Gamifi-what?
If that's your reaction to the word "gamification," you're in the right place.
You might have heard the word thrown around a bit over the last
several months, but never really dug into what it is and what it means
for your marketing. That's where I think most of us stand ...
gamification is just one more thing to learn about, and maybe one day
when we have the time (or the tide of marketing forces us to), we'll
figure it out.
Well luckily, there's been some pioneering brands out there
experimenting with gamification, and lots of research coming out of it
that shows whether it's worth all of the hulabaloo. We're going to dive
into it all right now in this blog post, and figure out just what this
gamification thing is, whether it's useful, and how we can all use it in
our marketing. Ready? Let's do this.
What Is Gamification?
I've been trying to think of a way to explain what gamification is
without saying, "it's the process of gamifying something." But ...
that's what it is. It's turning something into a game -- for marketers,
it's turning your inbound marketing
into a game -- in order to achieve some desired end. Your audience
(customers, leads, fans, followers, readers, whoever) engage in some
kind of game so that they might win something, and in return, you get
something you want out of them, too.
Not to belittle, well,
all of us (we're all leads at some
point, aren't we?), but gamification is the marketer's equivalent of
turning a baby's spoon into a rocket ship so the baby has fun trying to
catch it, and you get your baby to eat the smashed peas. Everybody wins,
and the baby has a good time to boot.
Or if you prefer a real
business example, it's kind of like when we host a webinar and say whoever tweets the webinar's hashtag the most gets a free ticket to our next marketing conference
-- it taps into people's competitive spirit and drive to win, and gets
our content more exposure on Twitter. Again, a win-win scenario, and one
that's more creative than just asking someone, "Hey, can you tweet this
link?"
Make sense?
Yep! But How Can Real Companies Gamify?
Well there sure are a lot of brands experimenting with it. Let's
explore how some brands are using it -- B2B, B2C, ecommerce, we'll run
the gamut -- so you can see what successful implementation of
gamification looks like, and what kind of results it can drive. I think
you'll be surprised to see it's more substantial than just gaming some
more Facebook 'Likes' and comments!
David B. Reath of Knoxville Plastic Surgery delights current
customers. And prospective ones. Might as well throw Facebook EdgeRank
in there, too.
Dr. David Reath is a local plastic surgeon in Knoxville, TN who has
started a weekly game called Truth-O-Meter Tuesday on his company
Facebook page. How's it work? Each week, he posts a true-or-false
question onto his timeline, and asks people to answer whether they think
the answer is, well, true or false.
Wow, look at those comments. 107? Pretty impressive for a niche local
business! So, what happens next? The next day, the doc posts a video of
himself answering the question ...... as well as that week's contest winner! You see, each week Dr.
Reath randomly selects, out of everyone who answered correctly, someone
to win a $100 gift certificate for his practice (he sells products as
well as services). The winner could be a prospective
or current
customer, so this gamification of your typical Facebook post helps this
practice generate new customers, and keep past customers engaged. Plus,
since the contest requires very little action -- he's looking for a
"True" or "False," not an essay response -- engagement is high on these
posts. What does that mean? It means Facebeook's EdgeRank algorithm
perks up and thinks this brand is pumping out quality content, and that
post in particular should make its way into news feeds. Why, what a
lovely way to expand your social media reach!
My1login helps you help them help you.
My1login is an online password manager that lets you store your passwords
safely
so you can access them securely from anywhere on any device. Security
and convenience? Sounds great! Except that security and convenience are
kind of at odds with each other when it comes to password management. As
TechCrunch
put it, "remembering a dozen or so strong and unique passwords for all
of the products that we rely on or sign up to every day, is anything but
convenient. But then, so is a security breach." That's why my1login
relied on gamification to help their customers set secure passwords --
so they
and their customers could be successful.
They've started to dole out badges that increase users' storage limit
by completing tasks that reinforce good behavior -- essentially taking a
Pavlovian approach to their product to make sure their users are
successful ... making
them successful by extension. So the most
strong and/or unique passwords their users generate, for instance, the
more badges they can get. Pretty cool way to teach people the
right way to use your product or service!
