Social marketing site DailyFeats had partnered up with online job board Monster. DailyFeats allows users to redeem points they collect for certain personal development feats they accomplish (divided across the body, mind, home and community), choose among roughly 130,000 local rewards and connect with other people who have similar interests. According to the company, this model provides a new sort of advertising, which enables sponsoring brands to show that they ‘care’ about customers, and now it’s also targeting the job seekers demographic.

“Monster and DailyFeats share a passion for helping people improve their lives and doing well by doing good as a business, so our partnership is a natural,” said Janet Swaysland, Monster global SVP of communications and social media. “Looking for a job and planning career moves feel monumental to most people, and what helps is taking action even in small ways, and frequently.”

Monster sponsors several job-related feats, including “!yourpotential, “!newskills” and !updateresume.” Of course, the partnership with the largest player in the online job hunting space represents a huge feat on its own for DailyFeats, a young company which is now geared up to directly target job seekers, advertisers and expand its presence in the online space as well.

Reward systems are being applied more and more into new businesses, and one of the most notable reward-based trends going on right now is gamification.  M2 Research expects gamification to reach the $1.6 billion milestone by 2015. Despite the industry having generated only $100 million last year, firms such as Tap.me, Bunchball, and consultants like Rajat Paharia make their living by transforming websites into games and implementing game mechanics.

This is also the technique used by Foursquare and others, who present some sort of motivator such as badges and time limits – and even LinkedIn adopted this accelerated marketing trend. Individual examples of sites including Campusfood.com seem to indicate gamification works, but only with the proper resources at hand.  “It’s a neat trick—if it lasts. “People move in herd mentality,” says Tim Chang, partner at venture capital firm Norwest Ventures. “The backlash is going to come from people who try to slap [game features on a site] without any understanding of how to bake it into the full experience.”