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Foursquare is a mobile application that is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide, and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things. Foursquare challenges you to explore your city and earn points, win mayorships, and unlock badges and coupons for trying new places and revisiting old favorites. This is a new way to take social to the next level by social scorecards and giving individuals rewards for their performance. This turns social play into social work. Foursquare is just the start; don’t be alarmed if Facebook starts their own version of a social scorecard integration.

I enjoyed reading the article   Enterprise 2.0: social scorecard and social media karma by Laurel Papworth, and liked the idea of bringing social into the work place. What if some aspects of work were turned into a game? What would happen if employees were rewarded by the social scoreboard, winning a badge or points for not using one sick day or writing a blog post for the company? Would this help drive better performance in a company if they could see where they rank against other employees in sick day usage, blog posts or other areas?

This also got me thinking about utilizing other social networks within the work area. For example, what if a specific Twitter account was used to announce internal messages such as the employees out of the office for the day or a specific task list? This may minimize the internal messages to your email inbox and allow updates in one source that others would follow. It is just another example of bringing social into the work atmosphere to enhance productivity, engagement and community for the company.

Foursquare has jumped out of the social network into utilizing a mobile app to reward users based on locations visited. Facebook may adapt a similar social scorecard in the future. As social networks are coming up with new uses, it makes us think out of the box a little more. Bringing social into the work atmosphere, is this something we will see in the future?