Last week, our business development team represented BigDoor at the2012 Gamification Summit. We were very excited to unveil our new logo for the first time at an event, as well as talk about some of our awesome clients, new features and get a chance to talk about how we are improving online user loyalty and customer engagement.  When BigDoor was starting out, gamification was a concept that most people didn’t understand and relatively few people thought was valuable. We were so encouraged to see how big gamification has become. We heard the conference ended up with ~650 attendees for the two days, and we know we talked to some great people (though we wish we could have talked to you all!)

Nate @ G Summit showing off our swag

One of the coolest things about gamification is that it can be applied to a wide variety of sites. Our flexible Gamified Rewards Program can increase user loyalty no matter what your focus is, which means we have been lucky enough to work with an interesting variety of publishers.   While everyone we work with has unique goals and reasons for implementing gamification, we love being able to show how effective our solutions are. That’s why we were very excited that Chamillionaire was able to be a part of Gamification Summit this year.

After searching for a way to engage fans on his website Chamillionaire found the BigDoor solution. He came to G Summit to talk about his unique challenges on Chamillionaire.com and his passion for engaging users and building brand loyalty. If you were able to hear him talk or if you know anything about him you will know that his passion for gamification is infectious. He is not only a very talented entrepreneur but a very convincing person to speak on behalf of gamification. You can view his entire talk on Fora.tv, but we thought we would highlight some of our favorite quotes.

On why rewarding people with status works: “People love status, nowadays people come up to you and introduce themselves without even telling you their name first, they tell you how many followers they have on twitter”

On making the decision to work with BigDoor:  “It’s going to cost a million dollars, it’s going to be hard to implement, and all this stuff…and then…I was completely wrong. It didn’t cost a lot, it was actually affordable, it was actually something that was easy to implement to my website.”

On fan engagement:  “I believe it’s a relationship, if I do stuff for you, you do stuff for me back”

On the success of his website after adding gamification: “They say a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it…that’s not my website…it’s a lot different on chamillionaire.com”

On his song hitting number one on itunes:  “There’s a lot of people with more fans than me that just can’t do it, because their fans aren’t engaged”

If you were at G Summit, and watched Chamillionaire’s talk, make sure to head over to his Facebook page and tag yourself in the photo here.

Chamillionaire and Nsilo Reddick with the BigDoor Team

You can also check out Chamillionaire’s slide deck from his talk, below:

Our CEO Keith Smith was also a speaker this year and he talked about internet promiscuity and how gamification can turn infrequent visitors into engaged brand ambassadors. With so many options online, marketers need to give users extra incentives tor return and engage. Using game mechanics to encourage users towards desired actions and rewarding them for those actions, is a proven way to build engagement and customer loyalty in today’s tough market. The keys to loyalty and engagement according to Keith; Easy user onboarding, create yearn, reward and  social integration.

Keith Smith speaks at Gamification Summit

You can check out the slides from his talk below:

While we mostly focus on creating fun on the web, we also like to bring fun on the road. This year we decided to give out 10 limited edition marshmallow guns to attendees at the conference. Check out a few of the lucky winners, including Caroline Japic, Senior VP of Marketing @ Bunchball. We had a ton of fun putting these together and even more fun playing with them ourselves. If you won one we would love to see some photos!

We had a ton of fun this year and can’t wait to attend again. What were your favorite moments of Gamification Summit?

Posted in: Blog, Conferences, Gamification, Loyalty, Technology

Happy Monday! There was plenty of news to take a look at this week, from a study on brand loyalty to recaps from Gamification Summit 2012. If you missed out on any gamification news last week, you can catch up on our favorite links below.

Study: Loyal Customers Are More Effective Advocates in Social Marketing CMO.com 6/21/2012 We like to talk a lot about increasing loyalty and creating loyal customers, but we often don’t talk about the benefits associated with having a loyal customer base. This study takes a look at the effect of loyal customers on brand sales and marketing. The benefits seem to come from every angle; loyal customers who authentically recommended a brand had a larger impact than those who did not. Additionally, “advocacy programs focusing on loyal customers increased sales by an average of eight percent.” These are great reasons to focus on creating customer loyalty, and gamification is a great way to do that.

Gamification: It’s Like Playing Diablo For Everything You Do Tom’s Guide 6/23/2012 While we don’t necessarily agree that gamification is the same as playing Diablo (but boy do we wish it was!), this article has a ton of great content on what gamification really means, and why it works so well. One of the benefits of gamification is the strong connection to analytics, allowing publishers to “expose users not by what they claim they do, but what they actually do.”

Gamification Day Two: Engage Your Audience, Your Kids and Your Brain Fora.tv 6/22/2012 Fora.tv did a great job covering the 2012 Gamification Summit. In addition to providing videos of all the great speakers, they also ran some summaries during the event. We particularly liked this one highlighting Chamillionaire and his challenges in fan engagement. He talks about what he wanted and how he found the solution with a BigDoor Gamified Rewards Program. You can watch the full video of his talk on Fora.tv as well.

