Business Gamification For Dummies
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If you seek to gamify is a customer-facing online community, then odds are the community expert framework will meet your needs. It enables you to establish user reputation hierarchies by highlighting reputable contributors. This not only encourages quality contributions, it also helps with content filtering, not to mention enabling site visitors to make user-to-user connections.

Types of businesses that might benefit from the community expert framework in gamification include the following:

  • Publishing media (blogs, newspapers, and magazines): Media outlets are places where communities of highly opinionated people converge. The community expert framework gives those users an opportunity to build a reputation in the topics that interest them most. Users are more likely to leave quality comments when they receive community status for these contributions. This framework integrates seamlessly with common media user experiences such as commenting systems.

  • Crowdsourcing (Q&A, creative, and reviews): Employing crowdsourcing in gamification is a little like establishing mini-contests, where the “winner” gets to perform a certain task — such as designing a logo — often for compensation. Crowdsourcing is a great fit for the community expert framework because users are quickly identified for their expertise and social standing.

    Often, crowdsourced content has quality issues; it can be difficult to get through all the bad content when you’re looking for the diamonds in the rough. Community expert-based reputations help identify and showcase the top content creators.

  • Discussion communities and forums: Traditional Q&A forums, and other online communities less formally, provide a space to ask and answer questions. But this framework provides a meaningful way to improve your users’ status and reputations within the gameplay community for providing quality answers and contributions, thus improving content and increasing user interconnectivity.

In Q&A communities, people seek answers — but not all answers are always correct. Gamified reputation systems, coupled with community voting, help identify the top experts in each field — a win-win for both the experts and the askers.

Regardless of use case, the community expert framework is generally best if your gamification site or application is customer-facing and social in nature.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

Kris Duggan is a thought leader of innovative ways to incorporate game mechanics and real-time loyalty programs into web and mobile experiences. Kate Shoup has written more than 25 books, has co-written a feature-length screenplay, and worked as the sports editor for NUVO newsweekly.

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