GAMIFICATION.COM - The Official Blog of Bunchball

5 Ways to Get More Out of Salesforce.com Using Gamification

Fri, 25 May 2012 09:41:46 -0700

By Robert Mullany, Sales Engineer, Bunchball
robert.mullany@bunchball.com /@RobertMullany

Enterprise gamification has gained a lot of traction over the past year. As with other “firsts” in Gamification, Bunchball has led the way in the use of game mechanics to motivate employees within the enterprise. We’ve worked with companies to integrate game mechanics across a wide spectrum of enterprise applications and developed Nitro for Salesforce. Nitro for Salesforce is the first out-of-the-box solution for adding gamification to Salesforce.com and was awarded the Best New App Award at Dreamforce 2011.

When we talk to organizations about gamification, common questions that arise are “Where are game mechanics best suited to motivate employees?” or “Where can our organization start with Gamification?” While game mechanics can deliver value to a wide number of functions and the answer should be tailored based on the needs of each individual organization, here are some ideas to get you started:

Sales Teams

Sales Contests and “spiff” programs have been around as long as sales teams. Managers have long struggled with manual tracking methods while participants have found themselves with little visibility to the results until after the contest has ended. Clearly, if the goal of the contest is to drive behavior, this is a major downfall. Nitro for Salesforce can automate these contests while providing users with visibility into where they stand in the contest by tracking activities such as call volume, lead conversions and opportunity wins.

Customer Service Reps

Customer service reps are often measured on the number of cases resolved, speed of case resolution, and customer satisfaction scores. This provides a wealth of quantitative data accessible by Nitro for Salesforce around which a gamification program can be built.

Customer Service Case Deflection

Many companies are investing in the Salesforce customer portal and knowledge base to enable customers to self-service support inquiries. However, potentially as a result of convenience, potentially just out of habit, many customers still pick up the phone and call customer service reps. Game mechanics in Nitro for Salesforce can encourage customers to not only use the existing knowledge base content but also to contribute content and respond to questions in public Q&A forums using Salesforce.com’s Answers module. One customer supporting another not only reduces the burden on an organization’s support teams, but also displays an active community to potential customers.

Training and Education

Whether facilitated through a formal Learning Management System (LMS) or through Salesforce.com directly, new employee training and ongoing employee education are generally high priorities. They are also areas where organizations struggle with a lack of motivation and limited analytics. Game mechanics can motivate employees to complete the required training while also providing managers with detailed analytics around what is working and what may need fine tuning. Since Nitro can be leveraged across platforms, certifications or points earned in an LMS system can be displayed on a User’s profile in Salesforce.com.

Chatter Adoption

More and more organizations are buying into the vision of the Social Enterprise yet still struggle with how to make it a reality. As a reformed Chatter-skeptic, I fully understand the hesitance facing many users: “does this tool provide any real value for me?” Nitro for Salesforce served as the catalyst to convert me into a believer. When I began at Bunchball, I found that posting to Chatter was a quick way to boost my meager score in Nitro. Since others had discovered the same, our Chatter community was flush with active users looking for conversations where they could add value. As a result, users were able to experience the value of the system firsthand. As a Sales Engineer, I discovered that I could answer a technical question once publicly instead of 35 times via email. We still have an active community as everyone has now seen firsthand the value Chatter provides.

Bunchball Guest Post: Gamification – Rules Of Engagement?

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:43:19 -0700

Special guest post from Bunchball partner Bluewolf. By Kate Hagemann, Director of Change Management & Adoption, Bluewolf

This special guest post is a follow-up to Kate’s previous post, Gamification – Why Play?

Now, let’s discuss what to consider if the organization has said, “We want to play.” As with any major program that an organization wants to implement, there are serious considerations to implementing a gamification strategy.

