Happy Tuesday! We hope everyone had a chance to enjoy Memorial Day in some way. With all the events happening over the weekend, be sure to catch up on gamification news below.

Catalysts for Change: How to Gamify a Path Out of Poverty Core 77 5/22/2012 There have been more and more examples of games for social change popping up lately, but Catalysts for Change did an excellent job focusing on the issue of poverty. Using the Foresight Engine, a game platform designed by Jane McGonigal, they created a virtual card game to raise awareness and promote change for poverty. The game focused on harnessing the power of social networks across the internet and set a new record for participants in a Foresight Engine game.

15 Ways to Integrate Gamification Features into Your SEO Strategy SEOGadget 5/21/2012 We highlighted Jeff Coughlan’s talk at SAScon last week in the gamification news. Richard Baxter of SEOGadget was also a speaker and discussed how gamification and SEO can work together. Here, he presents 15 ways that gamification can be integrated into SEO strategies including; integrating a leaderboard, allowing users status, incentivizing completeness, and motivating users to link and share content.

Don’t Love Games? Step Away From the Gamification Business2Community 5/21/2012 While this might seem a bit obvious, we couldn’t agree more. A love and knowledge of games is really important in developing gamification solutions that are fun and engaging. Knowing what keeps users coming back for more is the core of gamification and being a gamer yourself is the best way to understand that feeling.

How to Get Customers Using Your Online Rewards Entrepreneur 5/24/2012 Gamification expert Gabe Zichermann talks about the keys to rewarding users. Relevant rewards that give users status, access, power and stuff are key to encouraging users to participate in your loyalty program. If you are interested in how these rewards motivate users, you can check out our post on the topic here.

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Gaming, Loyalty

In true startup form, we love to embrace our geekiness on a daily basis, but today is special for a number of reasons. Not only are we celebrating the unveiling of our awesome new logo, but it’s also Geek Pride Day! In honor of Geek Pride Day we took our geekiness up a notch (or two). Our employees are all rocking their favorite geeky shirts, we are kicking off the weekend with some awesome Star Wars trivia, Portal themed cocktails, and munching on some delicious cupcakes from The Yellow Leaf Cupcake Company (because cupcakes are the official geek food of BigDoor).

If you didn’t know, Geek Pride Day is celebrated on May 25^th  and pays tribute to the first Star Wars movie that was released on May 25, 1977. It is also Towel day, a tribute from Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Last but not least, Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novel Discworld celebrates May 25th as the day for survivors of the People’s Revolution.

If you are letting your Geek Pride show today tell us about it in the comments or on twitter hashtag: #geekprideday!

Posted in: Blog, Startups

Happy Friday! This week’s BigDoor Friday Pinboard features a few fun things – most notably our new logo!  We also found quite a few great Startup infographics this week and we wanted to share them on our weekly board.

Posted in: Blog, Gamification

We are very proud to be sponsoring Gamification Summit 2012 in San Francisco this coming June 20-21. For an industry that only popped up a few years ago, we still can’t believe the recognition and support that gamification has all over the world.

At this years conference, Gamification Summit 2012 has announced the first ever GAwards: Best in Gamification Awards to recognize the best gamification applications and companies in the past year. Categories include; greatest impact, social good, enterprise, and consumer facing, among others.

We are very happy to be nominated along with some of our awesome clients, but we need your votes!

It’s easy to do, just visit the links below, login to List.ly using your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts and click the little thumbs up button on the right hand side of the nomination.

GAwards: Gamification Greatest Impact Award – BigDoor

GAwards: Best Consumer Facing Use of Gamification – Big Brother Sweden AND MLB

GAwards: Best Use of Gamification in the Enterprise (HR) – Dell

GAwards: Best Use of Gamification in Social Good – Nickelodeon

Feel free to share with your friends as well! We appreciate all of the support from clients and fans!

Posted in: Awards, Blog, Gamification

The April 2012 launch of BigDoor’s Gamified Rewards Program arrived with the recognition that both our product design and the marketplace we serve have evolved substantially. With this evolution, we sensed an opportunity to update our identity to better reflect how we value simplicity, reliability, and versatility for a widening range of partners.