The Chevy Volt reinforces real world gamification Vator News 6/19/2012 We talked a bit about the gamification elements in the new Chevy Volt before, but haven’t seen to many people talk about the experience since the Volt’s release. This is a great look at how a regular driver can be influenced by the game elements on the Volt’s dashboard.

Keith Smith’s Gamification Deck at Vator Spark Vator News 6/20/2012 Vator kindly uploaded Keith Smith’s deck from his talk on monetization at Vator Spark a few months back. Keith focused on how gamification can be monetized and what is important for a successful gamification solution. If you are interested, or you missed the updates from the Vator Spark conference, this is a great chance to catch up.

Posted in: Blog, Conferences, Gamification, Gamification Tips, Loyalty, Social Media

Happy Friday! We had a crazy week down in San Francisco at Gamification Summit and are happy to be home. We added some awesome photos of the event to our Pinterest account, as well as some great social media infographics and cool design examples. Click the photo to see our favorite pin’s of the week.

One of the lucky winners of our marshmallow guns from #GSummit

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Technology

BigDoor has arrived at Gamification Summit 2012! For those of you who haven’t heard of Gamification Summit, it’s an event that brings together gamification, loyalty and behavioral engineering experts to talk and share information and ideas. The conference kicked off today with two workshops where attendees could earn a certificate in Gamification Design.  You can check out more details about the workshops and the conference at www.gsummit.com.

Tomorrow, the conference will launch into full swing with a variety of speakers whose expertise ranges from game design to social media marketing. Our Business Development team is hanging out at the BigDoor booth waiting to answer questions, talk gamification and hand out some pretty cool stuff (including some awesome marshmallow guns to a few lucky winners). If you are at the conference, be sure to swing by and say hi.

On Thursday, our CEO Keith Smith will be delivering a talk entitled “Internet Infidelity: Using Gamification to Cure Online Promiscuity“. He will take a look at the ever growing problem of retaining quality online users. He will also discuss the gamification industry and provide best practices and advice for how gamification can help online publishers to create loyal and repeat visitors. He will be speaking in Room B at 2:25pm 6/21.

Chamillionaire will be also be attending Gamification Summit to discuss his “Direct to Fan Engagement” program. Chamillionaire’s Chamillitary social network has significantly improved fan engagement on his website. He will talk about the needs of artists to connect with fans as well as how he chose BigDoor as a gamification provider. You can catch his talk 6/21 at 10:25am on the main stage.

To set up a meeting with one of our gamification experts at the BigDoor booth, you can email us at: Charlotte@BigDoor.com

We can’t wait to post updates and photos from the event, stay tuned for our recap at the end of the week!

Posted in: Blog, Conferences, Game Mechanics, Gamification

We are proud to announce that BigDoor has been recognized as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Last Thursday night Seattle Magazine awarded BigDoor 6^th place in the Midsize company category.  It’s exciting for us to be recognized as one of the best among such a successful and competitive group of organizations.

Since BigDoor was founded in 2009, we have seen our product, industry and team grow.  Despite all the changes, we have kept a focus on creating a great place to work where everyone has a voice.  This award is not just a win for BigDoor, but for all of our team members that have put the time in to help grow the company. We are so thankful for their hard work and determination that this award is dedicated to all of them.

To provide a little background, Seattle Business Magazine’s annual ranking of “100 Best Companies to Work For” recognizes companies based on size (or non-profit status) in Washington State. The award program analyzes company characteristics such as culture, employee benefits, programs and an online survey where employees provide feedback on the company. Each year Seattle Business Magazine partners with research firm Ipsos Worldwide to survey thousands of employees from across the state on what makes their companies the best.

This year alone, BigDoor has also been named as WTIA’s Best Early Stage Company of the Year as part of its Industry Achievement Awards and a TiE50 Awards winner in the Internet/Social Networking Category. We are very proud to be recognized and truly thankful for our awesome team that makes it happen!

Posted in: BigDoor news, Blog, Startups

Happy Monday! There was a lot of great gamification news last week, from JetBlue’s new game show to getting everyone excited for Gamification Summit 2012. Catch up on everything you missed below.

JetBlue to Launch Live Online Game Show Mashable 6/11/2012 JetBlue announced the launch of it’s live online game show, designed to engage consumers and promote their vacation packages. The game show will have 15 minute episodes that will quiz contestants on travel related questions. The site will also hook into social media sites to engage non-contestants as well. This is another great example of a company that sees the value in making engagement fun and we hope to see JetBlue continue with this in the future!

In Defense of Gamification The Escapist 6/12/2012 Gamification is often accused of manipulating users. In this defense of the use of gamification, Shamus Young focuses on that criticism and highlights why marketers are turning to the use of game mechanics over other marketing techniques.