Suggestions/Challenges/Risks:

A well-done gamificationstrategy takes constant updates. Stale games or having no new challenges upon completing the first challenge can be demotivating. Employees/consumers will think, “Is that all? Do they think we aren’t any smarter than this and we couldn’t complete this challenge?” Have several ready to deploy immediately and be agile with updates if the game is not a success.
The games need to be relevant – a solid gamification strategy gets people to accomplish something they need to accomplish. Don’t insert a random fun-only game into work just to have fun. Make it count or colleagues will think they are not valued for the actual work they do.
Have relevant rewards for various audiences – there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the prize/reward. One person may want points and badges to earn a gift card, another may just want verbal or written recognition, while yet another may want lunch with the boss or a free day off. Know the employees’ and consumers’ “5 Languages of Appreciation” and allow people to be rewarded as they want to be.
The game must be challenging, but not impossible. If it is too easy, the organization will not be able to keep up with providing new challenges and employees/consumers will feel disrespected. If it’s too difficult, it may demotivate people who think they can’t possibly win so they will not even try.
Be sure to consider the basic fundamentals of driving change. In addition to the rewards, remember to address any risks to employees and consumers associated to the behavior the organization wants to drive. If applicable, be sure to take away replacements to the wanted behavior/action (such as other tools, other products, etc.) and have back up strategies to drive change such as accountability for employees who do not embrace the change. If the risks outweigh the rewards, the current state is comfortable, and there is no accountability, no game will drive the behavior. Think and execute holistically on your gamification strategy.
Communicate regularly – do not implement a game and forget to communicate. Just because it is there does not mean people will know the value proposition for them to engage in the game. Address the standard who, what, where, when, why and how fundamentals. Have a communications plan alongside the gamification strategy and implement it as a total package to ensure success.

As I was introduced to gaming at work, I realized how it brought out the closet gamer in me. There is definitely a value proposition for organizations to embark upon a gamificationstrategy. However, my experience dictates the suggestions I make above. Though it boosted my engagement on the behaviors Bluewolf is looking to drive, we will continue to do even better as we go back through my checklist. Like with any technology implementation, we will approach our gamification strategy as a continuously evolving program.

Change management consulting is the #1 reason organizations succeed with technology adoption. Check out Bluewolf”s Change Management Consulting Practice and join the agile conversation with Bluewolf on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Taking a Look at Transmedia

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:54:00 -0700

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

Have you been hearing the term Transmedia a lot lately? I certainly have from the Media clients that I work with. So I went to Wikipedia to check the definition.

“Transmedia storytelling (also known as multiplatform storytelling) is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies, not to be confused with traditional cross-platform media franchises, sequels or adaptations.

From a production standpoint, it involves creating content that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives. In order to achieve this engagement, a transmedia production will develop stories across multiple forms of media in order to deliver unique pieces of content over multiple channels. Importantly, these pieces of content are not only linked together (overtly or subtly), but are in narrative synchronization with each other”.

It is still the early days in this genre but in its purest form this type of entertainment experience is very compelling for the audience and takes advantage of the multi-screen craze that has infiltrated living rooms everywhere. How many screens are going when your family is watching TV? In my house two teenagers and one soon-to-be teenager ensures that there is never a lull in the digital action.

Jesse Redniss, Sr. VP for Digital at USA Network is a true pioneer in this space. The recent Hashtag Killer gamification campaign was created to support their Psych program. At The Mike Johnson blog, you can view a video of Jesse Redniss at Social Media Week running down the program itself and some of the amazing results it drove:

128 million total page views
15 minutes per visit on the site
60% of users returned more than five times
15% of users returned every day

These types of transmedia experiences will become more and more prevalent as creative marketers learn to utilize all the tools at their disposal to drive sustainable engagement. The audience will continue to participate more fully when they can be an integral part of the story itself.

This past weekend I was in Baltimore and went to the building where they filmed one of my favorite shows from back in the day, Homicide Life on the Street. If you happen to be a fan of The Wire, Homicide was its predecessor. Now, nearly 20 years after the program debuted, I can still remember how riveted I was with the story and the characters that drove it. If today’s technology existed back then I am sure I would have happily participated in an ongoing digital loyalty program as a fan of the show and in the transmedia experiences that flow from it.

At Bunchball, we are proud to be a small part of the group of partners working with USA Network to break new ground!

Guest Post: Gamification – Why Play?

Tue, 08 May 2012 09:35:18 -0700

Special guest post from Bunchball partner Bluewolf. By Kate Hagemann, Director of Change Management & Adoption, Bluewolf

I am not a ‘gamer.’ I have not downloaded Angry Birds to my iPhone. I do not regularly play any video games, excluding the occasional Rock Band performance. Don’t stop reading now though, thinking, “Why is she writing a blog about gamification?”

The answer is: gamification has actually brought out the gamer in me. This has proven to me that there is a value proposition for companies to embark upon the research, strategy and execution of gamification for their organizations. Statistically, over 70% of employees are disengaged at work and are costing billions of dollars in lost productivity, poor performance, and poor service to their customers.

