Business Gamification For Dummies
Overview
The easy way to grasp and use gamification concepts in business
Gamification is a modern business strategy that leverages principles from games to influence favorable customer behavior on the web in order to improve customer loyalty, engagement, and retention. Gamification can be used by any department in a company (HR, Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Support, etc.), for any web-based experience (mobile, website, retail, community, etc.).
Business Gamification For Dummies explains how you can apply the principles of this strategic concept to
your own business model.
- How gamification evolved from Farmville/Zynga and Facebook and is now something that can be applied to the work environment
- How to build a successful gamification program
- How to entice and retain customers using gamification
- How to drive employee behavior inside your organization
- Real-world illustrations of gamification at work
If you're interested in learning more about this exciting and innovative business strategy, this friendly, down-to-earth guide has you covered.
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About The Author
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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business gamification for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Using gamification in your business boosts customer loyalty and engagement. But you need to know how to motivate customers to do what you'd like them to by providing the right types of rewards and understanding effective modes of gamification.
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Business gamification uses elements like points, achievements, levels, leaderboards, missions, and contests to drive desired behaviors. All of a sudden, promoting a brand becomes fun for customers, and sharing troubleshooting solutions with fellow consumers is an engaging challenge. Likewise, employees actually enjoy training instead of seeing it as a chore, and they’re motivated to work harder on a day-to-day basis.
General Business
Gamification teams are comprised of key stakeholders, among them, creative types. Creative types not only understand the business objectives, but have a vision for the gamification program.
Creative types can include the following:
Producer: This person manages the process of designing and implementing your gamification program.
In short, yes, gamification works. That being said, gamification is not a panacea for your business woes. If your business or product is lousy, or if you're at the bottom of a dying industry, gamification alone can't save you. People look for value; if your value proposition stinks, gamification won't make it smell like roses.
General Business
Any good gamification guru will tell you: You’re only as good as the tools in your toolbox. When it comes to game mechanics, various tools are available to you — each designed to elicit a specific reaction in players. You can combine these tools in nearly infinite ways to create a broad spectrum of responses and experiences.
General Business
The goal of many business gamicifcation sites is to build a community. It’s not enough to make profiles, user generated-content tools, and other social software available to users. You have to give gamers a super-compelling reason to use them.
The key to promoting community-building behaviors is realizing that the required gameplay behaviors are social in nature.
General Business
Fostering customer engagement encompasses all the specific actions and behaviors performed by users on your gamification’s web and mobile offerings. Fostering engagement is objective numero uno for many businesses. Not surprisingly, it’s also one of the most difficult objectives to meet.
In many respects, the behaviors that pertain to engagement depend on what type of site you run.
General Business
A key part of increasing customer conversions — getting people to a transaction of some kind — is boosting engagement and loyalty with business gamification programs. After all, to sustain your organization, people need to ante up and buy something from you. But often, increasing conversions involves more than that.
General Business
Loyalty is a consumer’s affinity for a particular brand and willingness to purchase that brand rather than another. Loyalty and engagement are interrelated in gamification programs. That is, the more engaged a consumer is with your brand, the more likely that person is to be loyal to it (and vice versa).
As a result, you can reasonably assume that many of the gameplay behaviors that foster engagement will also inspire loyalty.
General Business
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.
A gamified experience doesn’t employ levels in quite the same way as arcade games. If your goal is to gamify a web forum, players won’t, for example, suddenly see their whole screen change to offer a new set of challenges the moment they level up.
Levels serve two important roles in gamification systems:
They indicate progress: Proceeding from one level to the next gives players a sense of satisfaction.
General Business
You can use missions and tracks to guide players through a gameplay experience or to encourage ongoing participation. Just as a mission is a series of rewards strung together, a track — often used in the community expert and gentle guide frameworks — is a series of missions strung together in your gamification system.
General Business
Many gamification providers provide a suite of widgets that you can embed in your site to educate, encourage, and guide users. The point of using widgets is that they’re crazy easy to implement in your gamification system.
Examples of widgets you might add to your gamification program include the following:
Activity feed widget: An activity feed widget displays achievements unlocked by users in a continually updated stream.
General Business
The company challenge gamification framework is an employee-facing model that’s designed to increase productivity through friendly competition. This gamified framework adds a layer of competition on repetitive or prescriptive gameplay tasks — mopping floors, entering data, and the like.
This layer of competition takes the form of teams, allowing different groups within the organization to compete against each other.
General Business
The social loyalty framework is ideal for engaging the masses or converting one-time customers into returning ones. The social loyalty framework rewards your site’s users for what they already do, their valued gameplay behaviors. With the social loyalty framework, you can apply any number of mechanics within the framework of the gamified site.
General Business
You’ve decided you want to gamify some aspect of your business to achieve a specific result. Your next step is to determine just how to implement gamification. To aid in this, six various gamification frameworks have been identified. These frameworks provide a path for getting up and running with a gamification program and help accelerate the aim of the program targeted to achieve a specific goal.
