Media and Publishers: See You at the Crossroads?

By Chris Sullivan, Regional Vice President, Sales, Bunchball
Chris Sullivan, @Sully63 

Almost 3 years later, I can still clearly remember the day-to-day details of managing the Digital operation at a major B2B IT Publisher. We had added all the bells and whistles that are required for a solid digital presence: video player, Jive community space (we were very early on this front), taxonomy that suited the content, effective SEO and SEM.  We had audience drivers like newsletters, webinars, virtual trade shows and, as key differentiators, a well-respected brand name and first class editorial team that our B2B audience relied on to keep abreast of the market we served.

Still, day after day, I would devour the Omniture reports only to discover that our Unique Visitors and Average Pages Per Visit were stagnant. We were above industry average, but considering our environment was a targeted, vertical space, we needed to grow if we were going to scale revenue.  A key challenge was that we had to increase our reach but still hold true to the demographic profile of users that our large technology advertisers expected to reach.  Another challenge was that only a small percentage of the audience were registered users and we knew how valuable registered users were to a media organization.

We had an engagement challenge which directly impacted our bottom line! If you are in the Publishing/Media/Entertainment space, I am sure your business is at a crossroads as well.

On top of it all, the competition for eyeballs is fierce: 

  • According to Netcraft, 2011 ended with 582,716,657 websites
  • According to comScore, the average Internet surfer spends 19% of their time online on social networks, up from just 6% in 2007
  • The explosion of mobile applications is causing publishers to completely rethink how to most effectively reach their users.

It is more competitive than ever to attract visitors to your site and you can expect to spend an average of $.50 to $2.00 just to attract that elusive visitor.  Depending on your eCPM it takes anywhere from 25 – 100 page views per user, just to break even.  This reality is causing website operators to rethink their marketing priorities.  80% of those budgets are now spent on acquisition, which is 6x more expensive than retaining visitors. This is why, in a recent report done by Forbes, 52% of CMO’s say retention is now the #1 priority.

There are many services at your disposal for user acquisition such as SEM, SEO, Social Networks, Blogs, Email, PR, Advertising, etc.  However, on the retention side of the ledger, the toolkit is pretty bare:  site content to keep users engaged, email alerts, social sharing, and contests are the most common tactics. 

The good news is that Gamification is a tactic that can be deployed in a contextually relevant way to create a compelling user experience and drive business value for Publishers and Media Companies.

In order to create sustainable engagement in your digital environment, it makes sense to analyze areas of the market where this type of engagement already exists. Games such as Angry Birds have started a category where 500 million people are spending 1 hour per day playing; social networks like Facebook have 800 million people sharing and commenting for 4 hours per day; and 120 million people per year are participating in travel reward programs. These are great examples of gamified experiences that most people overlook.

The above examples leverage 3 specific game mechanics to drive massive levels of sustained engagement and retention:

  • Personalization - Users feel entitled to a personalized, relevant experience all across the web.  Missions, challenges & goals need to be relevant and personal, not generic and one-size-fits all.
  • Social - The web is becoming inherently social, and users expect to be able to group together.  Gamification programs need to give users the opportunity to join others to accomplish goals.
  • Rewards - While great for onboarding, the novelty of badges soon wears off and users expect more meaningful rewards. Providing users with opportunities to redeem points for virtual, experiential or real rewards is a must.

Media Companies such as Comcast/NBCU, ABC, CBS, Scripps, MTV, Warner Brothers have deployed game mechanics in their environment and the results speak for themselves:

+40% Increase in Unique Users
+100% Increase in Page Views
+85% Increase in Time on Site
+42% Increase in Ad Revenue

Which path will you take with your budget this year?  Continuing the costly proposition of attracting new, potentially less demographically appropriate, users. OR invest those dollars in a sustainable engagement strategy that will create a compelling user experience and drive business value for you, the audience and your advertiser base? 

If you would like to explore the latter, let me know as we can help.

