One of the common mistakes in the industry today is the assumption that all gamification is created equal. In creating an industry, many of us have forgotten that the competitive realm will be comprised of a wide variety of gamification examples and solutions. While many distinctions between enterprise and consumer gamification are beginning to emerge, we also see a trend in the lack of separation between gamification products and gamification solutions. The two may seem similar, but in our experience, gamification products don’t tend to see the same success as a comprehensive gamification solution. Typically, a product is a one-size-fits-all answer to the problems of user engagement online. It is generally the same regardless of the type of users, content on the site, and site-specific needs/goals. For many websites, this application of gamification works great: it provides extra lift in registration and engagement, yet remains simple enough for a small publisher to manage themselves. For larger publishers a product is often simply not enough.

The reality is that large scale gamification is a network of moving parts, working in unison to engage and motivate users. This network is what we refer to at BigDoor as a gamification solution. Adding game mechanics to incentivize loyalty amongst online users is only part of the puzzle. Comprehensive service differentiates between a product and a solution, and elevates the latter to provide publishers with even more lift in engagement. Gamification is more than points: it’s a system that shows the user why those points matter. A solution creates a unique experience for the user that is ever changing and adaptable to publisher and brand needs.

While gamification products are traditionally implemented and left alone, solutions are continually managed. In our experience, this level of service is what has ensured success in our implementations. After all, we design, build and deploy our product all the time, but it’s our continued adjustments and attention to detail that turn a deployment of our product into lasting success. So, what happens after launch? How is “success” of a program determined? What is the process of making changes?

The most vital piece to our gamification solutions success is our dedicated team of gamification-minded account managers, implementation specialists, and loyalty experts that work with our partners to analyze user behavior and adjust gamification content. This team exists to make sure that our partners are receiving the best ROI, service, and support for their site. Using past experience, data from the BigDoor analytics dashboard, and a close look at every partner’s goals, we strive to find the winning combination of parts for a successful gamification program.

Here is a look at some of the questions BigDoor account managers look at in order to make adjustments to a partner’s solution:

 -What are the activities that the site’s user’s are normally engaging in while on the site?

-What is the average user’s passion level for the site content?

-What is the purpose of the user’s visit to the site?

-What are the expectations of the user in terms of implementation content, flow, branding, and design?

-What existing features and functionality especially “speak to” and resonate with the sites users? (i.e., leaderboards for a competitive user audience, or rewarding users heavily for commenting on topics in a tech support forum)

-What is the goal of the solution? To drive registration, retain a certain level of traffic of registered users a month, have users perform one specific activity (or several in a particular sequence), etc.?

-What aspects of the solution are under-performing or performing well, and by what metrics does our partner determine “success”?

We use the answers of these questions to justify possible changes within the solution. With every implementation, our team gets a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. This knowledge informs not only specific implementation changes, but also product-level features. Our account team is accessible for a partner during the entire lifecycle of a solution, from when a solution is first being designed, built and deployed, to testing/QA, and from the launch onward.

Ultimately, solution management is a necessary part of the puzzle for gamification success. We havve talked before about the benefits of site-wide implementations, and we recognize the level of commitment that an implementation takes from a partner. That commitment requires that extra level of support from our end. At BigDoor, we recognize that there is value in creating long-lasting relationships with our partners: They know we are clearly invested in their success. A loyalty solution is a living breathing organism; just like the site’s users. Our partners are smart enough to recognize that as their audience’s behavior changes, so to should their solution. Does any website that is trying to engage their users want to be left with an antiquated, buggy, and irrelevant loyalty program?

Posted in: Blog, Gamification, Gamification Tips, Loyalty, Success

I get excited every time I see an announcement for a new gamification program on the web. Each new implementation is a chance to witness the industry growing as well as experience the individual creativity and innovation from various companies around the world. Far too often, I head to websites to check out their gamified programs, only to have to spend time searching for how to join and participate. What good is a loyalty program if users can’t find it?