My personal experience with gamification at Bluewolf, with past employers, and current clients has helped me see how it can be used to engage currently disengaged employees and drive the desired behaviors.

Gamification is the use of game mechanics to encourage and reward certain behaviors. Some simple common examples include the use of earning points to drive consumer loyalty (think of airlines and hotels) or progress statuses like consumers see on Turbo Tax showing the road-map of where they are, when they will be done, current return or amount owed, etc.

With Wii Fit, consumers “unlock” new exercises upon completing others. Now, salesforce.com has plug-ins where organizations can leverage badges, points, rankings, and leaderboards to drive frequent, consistent, and quality user adoption of the organizations’ business processes within the application.

Advantages to Gamification:

Games can facilitate a sense of accomplishment. Showing people from where they came, where they are and where they are going gives purpose. It’s a proven fact that having goals, clear expectations and seeing value of a job done well drives engagement.
Games can facilitate healthy competition among sales people who are driven by being at the top of a leaderboard. I personally worked late one night just to get to the #1 seat on our Chatter Leaderboard. I was devastated when I awoke the next morning and had been bumped down to #3 by my UK team. I started posting more comments – relevant to my work – but mostly to get back to #1 (I’ll explain further in my next post).
Games drive more attempts to be successful. Statistically, the billions of people gaming lose 80% of the time, but still return to complete a challenge presented. The sense of accomplishment when presented with a challenge emits emotion where emotion may have previously been absent, also driving more engagement.
Implementing a gamification strategy can also simply be fun for employees and consumers. When done well, it shows colleagues and consumers that the organization cares about their engagement. A good tip is to leverage various employees in the organization and consumer focus groups to design the game to ensure what will be fun, relevant, and motivating to them.

Though a new word in the industry, gamification is not a new concept. For eons, humans have been motivated by competition, fun, and personal challenges. We just now have so many new technologies and social networks permitting us to reach a much wider audience. When done well through a full plan/execution strategy and the inclusion of employees and consumers, it can drive change and increase engagement providing an organization with some exciting results.

For suggestions on what to consider as you use gamification within your organization, stay tuned for my next blog:”Gamification – Rules of Engagement?”

Join the agile conversation with Bluewolf on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

3 Sponsorship Ideas for Gamification

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:28:00 -0700

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

By now you’ve heard about the powerful metrics gamification can drive on sites. According to the third party agency Hobson Associates, Bunchball customers on average boast a +40% increase in uniques, +100% increase in page views, +85% increase in time on site, and +100% increase on repeat visits. These are the type of statistics advertisers drool over, and they will definitely help you sell the basic ad units on your site. But gamification is all about differentiating your site while rewarding your users for loyalty, and we don’t see why this shouldn’t apply to your advertisers as well.

Go beyond the CPM with these 3 sponsorship ideas for your gamification deployment:

1. Sponsored Gamification Widgets. It’s harder to ignore messaging that is ingrained in my experience than it is to ignore messaging that is on the sideline of my experience. Bunchball’s Nitro platform offers widgets that house gamification elements like Leaderboards, Trophy Cases, Profiles, Trivia and Social Broadcasting. All of these widgets are completely skinnable and customizable, so you can offer your sponsors a chance to “own” them for a predetermined amount of time. These sponsorable widgets can be a great upsell to reinforce branding for advertisers who purchase ad units on your site. Internet users are increasingly wired to ignore standard ad units, but when they check out their standing on the leaderboard, sponsored by your sponsor, there’s a more direct branding opportunity that reach people who are already highly engaged with the gamification experience.

2. Leverage Registration for Leads. People are inundated with whitepaper and webinar offerings that are used for lead generation. Besides over-saturation, these invites fall on deaf ears because it’s not really about the prospect – it’s about the advertiser. Gamification can be used to reinvent lead generation efforts by satisfying human needs rather than work musts. For example, you could launch a trivia game that’s accessible after a registration page. Trivia creates incentives for people to show off their smarts and it satisfies their need for status with points and leaderboard standings. Every month can feature a new sponsor that receives the leads generated from those who played the game. To make it even more appealing to your advertiser and your cash flow, you could work with your sponsor to include targeted questions and answers in the game that indicate a valuable quality of a lead, and you can sell those who qualified at a premium price. Or maybe your advertiser is seeking highly educated leads about the trivia topic. You could sell the top ten performers pulled from our leaderboards at an A-grade price as well.