Mint.com widens the top of the funnel, roping in future customers.
Mint.com is one of the earliest adopters of gamification. If you're a
user, you know (whether consciously or not) that they use gamification
at every turn to achieve that coveted "sticky" factor all product and
service providers strive for. But they also find ways to bring in new
leads with gamification -- leads that are really, really,
really top
of the funnel. Take a look at how Mint is investing in its future (and
its leads') through gamification, screenshot courtesy of Interaction Design.
This is an example of a quiz that is featured in a Mint computer game
targeted at teens. It asks questions about how they would react in real
world situations that relate to personal finance ... pretty direct tie
in to the ol' Mint platform! What's amazing about this, however, is that
Mint is
investing in leads. These kids are not going to be a
customer anytime soon. And Mint doesn't care. They're using gamification
to talk to a demographic that isn't now, but soon will, develop into
their target persona.
It makes all the sense in the world -- if a teenager is getting
personal financial advice from one source since as long as they can
remember, where
else would they turn when they're ready to buy
their first car, figure out how to pay off student loans, or take out
their first mortgage? Mint knows the answer to those questions, and is
using gamification to capitalize on it.
Forrester Research gamifies ... content?
I've been meaning to write this blog post about gamification for a
long time, and one of the reasons is because a while back in my Google
Reader, a post from Forrester Research came up with the title, "Read This Blog, Win A Prize!!!"
Uhhh, this is genius. First of all, anyone who reads Forrester on a
regular basis knows that this kind of tone -- not to mention three
exclamation marks -- is a little outside the realm of normal for them.
But you know what? It garnered a click. I bet it garnered lots of them.
The author of this post also carried the gamification metaphor through
the post (which was, of course, about gamification) by including this
gem at the bottom:
And in case you don't carry around a magnifying glass on you at all times, it reads:
"Oh, and for reading this you get 200* Peter Wannemacher Points!
Earn 500 Peter Wannemacher and you
get a high five; earn 1,000 for a signed picture. Subject to rules and
regulations. Please email pwannemacher@forrester.com for details &
redemptions."
The point? Gamification doesn't have to require fancy coding and an
onslaught of engineering and developer talent. Gamification can take
place right within your next blog post! Ask readers to look for
something -- a joke, an image, a clue, trivia, anything -- to keep them
reading to the point at which they take some sort of meaningful action
with your content.
HubSpot gives a peek behind the scenes, and everybody wins.
You didn't think you were going to escape this blog post without an
example of how HubSpot gamified, did you? Well, this example doesn't
include a pretty screenshot, but it's an example of gamification that
marketers, manager, business owners -- anyone, really -- can take
something away from.
Here at HubSpot, we have several metrics we use to measure customer
happiness; one of them is something called CHI -- our Customer Happiness
Index. It's one of the ways we know whether our inbound marketing
consultants are doing a good job at making our customers successful. You
might think that's the kind of metric consultants don't overtly tell
their customers about, because it's what they're being measured on -- I
mean, isn't that a conflict of interest or something?
I guess it could be ... if you don't have a gamification mindset,
that is. One of our consultants decided to gamify CHI with his
customers. How did he do it? He told them all, flat out, how they could
have higher CHI. "If you blog X times a week, your CHI will go up X
points, because the more customers blog, the better they do, and the
better customers do, the happier they are." Then -- and this is where
the gamification comes in -- he pit customers against each other to see
who could achieve the higher CHI. Before he knew it, customers were
tweeting at each other about how many blog posts they'd published, how
much their Twitter followings were growing, how much their site traffic
was increasing ... being awesome at inbound marketing was a competition!
And a fun one, at that. Where consultants get high CHI scores, and
customers make tons of money. That's a pretty sweet game.
Source: http://blog.hubspot.com
I “met” Prof.
Werback via the online course of Gamification delivered by Coursera. Indeed it
was an “experience”!!! He really managed to “pass” his rich knowledge to me and
make me addicted to his six weeks lessons. He has a very clear framework about
Gamification and using engagement loops he leads the journey towards
Gamification expertise and mastery successfully. 