From Mad Man to Gamification Guy

By Joseph Cole, Digital Strategy Producer, Bunchball
Joseph Cole, @joefcole 

There’s a lot of excitement around working for an ad agency. Popular TV shows like Mad Men have really helped to drive the perceived glamour and sexiness of the ad agency world. It’s absolutely true. You do get to work on really fun projects and great brands; you often get to work with brilliant creatives on the precipice of developing industry-changing ideas, and you sometimes get to travel to exotic shoot locations.

I remember speaking at a college’s advertising club, essentially an introduction to the world of advertising, and covering topics like how to get in, what typical agency life is like, the different roles/players within, the work I do, and so on. And, I remember telling the students that the industry is not necessarily as glamorous as it seems. I went as far as emphasizing the frequent long hours, late nights, and weekend workdays. The reality is that great ideas require a lot of hard work and we all have to start somewhere.

The unique thing about this conversation is that it brought me full circle to myself. Specifically, it helped me reminisce upon the faint memories of what I was thinking when I was in their shoes. Namely, the passion and ambition we all had at one time. Déjà vu?

It was refreshing to see the excitement and unfazed passion in almost each and all of the students’ eyes, despite my emphasis on some of the industry cons. But, there was something else really special that I saw in their eyes. It was the unique drive that makes most people want to do great work, impress colleagues, and wow bosses. I had an evil thought, “How do I capture this motivation, passion, and eagerness, put it in a bottle, patent it, and become über-rich?” Well, that idea was a little naive. Or, maybe not!

At the same time I was interviewing at a few companies, Bunchball being one of them. The cool thing was that Bunchball was doing exactly that which I had hoped to put in a bottle and sell myself. I, like the college students, had become very passionate about getting into a new and growing industry, and was very motivated. I had heard about Gamification during my life in the ad agency world, but never really understood it. Well, I was finally sold, and was very excited to join the Bunchball team.

Typically, Gamification is best when implemented as a strategic layer in an existing marketing campaign, a component of an internal engagement program, or within a consumer facing web site. What converted me was how Gamification could be used to enhance great ideas and give these ideas actionable/measurable results.

With Bunchball’s version of Gamification having its foundation in psychology and behavioral economics, I felt very comfortable in taking the leap to the Gamification world. I immediately saw the potential of Gamification in the workplace. The workplace now encompasses as many as five generations. So it’s not just the millennials that we should think about when it comes to Gamification. When we take the principles of what makes games fun and apply it to the enterprise, Gamification can be applicable to users of almost any demographic. When it’s done right, it has impressive results, with a core outcome being a rewarding, personalized and collaborative experience for all users.  

Molly Kittle: One of the Top 10 Women in Gamification

The team at Bunchball was excited to see one of our own, Molly Kittle (@MolKittle), named as one of the Top 10 Women in Gamification on Gamification.co. Molly Kittle, our Vice President of Digital Strategy, has been with Bunchball since the early days and has seen us grow from a young upstart  to the gamification industry leader. Personally, we would list Molly on many more Top 10 lists, including Top 10 User Experience Designers, Top 10 Creative Thinkers and Top 10 Engagement Strategists. While we wait for those lists to be created, check out Gamification.co’s write up:

Molly Kittle is currently the VP of Digital Strategy at Bunchball and has been with them for about 5 years. Molly has been involved in almost every customer deployment Bunchball has had and for good reason — Molly is a bonafide gamification veteran and gave a talk at this year’s SXSW about employee engagement. 

Source. 

The Pwning of Gamification

By Barry Kirk VP, Loyalty and Motivation, Bunchball
barry.kirk@bunchball.com, @barrykirk 

Mark my words: 2012 will be the year that loyalty marketers finally pwn gamification.

If you aren’t familiar with the expression “pwn” it’s video gamer parlance meaning to take ownership or dominate decisively. I’m intentionally using gamer language to highlight one of my pet peeves as both a marketer and a gamification practitioner: that a small but vocal part of the game design industry has chosen of late to take up intellectual arms against gamification, showering it with skepticism and even verbally colorful disdain.

If I understand their beef, it’s that gamification is an egregious example of marketers appropriating the pure art of game design in order to manipulate consumer behavior. And that they should have some special say in the future of gamification because it’s based on what they do for a living.