General Business
Creating rewards and levels in a gamification program is conceptually simple: You specify the gameplay behavior you want to reward, define any rules associated with the behavior (or behaviors), and then indicate what reward corresponds to that behavior. You’ll also want to associate an image with the reward.
There are various types of gameplay rewards: recognition, status, and monetary.
General Business
You should have a very solid idea of what gameplay behaviors you want to define in your gamification program. A gameplay behavior is defined as a name, a point value, and a time limit.
Behaviors may have the following properties:
Cooldown: This is the time, typically in seconds, that must pass before the user can be rewarded for performing the same gameplay behavior again.
General Business
The context of a game or gamification system is simply its implied set of rules and values. Although not technically a game mechanic, it does include the dimensions of the game and the reasons for playing. Evidence of this context is in the fact that you might do something in a game you’d never do in real life.
General Business
Interested in applying gamification to your business? If so, the first thing you need to recognize is gamification is a program, not just a project.
You can’t just apply gamification for three months and call it a day; you need to invest in the strategy for the long term. These are the steps involved in developing a gamification program.
General Business
You can rest assured that at least one bozo out there will try to game your gamification system — that is, attempt to cheat or to earn points by exploiting loopholes.
For example, suppose you offer a free T-shirt to all users who earn 10,000 points. Suppose further that users receive 10 points for each page view.
General Business
The social loyalty framework is classic gamification. It’s all about increased gamer adoption. If you find yourself trying to engage the masses who are “just passing through” or you would like to convert a one-time customer into a returning one, then the social loyalty framework is for you.
This framework takes what your site’s users already do — their valued behaviors (think visiting, browsing, sharing, purchasing, and so on) — and uses gamification to increase engagement and activity.
General Business
If you do opt to build your own gamification program, there are a few open-source resources that can help. Not familiar with open source? Simply put, open source refers to a software development method in which everyday users are permitted to study, change, and improve the source code.
This is in contrast to a typical commercial, proprietary software development model, in which the source code is closely guarded by the copyright holder.
General Business
Although some users prefer to be rewarded in a gamification system with reputation or status, others will be more motivated by receiving privileges. These might include the following: early/VIP access, moderation powers, and stronger votes.
Early/VIP access privileges in gamification
Suppose your gamified site is of the e-commerce variety, and every so often you have sales — big ones, involving giant discounts.
General Business
Some users will certainly be satisfied with recognition and privileges from your gamified systems, but others may hold out for more monetary rewards or other tangible benefits from gameplay activity. These benefits are typically monetary in nature, but could also involve free stuff, like prizes.
Perhaps the most obvious example of the use of prizes is McDonald’s Monopoly, based on the famous Hasbro board game of the same name.
General Business
Many companies opt to reward desired gameplay behaviors with gamification-based points — sometimes called something else, such as miles — that users can redeem for, well, just about anything.
Take American Express, for example. It enables cardmembers to earn points for each dollar spent, which they can redeem for goods ranging from gift cards for retail stores and restaurants to convert tickets, airline tickets, and more.
General Business
First and foremost, you need a business champion on your gamification team. A business champion is someone who has identified business objectives that he or she wants to achieve and possibly even the behaviors that will help achieve those objectives. The business champion also recognizes that gamification can help drive those behaviors.
On the technical side of your gamification team, you need nerds with the knowledge to architect, develop, and test your gamification program to meet the business objectives and vision of the program.
Ideally, they’ll be skilled in the following technologies:
HTTP: This web standard is the foundation for all data communication on the World Wide Web.
General Business
Business gamification efforts typically employ a few different types of points for gameplay. These include experience points, redeemable points, and karma points. Some designs use multiple point types. It all depends on what type of gameplay behavior you intend to drive.
You need not limit yourself to one type of points in your gamification efforts.
If you’ve opted to go the provider route to build your gamification site, the next obvious question is, what provider should you choose? Although gamification is a relatively new industry, there are numerous organizations to choose from.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of gamification providers. It’s a growing industry, and new players emerge (and old ones fold) at a breathtaking pace.
General Business
Cool downs are one anti-gaming mechanism you can use to prevent users from gaming your gamification system — that is, attempt to cheat or to earn points by exploiting loopholes.
If you follow IndyCar racing, you may be familiar with the push to pass feature. When a driver presses the push-to-pass button on his steering wheel, the car receives extra horsepower for a few seconds, enabling the driver to pass the car ahead (or defend against one creeping up from behind).
General Business
Eventually, a user gets to the point where he’s done everything the gamification site has to offer, many times over. Even though he’s built up a large gameplay presence, he’s still thinking about leaving out of sheer boredom. What to do?
Here are three strategies:
Postpone the inevitable. Don’t let the user finish everything, ever.