3. Feature a Sponsored Gamification Track. The previous two ideas give your sponsors a way to be uniquely highlighted on your site, but why not bring them all the way into the action? Work with sponsors to create specific challenges or tracks to motivate your users to engage with their brand. This can be done as simply as using featured challenges like, “Share this sponsor message on Twitter or Facebook for 25 points,” or you could go deeper (at a higher price point) to create a separate program focused entirely on your sponsor. With Bunchball’s platform Nitro, you can create a new point category and incorporate branded badges for your sponsor’s program. These special points and badges can only be earned when users complete challenges focused on the sponsor’s content. Naturally, the end game should be a coveted reward only your sponsor could offer or perhaps entry into a sweepstakes, also sponsored by your client. Users would need X amount of sponsored points or must have earned the sponsor’s badge in order to be eligible for the reward or entry. Thanks to the robust nature of the Nitro platform, these challenges and rewards can be extended to teams as well.

A gamification program will enable you to offer truly unique and valuable campaigns for sponsors that will award your company, your advertisers, and your users alike. If you’ve been thinking about how to pay for gamification technology, now you have three ideas to bring to your team. Have some additional sponsorship ideas? Let me know, and good selling!

The Next Wave of Loyalty Technology

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:35:10 -0700

By Kyle Clark, Sales Engineer, Bunchball
kyle.clark@bunchball.com /@kylepclark

How many loyalty programs are you a member of? Better yet, how many loyalty programs are you an active member of? Are you an active member because the program offers you the best discount, or because you truly love the brand? These are the questions that keep Loyalty Marketing professionals up at night.

It is no secret that consumers flock to loyalty programs that offer instant discounts and savings. However this is an expensive proposition for a company that wishes to increase retention and engagement. The facts are that 63% of consumers join discount style programs, while another 55% join programs that allow you to earn and redeem points for products and services. So in order to increase loyalty, do you have to buy it?

Loyalty Fatigue Syndrome

According to recent Forrester research, many companies introduce loyalty programs with the hope of increasing customer retention (58%), increasing profitability/revenue (48%), and increasing engagement (37%). Colloquy numbers have consistently shown that enrollment in loyalty programs is up, but the average consumer remains active in less than half of these programs. Additionally, out of the $48 billion earned annually in program rewards, $16 billion goes unredeemed. Both of these are signs that the traditional loyalty model is showing fatigue. The model may be effective, but is slowly losing its ability to engage consumers.

Let’s face it – loyalty programs are a commodity, and everyone has one. But what makes the loyalty program a commodity? In a simple form, a loyalty program rewards you for the behaviors that add value to the company. The more you participate, the more rewards you achieve. The problem is, although the earning and redeeming structures are unique in each program, the basic idea is the same. Participate, earn, redeem. That’s it.

A product becomes a commodity when it is indistinguishable from like products. Imagine coffee – a commodity – the average consumer doesn’t care where the bean was grown in Colombia, they only care that Starbucks roasted it. In a loyalty program, this is what consumers see between programs - a variety of undifferentiated offerings. What makes this so? Are Loyalty Strategists behind on industry trends?

The Loyalty Technology Gap

Loyalty Technology is the offender. The original loyalty technology was rudimentary – stamps on a card that could be redeemed for rewards or discounts (Subway Club anyone?). Loyalty 1.0 introduced a technology offering that tracked purchases and allowed consumers to accrue points that could later be redeemed for rewards. The more points, the bigger the reward. Loyalty 2.0 attempted to personalize the experience using 1 to 1 marketing. Since a Loyalty Program is learning all about your consumer habits with a brand, the technology should know all about you and be able to “speak to your interests”. In current loyalty programs, email is the life-line in listening and responding to the customer. With open rate declining over the past few years, this type of marketing is losing its effectiveness.

For Loyalty 2.0, campaign management tools were born that rely on an increasingly ineffective form of communication – email. From here, Loyalty Technology needs to progress. It should progress to a place that provides differentiation, drives retention, and increases revenue. In order to realize these common Loyalty Marketer goals, Loyalty 3.0 needs only one focus – Engaging Experiences.

The Next Wave of Loyalty Technology

Gamification can provide this engaging experience. Basic gamification techniques were born in Loyalty 1.0 and Loyalty 2.0 – Points, Levels, and Rewards. In Loyalty 2.0 the experience was meant to communicate with the consumer by tailoring to their interests, however this largely resulted in an increase in unread emails. Loyalty 3.0 technology needs gamification at its core to create a differentiated engaging experience.