The 100 Best Companies to Work For 2012 Seattle Business Mag July 2012 We are very proud to have been named the #6 best mid-size company to work for in Seattle. The results were decided by a panel of judges after all company employees were anonymously surveyed. If you are interested in working for us, check out our jobs listing here.

Gamification Summit: What’s New and Who’s Speaking? Fora.tv 6/12/2012 We are very excited to have our business development team heading down to Gamification Summit this week. Gabe Zichermann, the mastermind behind the conference highlighted some of the exciting speakers attending the 2012 conference. Among them, we are most excited for our CEO Keith Smith as well as Chamillionaire.

Why Badges can be Bad – Really Bad Business2Community 6/13/2012 With a title like that, it might be surprising that we included this article, but the message is important to us. Gamification can get a bad reputation due to a lot of the sloppy solutions out there. While we agree that badges (and just badges) can be a sign of a really bad gamification solution, we also agree that badges done right can show real status and achievement that benefit loyal users.

Posted in: BigDoor news, Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Startups

Happy Friday! It’s been a busy week here at the BigDoor offices, but we still had time to gather some of our favorite infographics, gamification articles and geeky images from Pinterest for you to enjoy.

We especially enjoyed some of the fathers day themed Pinterest pins we saw this week. We know we are a few days early, but Happy Fathers Day to all the father’s out there!

Image Credit: http://www.jeffreybrowncomics.com/

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Technology

Happy Monday! We have a bit of everything in the news recap this week. Gamification for social good, for education and for shopping deals, there really is a way to make lots of stuff more fun!

Play the good game with gamification The National 6/11/2012 Gamification is a great way to increase user loyalty on the web, but it’s also a great way to achieve personal goals as well. Jane McGonigal and Mark Baldwin are two people focused on using gamification to help people achieve their goals and overall improve mental and physical health. “[Games] can help us to achieve cherished goals, solve grave real-world problems and lead more fulfilling lives.”

50 Amazing Companies Win TiE Company Showcase India West 6/8/2012 We are very proud to have been included in the TiE 50 Company Showcase. Not only is this great recognition for gamification, but we have to admit, we love representing Seattle technology in the Silicon Valley.

Ex-lead programmer of “Plants vs Zombies” and ex-director at ChinaCache work together to gamify real-world deals with Gimmieworld e27 6/7/2012 Playing games online can earn you free stuff and product discounts with Gimmieworld, a new game site created by Roy Liu and David Ng. The site rewards players with points that can be redeemed for free and discounted products at partnering online shops. Shopping and games? Sounds pretty awesome!

Pierce County Library Introduces New Features to Summer Reading Program Gig Harbor Patch 6/5/2012 We are really proud to see gamification being used by a library system in our home state. Students who participate in the summer reading program can earn points for each book they read, points now correspond to redeemable prizes as well as a way for students to pay down library fines. $5 increments of fines can be ‘bought’ with points earned through actively reading. Who doesn’t wish they could participate in that?

The Gamification of Education and Cognitive, Social and Emotional Learning Benefits EmergingEdTech 6/10/2012 This is a really interesting look at the ways that gamification can benefit education of children. By taking a look at the cognitive, emotional and social needs of students, researchers addressed the ways that gamification can be used to maximize learning in the classroom.

Posted in: Blog, Gamification, Loyalty, Technology

We hope everyone is having a fantastic Friday! Pinterest was stocked full this week with awesome social media infographics. Be sure to check out our Friday Pins for some of our favorite design, infographics and gamification related pins. We also couldn’t resist this ode to one of our favorite old games The Oregon Trail. We can’t be the only ones who fondly remember playing it!

Check out all our pins here.

Posted in: Blog, Gamification, Social Media, Technology

Happy Monday! Busy week? Catch up on gamification news in the recap below.

Gamification: What Investors Are Looking For DailyDealMedia 6/1/2012 Interested in real world examples of gamification? This is a great look at places gamification already exists successfully and how we can learn from it when taking gamification online.

Game on! Sun Star 6/2/2012 Kids and teens make up a huge portion of game players. By taking a look at how teens interact with games including what motivates them we can learn a lot about game mechanics and gamification. The article also takes a look at how gamification has influenced parenting styles to include challenges and rewards.

3 Benefits of Gamification in Microsite Design Business2Community 5/30/2012 Using microsites as a way to attract visitors with relevant and interesting content is not a new idea. However applying gamification to these microsites is becoming more and more common. Highlighted are three huge benefits of adding gamification to your microsites, as well as a few stellar examples of what that can look like.

Gamify your sweat and make films more exciting New Scientist 5/28/2012 New technology is coming out that measures sweat and heart rate and uses those numbers to influence content users are seeing on their screens. This reaction loop was used at SXSW by Filmtrip to create an interactive short horror film. The more fans got nervous, the more intense the movie became. This is some pretty cool stuff that could really change the way we understand content in the future.

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