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In Loyalty 3.0, Rajat Paharia reveals how you can use these same techniques to seize the competitive edge for your business.

Paharia shows you how to create a system powered by human motivation and digital technology that creates ongoing, persistent engagement among customers, employees, and partners. Loyalty 3.0 arms you with everything you need to know in order to build a loyalty and engagement program that drives a sustainable advantage for your business, including:

• The building blocks of motivation, big data, and gamification necessary for creating a powerful strategy that drives long-term loyalty
• Case studies from today’s most innovative companies that are already driving customer engagement, learning and skill development, and employee motivation with Loyalty 3.0 methods
• Step-by-step guidance on how to plan, design, build, and optimize your program

Cult Following

The psychology of cult followers is an interesting angle for AvaStar. More information can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_(religious_practice)

MAX WEBER’S TAKE ON CULT
Pioneering sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) found that cults based on charismatic leadership often follow the routinization of charisma. Sociologist Roy Wallis (1945–1990) argued that a cult is characterized by “epistemological individualism” by which he means that “the cult has no clear locus of final authority beyond the individual member.” Cults, according to Wallis, are generally described as “oriented towards the problems of individuals, loosely structured, tolerant, non-exclusive”, making “few demands on members”, without possessing a “clear distinction between members and non-members”, having “a rapid turnover of membership”, and are transient collectives with vague boundaries and fluctuating belief systems. Wallis asserts that cults emerge from the “cultic milieu”. In their book Theory of Religion, American sociologists Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge propose that the formation of cults can be explained through the rational choice theory. In The Future of Religion they comment “…in the beginning, all religions are obscure, tiny, deviant cult movements.”

In the early 1960s sociologist John Lofland lived with South Korean missionary Young Oon Kim and some of the first American Unification Church members in California and studied their activities in trying to promote their beliefs and win new members. Lofland noted that most of their efforts were ineffective and that most of the people who joined did so because of personal relationships with other members, often family relationships. Lofland published his findings in 1964 as a doctorial thesis entitled: “The World Savers: A Field Study of Cult Processes”, and in 1966 in book form by Prentice-Hall as Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith. It is considered to be one of the most important and widely cited studies of the process of religious conversion.

The Following | The TV Show

The TV series, The Following, has a nice hook that grabs audiences. Watch full episodes of the show here: http://www.fox.com/the-following/

In Hinduism, an avatar /ˈævətɑr/ (Hindustani: [əʋˈt̪aːr], from Sanskrit अवतार avatāra “descent”) is a deliberate descent of a deity to Earth, or a descent of the Supreme Being (e.g., Vishnu for Vaishnavites), and is mostly translated into English as “incarnation”, but more accurately as “appearance” or “manifestation”.

What is Avastar?

Avastar is a Blender Addon for Second Life Mesh Creators and Animators. We have created various functions to make the creation of content as easy as possible. Avastar supports the entire production chain starting from Modelling, rigging, weighting, up to single character and multi character animations.