It’s understandable that they came to this conclusion. They just happen to be all wrong.

If the emergent gamification space is derivative of any other, it is clearly the loyalty marketing space, where game mechanics (points, levels, rewards) have been techniques wielded in consumer programs with precision and effectiveness for decades, particularly in the hospitality, airline and retail industries. Loyalty marketers are already experts at deploying game mechanics — they know how to create and manage sophisticated points-based economies, sustain engagement through level unlocks, and reward behavior with status-based benefits. What gamification promises them is:

  • A whole new suite of engagement techniques to incent profitable behaviors
  • A new set of analytics tools and data sets to derive customer insight
  • The technology to enable a dynamic customer experience and rapid response

The good news is that many in the loyalty space are waking up to the potential of gamification and evangelizing its promise. And it comes not a moment too soon, with less than 50% of companies now believing their current loyalty programs are working (Axiom). When consumers who spend hours playing Angry Birds can’t be bothered to spend a few minutes with your loyalty program, something is broken. Gamification can fix that.

So, game designers, time to give it a rest (and get back to creating awesome games like my current favorite, Journey). And loyalty marketers, time for you to get into the game.

How Gamification Fuels the Social Enterprise

By Steve Patrizi, Chief Revenue Officer at Bunchball
steve.patrizi@bunchball.com, @spatrizi 

As hundreds of thousands of businesses make big investments in social enterprise technologies, they know that the promise of social business is only realized if employees actually use and engage with the technology. It’s a lot like buying a beautiful, fast and powerful sports car: even if it’s built with nothing but the highest quality components, loaded with the latest features and assembled with the utmost craftsmanship, it won’t move an inch if you don’t add fuel. It will just sit, in the driveway, looking pretty, and getting you nowhere fast.

Gamification provides a powerful type of “engagement fuel” that ignites the social enterprise engine and keeps it running fast and smoothly, and last week we announced an exciting new partnership with Bluewolf to bring this fuel to businesses. Before I explain how, let’s take a quick look at what’s driving all the fuss around the “social enterprise,” anyway.

Ask any CEO “What’s your most important and valuable asset?” and the smartest and most successful will always answer the same way: “Our people. The people who create our products, connect with our customers, build our partnerships, manage our technology, handle our finances, design our strategies and organize our business are ultimately what make us successful as a company and separate us from our competitors. Our people are our competitive advantage.”

That may just sound like the right thing for a CEO to say, but it’s not a stretch to see how true this really is; we’ve all made decisions to buy - or not buy - from a business based on the interactions we’ve had with the people at that company, be it the service experience at a restaurant or the interactions we’ve had with the sales organization of a technology company. In fact, in business-to-business scenarios, where product parity is common, it’s often the interaction with the people at each company that ultimately decides who gets the business. People buy from people. I blogged about this years ago when I was at LinkedIn, and would argue it’s even more true today.

Until recently, it’s been really hard for a company to fully leverage this asset. For the most part, your customers and partners have only had access to your sales people, your customer service departments, and maybe your corporate communications departments. The rest of your employees were typically walled off from customers, partners, and potential employees. And it’s been hard for employees to collaborate with one another to make great things happen for customers; the people in your New York office can’t walk down the hall and physically huddle up with your San Francisco team, the product team has no idea what sales is hearing from customers, etc.

Fortunately, a number of tools have arrived in the past few years to address those issues. Salesforce, IBM, Jive and many others now provide powerful platforms that businesses can use to foster internal collaboration and develop dynamic customer communities. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and other tools allow businesses to showcase their talent, and the smartest companies are aggressively embracing these tools and encouraging their employees to participate. While they realize that creates some risk of having their best people recruited, they also know that their retention strategy needs to involve far more than just hiding their people, and the benefits of exposing their talented employees outweighs that risk.

But here’s the problem: these tools can be incredibly intimidating to use. Not only are you typically staring at a big white box begging you to “share something,” the very thought of broadcasting and sharing with thousands of customers, peers, partners, competitors and others is scary for people not familiar with the tools. Companies find themselves faced with a myriad of questions from employees: How do I use LinkedIn? What should I say on Twitter? Why should I use Chatter? How do I follow one of my colleagues on Jive? How do I participate in communities on IBM Connections? Since the interactions taking place on these platforms will reflect on the brand of both the individual and their employer, it’s understandable that there’s some apprehension, especially considering that social ink is indelible.