Gamification Tip #5: Make sure to onboard new users

Customers coming to your site may or may not know that you have implemented a gamification program. Either way, they can’t participate if they can’t find it. Publishers should be notifying incoming customers of their loyalty program as well as outlining its value. Will the gamification implementation help the user meet their goals? Will it give them access to exclusive content? Whatever, your customers want, it should be clear that your program can help them achieve it.

In addition to concisely communicating the value, make it easy for users to sign up. Customers shouldn’t have to spend more than a few seconds deciding and joining your program. A simple sign-up that guides the user through the registration process (or social sign-in authorization) means that customers can start participating in your loyalty program while they are still excited about what the program can do,

Onboarding your new users shouldn’t stop at registration. Publishers should be sure to educate newly registered users on what actions they can be rewarded for, how the program works and how to navigate around. Good design and quests can help guide new customers, giving them hints at what actions will help them meet their goals.

One of our favorite examples of excellent onboarding into a gamification implementation is the NFL website, what do you think?

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Gamification Tips, Loyalty, Success

I saw The Dark Knight Rises last night for the second time and spent much of my drive into work this morning trying to come up with a way to relate that movie to gamification or customer loyalty. If you have been reading here long, you might remember my Hunger Games post from earlier this year and my love of connecting gamification with things in my daily life. Unfortunately, my pre-coffee brain was unable to come up with anything coherent enough to be worthy of a post here on mygamification.com. Instead, I turned my attention to something with much more value to the readers: another gamification tip! The Batman post will rise (ok, that wasn’t funny).

Gamification Tip #4: Analytics Matter!

Gamification in its best form allows publishers to increase engagement and loyalty, while creating benefit and reward systems for their users. The ongoing maintenance and success of a customer loyalty program should rely heavily on analytics allowing publishers to see what works and what doesn’t. Just as you should know your users before implementing gamification, good analytics should help you grow your program and understand its strengths and weaknesses. Not to mention analytics are key to justifying the expense/effort of implementation and program management.

I don’t feel anyone would argue that analytics don’t matter in the context of brand success, but check out any good gamification example and you will see that all of them provide either the user or the brand with analytics. Gamification of fitness sees its biggest success when users are given simple ways to understand their fitness data and progress. Enterprise gamification succeeds when employers and employees can measure their progress and understand failings, trends and set goals. Consumer focused gamification often relies heavily on understanding user actions and channeling those actions into successful advertising and content.

How your company measures the success of its program will vary greatly depending on the end goal, which means that analytics must be flexible enough to be valuable to all types of publishers. BigDoor’s analytics provide both at a glance and drilled down measurements measuring your user’s engagement with your program, loyalty to your program and virality. Our platform features RAMP technology which creates a no-exposure control group used to compare data between users seeing and participating in the program to those who haven’t been exposed.

Whether your company is seeking more user registrations, looking to track employee progress or any number of other valuable actions, analytics is the backbone of gamification strategy and success.

Posted in: Blog, Gamification, Gamification Tips, Loyalty, Success

Back in June we talked about how excited we were to have Grammy award winning artist and entrepreneur Chamillionaire at Gamification Summit 2012 to talk about brand loyalty and his BigDoor implementation. Chamillionaire discussed his websites lack of engagement and his quest to find a solution that could engage his fans, recognize his online users and boost web registrations. Unlike other solutions he tried, BigDoor’s gamification platform was easy to integrate with his existing website, allowed quick customization and simple rewards management resulting in a 32% user registration rate. You only need to visit Chamillionaire’s website, Facebook or Twitter page to see that the program is still building loyalty and getting fans excited about the Chamillionaire brand.

We posted a Chamillionaire case study last month, but now you can check out the entire Chamillionaire talk from Gamification Summit to find out why he chose BigDoor and how he used gamification to make his loyalty program a huge success.

Enjoy!