The company has been in business since 2009, so the current logo has had a solid timeframe within which to establish itself on the website, in our admin tools, business cards, social media accounts, printed collateral, and various and sundry expected places. Because of this legacy, we did not want to radically reshape, or even re-color, what we’re using today (we love that big, bold red-and-black combo), but several qualities to strive for came to mind: sleek, approachable, trustworthy, versatile, and strong. Added complexity is an unwanted item for any startup, so we also wanted to keep this redesign process fast-paced (but not rushed).

The red “door” in the mark visually suggests potential, possibilities and still appeals to us.

Even though quite a few variants of open/ajar doors came to mind, our conclusion was to illustrate a literally more straightforward perspective on this shape.

We also wanted to ensure the logo mark (graphic) can be displayed independently. This is an important requirement for social media account avatars, web favicons, and optimal flexibility in printed usage, too. But we also wanted that shape to have a more distinctive silhouette.

And with that, we arrive here:

It represents a progression from our original position (much like our business itself), conveys growth and depth, and provides easy visual association with the company name. We hope it conveys to you those qualities we wanted to communicate about us and the work we do with partners like these.

We hope you dig it – we’re pretty stoked  to make this change and start using this new identity to represent our new way of looking at gamified loyalty.

(Also, for font fans: yep, you nailed it. That’s modernist workhorse Futura Medium in there.)

Posted in: BigDoor news, Blog

Last week the Nieman Journalism Lab reported that MTV Networks will use gamification as part of the 2012 election coverage. MTV’s VP of public affairs, Jason Rzepka talked about the program, “Millennials are increasingly viewing life through a game lens, even just [using] #winning or #fail…Game vernacular has become a part of youth vernacular. By putting that competitive layer on top of it — a lot of people are inherently competitive, so if the path to winning is being informed, there could be a really great civic benefit.”

The beta version will be out this summer and the formal launch will happen on September 1st, 2012. The official name of the program is Fantasy Election ’12 and will encourage players and their friends to sign up, build a team, compete against each other in a virtual league. The game is centered around mobile — players using smartphones can check stats from their phones and much more. The other interesting thing is the game focuses on data. MTV will be using sources like PolitiFact, Real Clear Politics and more to measure performance and data. Social media and the frequency of Twitter and Facebok activity will also be used to gauge engagement.

What a smart use of gamification – we’re excited to see this program when it launches!

Posted in: Blog, Gamification, Gaming

Happy Monday! It’s raining in Seattle today, so we are staying inside and catching up on gamification news from the past week. We’ve highlighted our favorite articles below.

Gamification: Seamless Integration Business2Community 5/18/2012 One thing we have focused on at BigDoor from the beginning is making sure that publishers don’t have to put a lot of effort into adding gamification to their sites. Part of ensuring this means also ensuring simple and seamless integration. Andrzej Marczewski highlights the need for simple integration and automation in his post on gamification this week.

In the future, you’ll game without knowing it MSNBC 5/18/2012 We highlighted the Pew Research Center’s report on gamification last week, but in case you didn’t have time to read the whole thing, MSNBC did a great overview of the important points to take away from the report as well as looked at the trend of gamification as a whole. “The experts point out that game mechanics offer advantages in encouraging specific behavior and generating measureable feedback.”

MTV Creates Fantasy Football-Style Game for 2012 Presidential Election PSFK 5/18/2012 We mentioned this in a gamification news post before, but more details are being released about MTV’s plans to gamify the presidential election. Following a similar structure as a fantasy football league, MTV will ask voters to create a team of congressional and presidential hopefuls. The players will then earn points when members of their teams perform well during pre-election campaigning. The game attempts to, ’to engage players with the election process in real time, and to draw in those who have been put off by elective politics…to help young voters break down the key issues and come to conclusions themselves’. It is certainly a big goal, but with a backer like MTV, we hope this project sees real success!

Gamification, a new way of marketing #SaScon Part 1 State of Search 5/19/2012 The Search, Analytics and Social Media conference was held last week in Manchester and among the speakers was Jeff Coghlan of Matmi. Jeff spoke about gamification in everyday life and how it can be used inside businesses to encourage employee productivity and better management solutions. If gamifying a business is an interest of yours, this is a great read.