That’s where gamification comes into play. By adding the same ingredients that motivate hundreds of millions of people to deeply engage in gameplay, you can help them learn, embrace and sustainably use these social platforms. Today’s game designers have realized that the most effective way to engage people is to introduce them to a series of simple, basic “missions” that get progressively more advanced until the user has completely mastered how to play the game. Now those same techniques are being applied to social enterprise technologies.

Here’s an example: imagine opening up an enterprise software application and seeing a series of missions organized across 4 levels. The level 1 missions are very simple: Add Your Profile Photo, Join a Community, Follow a Colleague. As you complete the missions and advance to the next level, you’re presented with more advanced tasks, like Post a Comment, Share an Article, Start your own Blog. By the time you’ve completed Level 4, you’ve become an expert user of the platform, and are now presented with a set of missions related to your specific role: Close 5 Deals, Collect 5 Outstanding Invoices, Squash 25 Bugs. All the while, you’ll see progress bars showing you how close you are to the next milestone, along with leaderboards showing how well your colleagues are doing. An example of how this has been implemented in IBM’s Connections platform can be seen here.

Bluewolf is a great example of a company embracing this approach. As a technology consulting firm, they know their most important asset is the army of brilliant people they’ve recruited to join their company, and they want Bluewolf’ers to embrace and use social technologies to showcase their individual skills, expertise, thought leadership, and overall value. So they created an internal initiative called #GoingSocial, designed to teach their employees how best to leverage these tools. Employees are given a series of missions, implemented within Salesforce.com, to expose and engage them in the program. The results were so impressive right out of the gate that they’re now offering this service to their customers to help them achieve the same results, using gamification at the core to drive the behaviors.

So after you’ve assembled your dream social enterprise vehicle, don’t forget to fuel it with engagement elements to drive adoption. It’s best to do it right from the beginning when you’re rolling it out, but it works just as well with an existing implementation. Whether you’re using Salesforce.com, IBM Connections, Jive, or any other social platform, Bunchball can help you use gamification to realize the full potential of the social enterprise.

Millennials Just Want to Have Fun (and Work Hard While Doing It)

By Katherine Heisler, Account Executive, Bunchball
katherine.heisler@bunchball.com / @katheisler

Full disclosure: I am a Millennial. Yes it’s true - born in 198don’tworryabout it, I had a cell phone at 14, was on Facebook before the “grownups” got to join, and I identify strongly with other Millennials who see room for improvement on how we work. These ideas cause some to think of my generation as a group of lazy, good for nothing slackers - entitled to everything with zero work ethic. Ouch. And, incorrect. 

Millennials have an incredible sense of work ethic that’s simply motivated in a different way. So instead of giving up on us, let’s learn about techniques companies can use to bring out our best, while satisfying some new found work life expectations. I will endeavor to do this by sharing my experience with Bunchball’s product Nitro for Salesforce, a gamification plug-in for Salesforce.com CRM system, and how it satisfies five specific millennial expectations as uncovered by MTV’s recent study on Millennials in the workplace. 

  1. 89% of Millennials want their workplace to be social and fun (compared to only 60% of Boomers) - Having an outlet to connect with your colleagues on a social platform fosters group morale, which is why so many companies are going the Social Enterprise platform route. Rightly so. Most of my colleagues are located on the West Coast, while I’m here in New York. I wouldn’t know my colleagues or appreciate them the way I do if we didn’t use tools like group chat on Skype or Chatter on Salesforce.com. I’m also rewarded with points through Nitro for Salesforce for participating in these forums. Admittedly this is why I first engaged, but now it’s more than that. I work with real people who have great ideas and help me on a daily basis. Through positive reinforcement with points for commenting and the experience of communicating with my team from afar, my loyalty to my team has grown so deeply. Gamification can also be the fun factor in work. What’s more enticing? Having a run of the mill to-do list or engaging in missions and challenges that are transparent and acknowledged? 