Posted in: Blog, Gamification, Gamification Tips, Loyalty, Partners, Success, User engagement

Our business development team has made some changes recently to streamline their processes and continue to quickly scale for our partners. We asked Paige Petersen, Account Manager on the business development team, to detail some of those processes and how they have affected the team’s success. 

As BigDoor’s Gamified Rewards Program grows larger and scales to manage more partners, we often forget that the business development team, us folks you might see at conferences or chat with on the phone, also need to adjust to deal with the influx of inquiries and new partners. Since we announced our new product in early April, we’ve been busy, really busy! We embarked on an attempt to streamline our processes, focus on validated learning’s, and constant iteration. Interestingly, we turned to our dev team and their use of the SCRUM/Agile method to streamline and organize our onboarding of new partners.

When the idea to incorporate a SCRUM/Agile methodology and put into practice a few key aspects from Eric Reis’ The Lean Startup, there was some skepticism. Several questions surfaced right away: “Won’t this take up even more time, instead of save it?” And “Isn’t SCRUM/agile for developers?” But despite the skepticism, we decided to give it a try.

In the initial weeks, our planning meetings and daily stand-ups were far too long rather than quick updates on progress and sticking points. However about a month in to the experiment we saw a turning point. Not only have some important sticking points been identified, but we’ve also been able to recognize where time is being spent, re-prioritize, and/or brainstorm more efficient ways to reach the same result. Time to fix an issue that might arise has gone from a matter of weeks to a few days.

We’ve been able to…

• Identify sticking points in our pipeline
• Iterate on messaging and identify key features that resonate with our audience
• Visually see/track the incremental development of each project
• Digest customer feedback daily with the team which has helped re-prioritize specific development efforts

Startups are like giant testing environments, whether we are testing a specific product, service, message or related concept –our team is always trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. The BizDev team has adopted a “test-measure-learn-iterate-test again” philosophy. We’ve been able to test assumptions we’ve made about our business, our partners and what features are really important to them. While we are still in trial mode, it appears that the SCRUM/Agile method may not be just for the devs anymore! Incorporating these methods has produced excellent results and is truly making us a ‘leaner’ startup.

Posted in: Blog, Development, Startups, Success, Technology

Update: We even more pleased to announce that BigDoor has been selected as a winner in the “Internet/Social Networking” category!

We’re very pleased to announce that BigDoor has been selected as a finalist in the prestigious TiE50 Awards Program! The program is part of TiE’s global network that includes more than 14,000 entrepreneurs and professionals that are dedicated to the advancement of entrepreneurship. Each year TiE50 recognizes the world’s most enterprising technology startups. BigDoor was selected as part of a comprehensive evaluation, screening and judging process. Thousands of qualified nominated companies are evaluated on business model, IP value, and leadership team. From the nominations the list is narrowed down to 100 per segment. We’ll be following along with all the finalists and are asking all BigDoor fans to visit the BigDoor page and vote for us!

Posted in: Awards, Blog, Startups, Success, Technology

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

McKinsey Quarterly recently published a survey, “A rising role for IT: McKinsey Global Survey results,” that examines IT spend among big companies and their adoption of new technology platforms that help support innovation. The survey breaks out 10 areas in which businesses are increasing their investments. You can read more here but there are a few from the list that can be accomplished through incorporating gamification, including: customer engagement; social Internet technologies; existing online social platforms to increase customer engagement, branding or marketing; and engaging customers with apps leveraging mobile-specific capabilities.

Posted in: Blog, Gamification, Gamification Tips, Success, Technology

This weekend BigDoor’s co-founder and CEO, Keith Smith shared his thoughts about core metrics that really matter with the online publication Geekwire.  Keith walked through the four KPI’s that every site should focus on: Loyalty, Engagement, Virality and Revenue. As Keith stated in the article, “The simplicity provided by these 4 golden metrics allows us to focus on the key drivers of our business, no matter the size and scale of our audience.”

Posted in: Blog, Loyalty, Monetization, Our Thesis, Social Media, Startups, Success