can have multiple columns. But like Twhirl – and Nambu – you can condense to one column plus a list. Each item in the list can be displayed as its own column and the columns can be arranged via drag and drop. Twhirl takes the one column a bit further than Nambu, however, integrating both of my Twitter accounts into the same Home column, which is nice. It’s like having one inbox for all of your email accounts.

Of course, you still have the option to view multiple Twitter accounts separately, whether in the single column format or in multiple columns. You can filter by Userlists (Seesmic’s name for groups). In the screen capture above, I’ve created a Userlist for my Girlfriends, so I can see what they’re up to at any given point without missing anything. You can also create and save searches. A search displays in a separate column that pops open and closed with a single click.

URLs can be shortened using bit.ly, the new digg.com shortener, and is.gd. Photos can be shared with just drag and drop and then sent to TwitPic.There’s even an option to pull a photo from your webcam.

Common little things about this make me happy. For instance, I set the notifications (like in Twhirl) to only appear when I receive a direct message or Reply/Mention. I’ll also only hear a sound when those things happen.

Currently, Seesmic Desktop only supports Twitter. Do one thing and do it well, I suppose. That said, Twhirl supports FriendFeed, so that could possibly be in the future. I also recently wrote about the Seesmic Facebook client, which I suspect may also get integrated into this application. But this is still a preview release, so it smartly sticks to its objective of excelling at Twitter. I also wish it had threaded replies like Nambu, but again, this is a preview version.

What about Twhirl? VentureBeat noted that someone in the audience at the release inquired after Twhirl support:

Also interesting is that when a person in the audience asked if Seesmic would continue to support Twhirl as a separate product, LeMeur clearly didn’t want to come out and say it, but it would seem that Seesmic Desktop will be the area of focus going forward. He noted that Twhirl is hard to say, hard to spell and that it doesn’t own the “.com” domain for it.

Sign up for Team Seesmic to access the Seesmic Desktop Preview.

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

by Marissa Louie

ZOMG Our angel and VC friends have done it again. They’d rather roast our insides than roast the turkey. Turn that portfolio company from turkey to turnkey. Joke’s on us, VC billionaires.

Purchaze

-1- Paul Kedrosky: Somali Pirates and TARP

*PAULSON: TARP PIRATE EQUITY IS AN `INVESTMENT,’ WILL PAY OFF.”

-2- Brad Feld: Take Responsibility for your Actions

“I tried calling 1-800-BAIL-OUT to see if I was missing something.  They wouldn’t help me…”

-3- Joi Ito: Loic for a Day

“I thought about selling Loic on eBay, but I realized that would be too selfish.”

-4- Jeff Nolan: I am a Bond

“4 basic types of bonds, Schoolhouse Rock style.”

-5- Fred Wilson: Do You Ever Do Any Real Work?

“Slowly but surely people are wising up to the fact that blogging is work and its a very valuable use of my time.”

-6- James D. Robinson IV: The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

“VC’s are too arrogant and the pitching process is too inefficient.”

-7- Daniel Cohen: New TeeVee Live!

“”The best part was his reply to a question on how Fred changed his life: “I get attention from the senior girls in school, which is cool”. Excellent.”

-8- Josh Kopelman: Road Trip

“Chris Fralic, organized a two-day road trip to the four largest advertising agencies in country.  We rented a bus.”

-9- Bing Gordon: Looking for Killer Apps

“Look how smart I am (how dumb I am not!); I got this new (insert hardware model here) and it can do this!!!”

-10- Mark Cuban: Proud to be an American

“I can tell you that no entrepreneur or CEO worth a damn in this country gives up or works less because of a change in tax policy.”

**Honorable mention**

-11- David Cowan: It’s a Smule World After All

When Jeff’s team isn’t cleaning out Bessemer’s kitchen, they’re churning out ass-kicking Chuck-on-iPhone (CHiP) apps.

**Your turn**

Suggest funny angel and VC blog posts through Turkey Day (you know these are going to be ridiculous!)

Marissa Louie is the Founder and CEO of AD Village (http://ad-village.com) which helps bloggers monetize and advertisers optimize. If you liked this post, you might also like You Know You’re a Young Female Entrepreneur When…, 10+ Funniest Angel and VC Blog Posts October 2008, and The Future Co-existence of PR and Advertising. She gets esoteric on Twitter, where she announces Entrepreneur 2 Entrepreneur Office Hours and broadcasts her entrepreneurial journey.