     
  2. 61% of Millennials say they need specific directions from their boss to do their best work — a level twice as high as observed among Boomers - Millennials want to know they are on track more than any other generation, and thanks to growing up on Web, we want to know in real time.  Gamification technology satisfies this need, and also automates the process. I log on to Salesforce and see a list of challenges my boss wants me to focus on. This gives me a clear picture of what’s expected and allows me to zoom in on what matters most.  I can easily distill this information by seeing the corresponding point values or rewards that are generated by completing the tasks at hand. Here’s an example of some starter challenges:


     
  3. 8 out of 10 Millennials want regular feedback from their boss- It would be pretty difficult for any manager to provide employees with regular feedback, but with gamification technology I don’t need to ping my boss to know where I stand. Leaderboards tell me. For example, if I’m on Team East Coast, and we’re placing last on the team leaderboard, and I’m in last place on the team - - do I really need to ask my boss how I’m doing? It’s pretty obvious. On a more positive note, when I do log valuable actions or win challenges in Salesforce, I get instant feedback from pop up notifications congratulating me on a job well done. What a lovely feeling! And one that my boss doesn’t need to provide me with directly on a daily basis because it’s done automatically.


     
  4. 8 out of 10 Millennials think they deserve to be recognized more for their work- Okay, so maybe this is where we get a bad rep for being entitled. But we are the generation who got trophies for merely showing up to things, so when we actually do something worthy of recognition, we really want that recognition. Nitro for Salesforce uses a digital trophy case to incent the team to accomplish more challenges. Challenges I haven’t completed are greyed out. Challenges I have completed are highlighted on my profile page.  Furthermore, when I unlock a digital trophy, that accomplishment is broadcast in our newsfeed and on Chatter for the whole company to see. I can also use my points to redeem physical prizes in our rewards store. No golf clubs for me, thank you. I’m working on that first class ticket to San Francisco! 




     
  5. Three-fourths of Millennials think that if the workplace were like a game, they’d know how to “level up” faster than others- This one is too easy. All I want to say about this point is, make us prove it. See, look at me: I only have 6,525 bazingas to go

     

“Jive + Bunchball = Real Gamification”

By Ken Jones, VP Strategy and Corporate Development, Bunchball
ken.jones@bunchball.com / @kjducguy

This has been an exciting week for the teams at Bunchball and Jive Software. What started as an invitation to build an app for the Jive Apps Market prior to Jiveworld 2011, has resulted in the Jive Gamification Module that will be delivered through the Jive sales team and integrated as a native module for Jive Essential Plus customers.

Early in our interactions with the engineering and business teams at Jive, we recognized that not only did we have complementary technologies, but we also had a similar approach to delivering value to our customers. As a result, we were able to brainstorm with the Jive team and quickly build out the core functionality delivered by the Jive Gamification Module, formerly known as Nitro for Jive.

The real story will be in a few months when our first customers will be able to show results based on their usage of game mechanics within their Jive instance, and we’re talking about more than badges and points on a site. One thing that we’re particularly proud of is the ability for a community manager to customize missions and challenges for their entire community, a particular group, or even an individual.

The big question that everyone has been asking me as of late is why Jive selected Bunchball as the Gamification partner to be integrated into their solution. The answer is based on some things that you might not immediately expect. Of course, our technology and product platform, our market leadership, and our expertise with customer deployments were all major factors - you have to be better in those areas to get the nod from a public company like Jive. But I really think it comes down to people - I think we have shown through our ability to communicate and meet the needs of our mutual customers that we are going to work in concert with Jive and over-deliver for the end customer.  

I love the white board walls in the lobby of Jive’s Palo Alto Offices. If you’re in the area look for a little fun graffiti - “Jive + Bunchball = Real Gamification”

Props to our friends at Jive - Robin Bordoli, Mark Weitzel, Nathan Rawlins, Curtis Gross, Bill Lynch, Matt Tucker, Kenny Tucker, Chris Morace and the Ari Newman. 

