As a gamification company we are all about loyalty, which is why we put our heads together to come up with a special way to reward our most loyal visitors here at the BigDoor office. Just like we provide a platform that encourages users to return to your website, we wanted to encourage visitors to return to our office (because we love meeting new friends).

We are very excited to announce our first ever BigDoor Loyalty Special on Foursquare. Visitors who check-in at the BigDoor office 5 times, will unlock a $10.00 Amazon.com gift card (limited to the first 30 people). Stop by, say a quick ‘hello,’ grab a copy of our our popular “Gamification Goes Mainstream” infographic and check-in on Foursquare! Bonus points for sharing your check-in on Facebook or Twitter.

If you aren’t local, we hope we have a chance to meet you during one of the many events we attend throughout the year, or  set up some time to talk with us next time you are in Seattle.

Happy Check-ins!

 If you don’t know where we are located, you can find us in South Lake Union neighborhood on the first floor of the TechStars Seattle HQ:

511 Boren Ave. N.

Suite 100

Seattle, WA 98109

Posted in: BigDoor news, Blog, Gamification, Offers

Happy Monday! Here is some gamification news from the past week that you shouldn’t miss.

Green Gamification Scores Points GreenBiz 1/24/2012 Encouraging sustainability for the masses has been a challenge for many companies, activist groups and government agencies. The concept of ‘games for good’ has been slowly emerging, introducing gamification to a number of environmental causes in hopes of increasing user desire to become more sustainable and environmentally friendly. Both the Nissan Leaf and Ford Fusion hybrid have included dashboard ‘games’ that provide real time feedback to drivers to encourage them to shape driving habits that produce the best efficiency. Mario Herger, SAP Labs senior innovation strategist stated, “I haven’t seen a single sustainability application that didn’t use game mechanics”.

Gamification: You Got To Play To Win Business2Community 1/25/2012 Andrzej Marczewski over at Business2Community points out that it isn’t enough to understand game mechanics when creating gamification. In order to truly understand gamification and what makes games fun, one should play games. We totally agree with this at BigDoor and are proud to say our staff is full of gamers of all types!

The 12 Keys To Successful Gamification (Part 1) SocialFresh 1/26/2012 Carrie Peters, our Vice President of Marketing, wrote 12 key pieces to think about before implementing gamification on your site. If you are thinking about gamification, this is a great framework to use to make sure you are on the right track!

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification

Happy Friday – we thought we’d share this brilliant campaign that comes from our Swedish friends in Stockholm. The Stockholm County AIDS Prevention Program created a unique and gamified campaign to encourage teens to practice safe sex. The campaign kicked off by handing out 50,000 free condoms that included QR Codes.  Users then downloaded the app, filled out a profile and had fun! Participants uploaded their sex graph to the campaign site and were able to compare and search different personalities on the site. The creators of the campaign took the results from the gamified site to the streets with an incredible guerilla marketing campaign. Click below to see all the fun and the results. This is a tremendous example of how gamification really works to drive results across the life of a marketing campaign:

Posted in: Blog, Gamification, Success

Today’s post comes from our COO, Ring Nishioka. Below Ring reveals a little more about the culture here at BigDoor in his 2011 Startup Retrospective that recaps our recent company off-site. 

On Wednesday we had an all company off-site.  It was a great time to recap the previous year and look towards 2012 and where we’re headed as a company. As a startup we try to empower everyone to act and think like an owner. We all focus really hard on our product and our vision and try to keep the big corporation type stuff at a very minimum. We gave each group 5-7 minutes to do a rapid-fire recap of their wins and also losses this past year. Everyone did an excellent job with their retrospectives and our afternoon brainstorm was so productive that I’m really excited to see a lot of those ideas come to fruition!

One of our dev teams summed up things brilliantly in this tag cloud that was created from a series of developer chats. It’s evident from this visual the focus our company has on building great stuff and getting there quickly. I’ve always been proud of the work we do here and I’m even more proud to be surrounded by a world-class team.

-Ring Nishioka

Posted in: Blog, Development, Startups, Success

Happy Monday! After the snow storms in Seattle last week, and the power outages outside the city, keeping up on gamification news was probably not a priority. Thankfully, we have gathered some of our favorite news to help you catch up!

Gamification on the Rise in Marketing and Online Video  Kit Digital 1/21/2012 Kit Digital talks about the success of gamification in marketing and online video platforms. The gaming elements are successful because they “allow consumers and users to interact with the brand, compete with others, connect with their social networks, and control what they are experiencing,” says Christophor Rick of ReelSEO.

What is Gamification and How Does it Support Marketing? Social Fresh 1/19/2011 Still a bit confused about some of the terms and concepts behind gamification? Jason Keath at Social Fresh put together a great article on what gamification does and how it can help your marketing efforts.  He has some great examples to show the ways that gamification can help different businesses.