Traditional Loyalty Technology that just adds gamification “on the side” will fall short, and be unable to create an ideal Loyalty 3.0 experience. Gamification technology encompasses the core ideas found in Loyalty Technology today, but goes well beyond the traditional ideas that have worked for years in Loyalty Technology. Gamification technology and techniques should be the core of Loyalty 3.0 technology. This new wave of Loyalty Technology will provide a platform that drives sustainable engagement with the brand without continually increasing point payouts. Loyalty Technology that uses gamification as its loyalty platform will find new ways to tap into human desires that make people want to return – not just because of a discount, but due to an enjoyable experience that connects them to the brand.

How the Best New App at Dreamforce 2011 Leverages the Force.com Platform

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:26:00 -0700

By Robert Mullany, Sales Engineer, Bunchball
robert.mullany@bunchball.com /@RobertMullany

As a leading evangelist for cloud applications, Salesforce.com has not only created an incredibly successful business, but also developed a robust partner community. Nearly a thousand add-on applications are featured on the AppExchange (http://appexchange.salesforce.com) which has been billed as an iTunes for the Enterprise. These partner applications range from free apps that Salesforce customers can easily add to their environments to full enterprise solutions meant to replace legacy systems from Fortune 500 software companies.

I’ve had the pleasure of working in the Salesforce.com partner community for the past six years. During that time, I’ve seen hundreds of partner applications and thousands of customer implementations. I’ve been impressed both by the dramatic enhancements Salesforce has made to their platform to facilitate app development and the creative ways partners have leveraged this functionality.

When I first saw a demo of Bunchball’s Nitro for Salesforce app, which was awarded the Best New App Award at Dreamforce 2011, I was instantly struck not only by the business value (who doesn’t struggle with adoption around enterprise applications), but also by the extent to which it creatively leveraged the power offered by the Force.com platform.

Had I known more about the company at the time, I suppose I wouldn’t have been so surprised. It makes a lot of sense that the first company to build a Gamification platform would also be the first company to build a Gamification application on Salesforce.com. Similarly, it makes sense that the company that has repeatedly proven to be the thought leader in Gamification would steer the industry into Enterprise Gamification.

So how has Bunchball leveraged the Force.com platform in innovative ways?

Visualforce Pages

Nitro for Salesforce leverages the flexibility of Visualforce pages to both display data to end users and enable the administration of the application through drag and drop functionality. End users can view dynamic individual and team leaderboards, point totals and progress towards missions as well as redeem points in a built-in rewards store.

While that is impressive, there are a number of applications on the AppExchange that have built slick user interfaces using Visualforce pages. Where Nitro for Salesforce really differentiates itself is in the administrative functions. Teams are created using a 100% drag and drop interface and the screen layout can be controlled via an included WYSIWYG-style Visualforce editor. This was functionality that I had never seen in a partner application and it’s exciting to see this embodiment of the Salesforce.com mantra of “clicks not code” built natively on the Force.com platform.

Apex Triggers
Apex Triggers are the functionality that allow an administrator to “do something” after a user creates or edits data in the system. This “something” could be automatically updating other fields based on the new data or sending an email alert. In the case of Nitro for Salesforce, Apex Triggers are used to send an API call to Nitro to track and reward the user’s activity.

While Apex triggers facilitate powerful functionality in Salesforce.com, they have been one area where the “clicks not code” paradigm historically breaks down. In the past, a user has had to code these triggers from scratch to achieve the desired functionality. Here again, Nitro for Salesforce has broken barriers by introducing an Apex Trigger generator. This functionality allows a business user to easily generate an Apex Trigger by selecting options from drop down menus. Based on the user’s selections, the Apex Trigger code is automatically generated. Once again, I was thoroughly impressed by this functionality as I had not seen anything similar before.

It’s exciting to see an application that was introduced less than one year ago pushing the boundaries of the Force.com platform so significantly. I’m looking forward to seeing just how far our Product team can take this offering in the months ahead. Check out all of the features in Nitro for Salesforce by downloading our free trial from the AppExchange.

Engage! Gamification for the Enterprise

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 10:33:16 -0700

By Molly Kittle, Vice President of Digital Strategy, Bunchball
molly.kittle@bunchball.com /@MolKittle

The following post orignally appeared on Jive Software’s official blog.