Loyalty Expo Postmortem: Evolution of an Industry

By Barry Kirk VP, Loyalty and Motivation, Bunchball
barry.kirk@bunchball.com, @barrykirk 

Even as companies say they plan to invest strongly in their loyalty programs this year, consumers say they are valuing them less. The need to bridge that gap is the loyalty industry’s biggest challenge, and its best opportunity. 

That was my key takeaway from attending last week’s Loyalty Expo in Orlando, Florida where Bunchball was on hand as both a sponsor and presenter. As the singular annual event for any company serious about being a player in the loyalty space, I was encouraged to see so many of my peers there beating my favorite drum — the one signaling the need for the loyalty industry to boldly evolve into new models more relevant to the modern consumer. 

Latest Research Highlights Need for Change

The conference keynote featured a hard look at the state of the industry with highlights from brand new market research by Forrester, SAS and Acxiom, including: 

  • 58% of brands plan to increase spending on customer retention in 2012-13 (Acxiom) 
  • Yet most companies are still allocating less than 20% of their total marketing spend to customer retention (Acxiom) 
  • Marketers identify “differentiation” are their top loyalty program challenge (Forrester)  
  • And while 25% of customers feel very loyal to their preferred brands, 25% feel no loyalty at all. (Acxiom)

But most telling were these two (arguably related) data points:

  • 50% of brands say their retention strategy isn’t driving results (Acxiom)
  • Increasing customer spend trumps building brand evangelists as marketers’ top priority, 47% to 17%. (SAS) 

Is it any wonder that many loyalty strategies are seeing less than stellar results when programs lack differentiation and marketers are more concerned about driving spend that earning customer love? And aren’t those goals totally interdependent? The good news is that many in attendance agree that traditional transactional models (spend, earn points, redeem) are showing signs of fatigue and need to evolve - but to what? 

Time to Shift to Loyalty 3.0

Zain Raj, author of the new book Brand Rituals, provided the perfect framing for the shift required in the loyalty space during his Monday keynote. Raj argues that true loyalty is really about shifting the brand-consumer interaction from “routine” to “ritual” — from a low-involvement interaction to one that emotionally engages the consumer. I totally agree, and made my own case for this shift in Bunchball’s session “Loyalty 3.0: How Game Thinking is Changing the Rulebook on Consumer Engagement and Loyalty.” From my perspective, Loyalty 1.0 was characterized by points and rewards, and 2.0 by 1-to-1 marketing strategies. Loyalty 3.0 is now poised to become the new dominant model and will focus on the creation of “engaging experiences” that fundamentally change the brand-customer relationship. The measure of the success of these experiences will be whether they will prove themselves worthy of a consumer’s limited and precious “attention currency.” 

I see gamification as a solution uniquely primed to enable brands to create and grow those dynamic Loyalty 3.0 experiences. And judging by the interest we saw at Loyalty Expo, many brands agree. It’s an exciting time to be a loyalty marketer.

For another take on this year’s Loyalty Expo, with a shout out to Bunchball, check out Musings From Loyalty Expo by Sprocket Marketing.

DreamSimplicity interviews Bunchball partner BlueWolf at Cloudforce 2012, and gets their take on social gaming.

Why Gamification is the exact opposite of what you think it is.

By Steve Patrizi, Chief Revenue Officer at Bunchball
steve.patrizi@bunchball.com, @spatrizi 

It’s an understandable perception: you hear the word gamification, and when pronounced correctly [gay-muh-fi-kay-shuhn], the word “game” slaps you right in the face. It must be about making games and playing and having fun, right?

Wrong. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. To understand why, let’s start by turning back the clock a bit.

In 2005, Rajat Paharia founded Bunchball as a social games company, long before people were planting virtual corn or throwing birds at pigs. He noticed that every time he was making a game, he was using a similar set of techniques to engage players: he would give people a clear problem to solve like completing a puzzle in a defined period of time, he would give them a measure of progress like points and levels, he gave them a sense of social status like high score tables, and he would provide some degree of reward, like unlocking new levels or getting new abilities. None of these were revolutionary concepts - in fact, game designers had been exploiting these same exact techniques for years, particularly in the video game space, and as a result millions of people would devote hours and hours trying to save princesses from gorillas, collect pellets in a maze or help a frog cross a busy freeway.