Gamification: Motivation and Engagement Business2Community 1/18/2012 Gamification is a great way to improve loyalty on your website. One of the key concepts to building loyalty through gamification comes from motivating and engaging existing users. While we often experience negative motivation in our everyday lives, “Gamification gives you the opportunity to motivate people in a much more positive way.”

Can online gaming influence a US presidential election? BBC  1/16/2012 Speaking of the power of motivating users, BBC took a look at the power of gamification to engage voters during elections. Gamification of elections, though not seen yet on a large scale, seems to be a win/win for both politicians and users. “The user gets instant gratification, a sense of involvement and participation and gratitude,” says Patrick Ruffini, the president of Engage. “The campaign gets data.” It will be interesting to see if we see gamification elements in this years presidential elections!

Posted in: Blog, Gamification, Loyalty

Today’s blog post is courtesy of our Web Designer, Chad Jacobsen. Some of you might be familiar with Chad’s recent work on the Gamification Goes Mainsteam Infographic – which by the way has now been shared more than 4,500 times!

Gamification has been changing the way we explore the Internet, so we decided to change how the Internet explores gamification. BigDoor has been posting our own news, announcements, and experiences in this marketplace since we were founded in 2009 on our company blog. With the launch of this redesigned blog, we’ve streamlined the most important elements to deliver up-to-date insight, strategy and updates – and we now deliver them all from this new destination. Here on mygamification.com you’ll find our latest posts and highlighted recent items across multiple social media outlets. If you’re not immediately satisfied (and hey – never settle), dig in to our searchable archives and tagged categories. You have almost three years’ worth of leading gamification platform experience at your fingertips.

We’ve adopted “Adelle” as our new header font-face. Its friendly slab serifs, rounded characters, and clean lines won our hearts. Our colors have been hand-picked to give you a highly legible, easily searchable and  eye-strain free tour through the newest insider gamification information. Aside from snazzy ribbons and gorgeous gradients we’re working full-time to make sure we become a go-to gamification destination. If you have suggestions or comments on how we can better fit this bill don’t hesitate to give us some feedback. Also be sure to catch all of our other postings via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our recently launched Google+  page. Fanfare aside, we’re glad you’ve visited.

-Chad

Posted in: Announcements, Blog, Gamification, Spotlight

Today in Seattle is quite unusual in that we have a couple of inches of snow. This kind of weather is pretty rare Seattle and it can become difficult to get around due to the lack of snowplows/salting and general winter readiness. While most BigDoor employees end up working from home, there are a few of us in the office today braving the snow. We hope everyone in Seattle is staying safe and warm!

Here is the front of our office building:

And a view up the street:

If you are in a part of the country that is used to much more snow, perhaps this video will help you understand our reactions a bit better.

Posted in: Blog

What do Kraft, McDonald’s, Sears, Boeing and Motorola all have in common? Of course they’re all huge brands but as Crain’s Chicago Business pointed out, they are also brands who are winning with their social media strategies and keeping their consumers engaged. In all, the article profiles ten brands and examines their campaigns based on each program’s Audience Strength, Content Sharing, Conversation Strength and Topical Alignment – as well as overall Sentiment. What’s important here is each brand really knows their audience and has created programs that are distinctly diverse from each other but are truly engaging their consumers. As we’ve noted  before, social media is one of the cornerstones to gamification. We applaud these brands on a job well done!

Posted in: Advertising, Blog, Loyalty, Social Media

Happy Monday! We are coming out of a snowy weekend here in Seattle and if any of you are familiar with snow in the Pacific Northwest, you might know how crazy it can be. Despite the snow, we dug around and found some of the best gamification news from the past week.

Google Turns Its Maps Feature into Old School Maze Game PSFK 1/13/2012 Google has announced that in February it will be launching a gamified version of Google Maps. The company released a 26 second teaser video which features a map cube that operates like an old school tilt maze game. The game will dispense points for visiting certain places on the map and was designed by agency B-Reel to encourage more use and exploration of Google Maps.

Citibank turns rewards into social currency Associated Press  1/9/2012 Citibank launched a new app on Facebook which links users reward points to their social network. The app, ThankYou Point Sharing allows sharing points among teams for group gifts, charity donations or other goals. The app tracks how many points have been collected for the cause and allows users to engage their social network to reach goals together.

Silas Lyons: The best discipline? A game Redding 1/15/2012 This is a great post on how one parent applied game principles to his parenting technique and its success in encouraging and discouraging behaviors with his child. If you want a great real world example of applying game mechanics to life, this is it.

Game Mechanics for Bloggers: Video Interview with Gamification Wizard Keith Smith Business2Community 1/15/2012 Our CEO Keith Smith sat down with Dino Dogan to discuss what gamification can do for your blog. The video covers everything from what users want, what websites fail at, and how to increase frequency and loyalty on your blog. If you run a blog, or want to learn more about how to create a successful blog, this is a great post and video to watch.

Posted in: Blog, Gamification, Loyalty, Social Media