As we move from the old enterprise model [that relies on centralized control] to a more collaborative and social model [that encourages a social intranet as the driving force for information dissemination & communication] it’s more important than ever that we recognize and empower the people who drive conversations and engagement.

The smart enterprise is focused on increased efficacy: Onboarding. Adoption. Enablement. Retention. How do we help our employees learn to use and get the most out of the tools we’ve invested in? It’s a big problem. It’s estimated that disengaged employees are costing businesses 300 billion dollars a year in lost productivity. (Gallup - http://gmj.gallup.com/content/12157/power-praise-recognition.aspx and http://www.gallup.com/consulting/52/employee-engagement.aspx).

My job is to help our clients map their business goals to the appropriate motivational tools. Over the years we’ve seen that integrating tactics from game-play into a social intranet has a direct impact on motivating employees - and there are several specific characteristics of games that deserve a strategic place within the enterprise: Performance, Achievement, & Social Interaction.

Performance

Real-time-feedback - The immediate delivery of positive or corrective feedback solidifies learnings or provides an opportunity for adjustment. Surface a notification that an employee is on track or has just been successful.
Transparency - Show your employees where they stand in relation to company goals and others in the organization. You can do this with leaderboards, newsfeeds, progress bars, badges and other techniques.
Goal-setting - Break large goals down into achievable steps on a path toward long term success.

Achievement

Badges - Universally understood symbols that indicate mastery of skills and accomplishment. Display them on a profile and they can act as a visual checklist or a point of pride and status.
Levels - A shorthand way of indicating long-term, sustained achievement and status. An employee’s current Level Icon should be closely tied to their profile photo, name or other identity items and is most effective when used to unlock special privileges or abilities.
Mastery - The drive to master new skills and feel competent is an essential human motivator. (see self determination theory and this blog about the dopamine response) For example, onboarding employees shouldn’t be about reading instructions, it should revolve around “teaching by doing” - coached along by a system that provides step-by-step guidance, until they feel they have sufficient mastery to venture off on their own.

Social

Competition - Employees and organizations often involve competitive situations. There is an opportunity to move beyond competing for a position or a raise and foster competition around enablement (top performers/first to complete training).
Collaboration – Introduce Groups and Teams Team provide an opportunity to connect and bond with others “like” you, (even if the only similarity is that you’re on the same team), and work together as a cohesive unit to accomplish goals and compete with other teams.
Connection - We are spending more of our work lives online and the line between personal and professional continues to blur. Encouraging employees to share their work success with their social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) deepens their pride in accomplishment while it’s broadcast to a broader audience.

These game mechanics are tools that the socially aware enterprise can use to facilitate and direct employees during all phases of their lifecycle; from onboarding to adoption to enablement to ongoing performance and job satisfaction, which translate into retention…

How do you think some of these concepts could work in your organization?

Analytics: From One Side of the Equation, to the Other

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:39:00 -0700

By Keith Conley, Analytics Manager, Bunchball
keith.conley@bunchball.com, @kmcusa

I’d like to start with a brief introduction. My name is Keith Conley and I’m the Analytics Manager for Bunchball. I joined the organization in November of 2011 and have delighted in applying metrics to quantify the various benefits gamification can have on an organization, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

I started in analytics in 2006 for the Wunderman Agency in San Francisco. Before joining, I confidently told my future employer “My clients will know which half is wasted.” In case you’re not familiar, that’s a reference to a quote attributed to about a half dozen people (Henry Ford, John Wanamaker, Lord Lever, Walt Patrick, etc.) stating “he knew half of his advertising was wasted, he just didn’t know which half.” I’ve long felt the answers were available and have been excited to grow and learn in a fast-paced and demanding industry.

Thus far, I’ve been able to help a host of top-tier clients optimize campaigns in Online, Search, TV, Mobile (including tablets!), Radio and OOH using both quantitative and qualitative measurement tools. Along the way, I’ve learned how to optimize creative, messaging and media partners on a variety of outcomes and goals, such as lead generation, sales, purchase intent, awareness and others.

These opportunities allowed me to work with great people in exciting, dynamic environments and also lead me to continue seeking new challenges. When I discovered Bunchball, I saw a new, exciting opportunity. While advertising is primarily concerned with the driving of traffic, or creating a response with the audience in their environment, I often came across chasms where my efforts of driving traffic were then stymied by the effectiveness of the “landing page” and its ability to, in a general sense, convert the audience to the client’s intended response. As we tightened the paid media and optimized creative executions, we saw returns in efficiency, but in general, conversion rates from each site remained static. This is due to the lack of coordination and incremental testing of web pages and landing environments.