This made sense: the game designers knew that if you satisfied very basic human needs and motivators around progress, status, and reward, people would become deeply engaged in your programs. And they weren’t the only ones who knew this: for decades, martial arts instructors have given their students colored belts as a measure of progress, they’ve bestowed status in the form of rank relative to students with lesser belts, and they’ve rewarded students with ceremonies and recognition when they’ve “leveled up” to a new belt. The travel industry has also known this: give people miles as a measure of progress against acquiring a new level like “Premier Executive,” give them status with early boarding, and reward them with better seats and upgrades, and you will get people to not only engage with your loyalty program, but they will buy seats on your airline over others.

But for some reason, these game mechanics that so deeply engaged people were completely missing from where they were desperately needed: consumer and enterprise digital experiences. In a world where hundreds of thousands of sites launch every month vying for user engagement, and where millions of people are asked to use enterprise software for hours a day at work, none of these proven engagement techniques were present, in large part because it wasn’t easy to implement them.

But what if we had the technology to add these game mechanics that the game designers (and others) have exploited for years, and applied them to consumer facing web sites and enterprise software applications? Would we get the same levels of engagement? Rajat wanted to find out, so in 2007 he built a cloud-based “gamification engine” that would allow businesses to add missions, levels, points, leaderboards, and rewards to any digital experience to drive high value user behaviors, with rich analytics to understand what was happening. He called it Nitro, and signed up NBC as a customer. They didn’t want a game, they wanted high levels of engagement on the website for their hit show The Office. And they got it, big time - to the point where, 5 years later, NBCU uses Nitro today across the majority of their marquee brands like Bravo, USA Network, SyFy, Telemundo, and others. And thus the Gamification movement was born. Not making games, but borrowing the techniques that game designers have always used to engage audiences.

Fast forward to today, and gamification is now being applied in the enterprise: not so that employees can goof off, but to help them be more productive. Again, these techniques aren’t new: the notions of progress, like completing milestones in a project, status, like your reputation in a company, and rewards, like recognition in front of peers or a promotion, are nothing new and have been proven time and again to motivate workers, but they are completely missing from the tools we’re being asked to use on a daily basis at work. As a result, the tools go unused and employees become disengaged. 

That’s all changing. Companies large and small are beginning to see a massive opportunity to leverage game mechanics in the enterprise to engage employees in initiatives and applications to get better work done faster - to increase productivity in a way that actually motivates, engages and retains their employee base. 

Here’s an example. Imagine opening up Salesforce.com and seeing a mission titled “President’s Club.” To earn the “Presidents Club” award, you need to complete the following missions in Salesforce:

- Hit 110% of quota

- Close 5 opportunities worth $150K or more

- Add 10 new accounts

- Enter 5 new C-Level contacts with complete records

- Be one of the first 5 people to complete the above missions

The employee would not only have a clear problem to solve, but, in real time, can track the progress he or she is making, right in Salesforce.com, without the need for any manual tracking - its all automatically being tracked as work is being done. That progress is completely transparent to others in the company, bestowing a degree of status compared to those who will also be competing for the President’s Club reward. Most business leaders would love to have their employees focused on and completing those missions in the enterprise software tools that the company has invested time and money in deploying. They clearly map to business results and smack of productivity.

Which is the exact opposite of what many people think of when they hear the word gamification.

At Bunchball, we’re partnering with a number of companies to make all of this a reality. Our Nitro for Salesforce solution makes the above scenario completely possible, today. We’ve brought gamification to Jive and IBM Connections to help employees quickly learn how to use these applications to be more productive, faster. And we’re just getting started.

So for now, while we’re still in the early days, it’s understandable that the term gamification conjures up images of employees playing games, even if that’s the exact opposite of what’s happening. But at Bunchball, we proudly stand behind the term and always have, and believe that over the course of the next two years, gamification in the enterprise context will, by default, be associated with highly engaged, highly productive employees. We’re looking forward to playing a big part in making that happen.