Multiple Choice Inside Higher Ed 5/18/2012 Grading systems in college are complained about by university professors and students alike. Complex and time consuming grading systems eat up valuable professor time while being difficult for students to understand and succeed under. Mika LaVaque-Manty a professor of political science at University of Michigan is introducing game mechanics to let students control how they want to be graded. Students are guided to make decisions on how they will be graded based on their learning styles and preferences. LaVaque-Manty claims the system was a success and provided increased motivation of students during the course. He plans to try it again next semester.

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Gamification Tips, Technology

Today the Pew Research Center released their study about Gamification, “Gamification: Experts expect ‘game layers’ to expand in the future, with positive and negative results” (by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, May 18, 2012). The Pew Research Center provides information about the “issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.” Pew regularly focuses on popular topics including social networking, teens, technology and more.

The survey results are based on an opt-in, online sample of more than 1,000 technology stakeholders from companies including Google, Nokia, O’Reilly Media, Verzion, Cisco, IBM as well as from schools including MIT, Yale and Harvard University among others. It addresses the meteoric rise of gamification and examines thoughts from many of these technologists and analysts about the use of game mechanics.

Pew Research Survey Highlights: 

• Social networks are just one of the primary drivers for gamification
• 53% of these stakeholders agreed that “…the use of game mechanics, feedback loops, and rewards to spur interaction and boost engagement, loyalty, fun, and/or learning will continue to gain ground between now and 2020.” 
• Additionally 53% of the respondents agreed with the statement that  “By 2020, there will have been significant advances in the adoption and use of gamification.”
• While it has some drawbacks, gamification offers advantages in encouraging behaviors and generating measureable feedback
• “…neuroscientists are discovering more and more about the ways in which humans react to such interactive design elements. They say such elements can cause feel-good chemical reactions, alter human responses to stimuli—increasing reaction times, for instance—and in certain situations can improve learning, participation, and motivation.”
• “…reward and status elements are embedded in implicit and explicit forms in people’s interactions in their engagement in online communities. Game elements and competition are interspersed throughout the platforms that have made social networks like Facebook and Twitter popular.”
• Game-style engagement can bring an element of enjoyment to otherwise dull or challenging tasks, thus it will become a vital aspect of training, personal health, business, and education.

The survey also covered some negative effects of gamification and a few that liken it to manipulation. According to the survey, 42% of the respondents agreed that ”generally the trend will not advance except in specific realms.“ Our favorite negative quote of the survey was, “By 2020, anyone who ever used the term ‘gamification’ will be embarrassed to admit it.”

Whether you’re an enthusiast or not, the survey is worth a read since it addresses many of the positives of gamification as well as perceived negatives.

Posted in: Blog, Gamification

Happy Friday! As we mentioned a few weeks ago, the marketing team is experimenting with Pinterest and our new Friday Pinboard. As a general rule, we like to follow the same themes as our blog: gamification and the elements that make it great – loyalty, social media, and engagement.  We also like to cover technology, startups and Seattle.

This week we found some fancy infographics about startups, gaming, marketing and geeks. Enjoy!

Posted in: Blog, Gamification, Social Media, Startups, Technology

At BigDoor, we believe firmly that a gamification solution without solid analytics and data is doomed to fail. Accurate recording of actions, points and shares ensures that users are seeing the results of their efforts, and companies are able to track and monitor the success of a BigDoor Gamified Rewards Program. Recently, our internal team headed by CTO/Co-founder Jeff Malek made some important updates to our backend databases that ensure BigDoor can handle the large number of transactions, points and data required by our clients as well as free up valuable engineering resources for the internal team.

Previously, our data came from a replicated slave of its MySQL transactional database and aggregated the results on an additional intermediary MySQL host. Following this process data was then pulled into Tableau for reporting. This custom aggregation and ETL was workable in the beginning, but as we grew along with our client base, the problems of this type of solution began to eat up engineer time and energy.

We found our solution with Full 360 and Vertica. The two companies were able to provide us a solution that was quick to implement and able to handle our complex set of data. By moving away from our custom setup, we are now able to monitor and report with much greater speed and reliability in reporting user actions.

To read more about our transition and the custom solution provided to us by Full 360 and Vertica, you can check out their case study here.

Posted in: Blog, Development, Gamification, Improvements, Loyalty, Startups, Technology