It was easy to see how I could be on the other side of the equation with Bunchball’s approach to gamification. Bunchball’s products allow site owners to motivate their audience toward desired outcomes by providing a richer, more rewarding experience for the audience. The products also produce a rich set of behavioral data which can be used to perform critical analyses on adoption, retention, continuous engagement and content optimization. Focusing on the customer, we’ve developed a structure for measurement and learning during deployment. The key has been to work with our clients to identify their goals and define KPIs that ensure our analysis and optimization will map to their overall success.

Analysis on this side of the house is so powerful, because it has the ability to improve ROI from all advertising channels. As our clients increase their engagement metrics, it’s been very rewarding to watch them light up when realizing the impact the efforts are having on banner advertising and search efforts.

The first 6 months have been very exciting and we’re just getting started. Impacting external marketing efforts only addresses one (Customer Engagement) of our 3 target segments. Our products have separate, but just as meaningful impact on employee motivation and customer loyalty scenarios. Going forward, I’ll explain more of our analytics methodology and demonstrate how gamification is meeting the needs of our clients. Stay tuned!

Guest Post - Gamifying Social Collaboration: Big Wins for #GoingSocial

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:58:11 -0700

Special guest post from Bunchball partner Bluewolf. By Natasha Oxenburgh, Bluewolf Editorial and Community Coordinator

In January, we sent out a company-wide survey to gauge the state of collaboration internally and externally. We asked every Bluewolf employee:

How active they were on every major social network
How they felt about building their personal brand via the social web
What was holding them back

Our #GoingSocial strategy - to build collaboration and unlock the knowledge trapped inside our enterprise cyber walls - was based around that very feedback. We began proselytizing #GoingSocial in February.

In early March, we launched the sexiest part of the campaign = Gamification.

We implemented Bunchball’s Nitro for Salesforce (N4SF) with the goal of incentivizing internal and external collaboration (points, badges, and tangible rewards for social actions such as Chatter posts and comments, publishing a blog post, adding and creating social profiles, sharing Bluewolf content to external networks, adding content to Salesforce, etc).

The results so far have been more than encouraging:

1. Our corporate Bluewolf Klout score, steady for several months at 42, shot up to 45 since the #GoingSocial launch. This signals an increase in our online influence as it measures engagement with our brand (e.g. mentions of @Bluewolf and retweets). This result is due to the increased Bluewolf content sharing by our employee base and their subsequent connections.

2. The average use of Chatter within Bluewolf has significantly spiked since the launch. Check out the graph below that represents the average user’s Chatter Activity (posts, comments) over the past 2 years. Note the average activity in particular for the last two months.

3. Our website traffic from social media (including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, SlideShare, etc) has doubled since implementing Bunchball in early March. The “Spread the Word” feature in Bunchball’s N4SF has significantly helped our end users easily share Bluewolf content via their external networks from within Salesforce.

We’ve had great feedback on our revamped Pack Profiles, which are now more social and knowledge-based. This well-visited area of our site provides our employees with the perfect opportunity to leverage Bluewolf to build their personal brands. We’ve had several key analysts say they never seen such an integrated solution as this before. Here’s what people are saying:

With the positive results we’ve seen thus far, what have been the motivating factors for user adoption?

I asked some of our stand-out Bluewolf employees who have really embraced #GoingSocial. They say that there are several contributing drivers:

knowledge sharing and relationship building
enthusiasm about sharing Bluewolf content
availability of resources and the ease of knowledge sharing from within Salesforce
gamification rewards and badges
visibility within the organization - through N4SF

#GoingSocial is garnering support. The challenge over the coming months will be to maintain the enthusiasm and participation. User feedback will be central in this effort.

Follow our popular Pinterest board for the latest updates on our #GoingSocial program. Learn more about our #GoingSocial service offering.

Media and Publishers: See You at the Crossroads?

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:04:00 -0700

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

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:26:00 -0700

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

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 12:58:00 -0700

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

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 08:33:00 -0700

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

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:16:22 -0700

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)

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:50:00 -0700

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.

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?
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:
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.
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!
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”

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:37:00 -0700

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

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 08:22:00 -0700

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...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 04:34:02 -0700

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.

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:23:00 -0700

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.