General Business
The objective of the mid-game phase is all about progress. The user is unlocking achievements and reaching new levels through gameplay. In other words, experiencing more triumphs in the gamification system.
During this phase, the user must be aware of the path to progress — that is, where to find the next victory.
General Business
The onboarding phase for users of a gamification system is relatively short — maybe one or two sessions. Nevertheless, it is extremely important. After all, this is a new user’s introduction to your gamification program.
During this phase, the user doesn’t know anything about the gamification program and has no reason to like it.
General Business
Recognition is part of just about every type of competition on this planet. Recognition with reputations in gameplay for completing a task or accomplishing a goal not only feeds this basic human need, it also encourages player engagement and increases repetition in the gamification system — both of which are probably in your list of business objectives.
General Business
In a gamified environment, status is often tied to valuable gameplay behaviors that support a company’s business objectives and needs to be rewarded. So on a site that sells books, for example, you might reward users who submit particularly excellent reviews.
If your goal is to foster player engagement on, say, a weight-loss site, then you could confer higher status on those users who religiously add entries to their online food journals.
General Business
Behaviors are the foundation of all business gamification programs. It’s not enough to define your business objectives; you must determine which valuable user behaviors will drive them.
You need to distinguish between valued gameplay behaviors and valuable gameplay behaviors:
Valued gameplay behaviors are behaviors that your target audience already performs because those behaviors have an inherent worth to them.
General Business
Points help users know they’re in a gamified environment and that many of the small behaviors they take along the way are being recognized at a system level. Companies running gamification programs use points to spur desired behaviors.
If you successfully perform a task in a game, but you don’t receive points for it, did it even happen?
General Business
One way to encourage player engagement is to broadcast well-written, helpful, engaging on-screen messaging in the form of real-time notifications within the gamification system and/or via e-mail when players perform a desired gameplay behavior, level up, unlock a reward, or need to complete an additional behavior in order to earn their next reward.
General Business
If the site you seek to gamify is a customer-facing online community, then odds are the community expert framework will meet your gamification needs. It enables you to establish user reputation hierarchies by highlighting reputable contributors.
Community expert frameworks not only encourage quality contributions, it also helps with content filtering, not to mention enabling site visitors to make user-to-user connections.
General Business
Missions, challenges, and quests are essentially different words for the same thing in gamification. They require users to perform a prescribed set of gameplay actions, following a guided path of your design. A mission, challenge, or quest might involve a single step (for example, creating an account on your website) or several steps — even as many as 20.
General Business
The social loyalty framework is for specific tasks in gamification — from training, certifications, and special promotions to loyalty economies, gamified events, and tradeshows. This framework is all about tracking a variety of goals in parallel.
All social loyalty framework tasks have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and users are encouraged along the way, making progress, completing sets, and collecting gameplay accomplishments.
General Business
The company challenge gamification framework adds a layer of competition to redundant or prescriptive tasks, ranking individual employees or teams of employees according to gameplay performance. This friendly layer of competition allows different groups within the company to compete against each other, not only motivating employees and increasing productivity, but also making work more fun.
General Business
The company collaborator framework is used internally to help connect problems with solutions. This gamification framework benefits any company that is large enough that the specific skills of each coworker might not be known corporate-wide.
Employees in need are directed to experts in the problem they’re experiencing, while employees, developers, and partners who show proficiency in particular areas level-up in those categories of expertise.
General Business
The goal of the competitive pyramid framework is to supercharge an already-competitive user experience by tracking player skill levels and presenting challenge opportunities for players to level-up and win. In essence, you’re offering a game within a game, giving players new ways to compete.
The competitive pyramid framework also works well for gamified sites that involve prediction — think stock prediction, sports prediction (such as Fantasy Football), gambling, and the like.
General Business
Gentle guide is a hand-holding, employee-facing gamification framework, designed to help employees complete a process of steps – be they everyday job tasks or a specific process-oriented training program for required certifications in a gamification environment.
Suppose you’re a cog-producing facility that wants to reduce the number of work-related injuries and increase employee efficiency.
General Business
The gentle guide framework is designed to help employees complete a process of steps, such as the everyday tasks of their jobs or a specific, process oriented training program for required certifications. With the gamified gentle guide framework, you keep employees task oriented by assigning them a daily mission of objectives.
General Business
To really drive desired behaviors, game designers can weight points. Weighting points means awarding more points for those behaviors deemed more valuable or that require more effort in a gamification system.
For example, if your business objective is to drive more user-generated content, then it’s more important for visitors to create a new blog post rather than simply like an existing one.
General Business
The purpose of a leaderboard is to show players where they rank in a gamified system. Those at the top enjoy the notoriety it brings; as for everyone else, the leaderboard shows them where they stand relative to their peers.
Often, the very presence of a leaderboard can elicit the desire to play. The simple goal of rising up the rankings serves as a powerful motivator to continue.
General Business
Business gamification is all about driving key behaviors. You can harness game mechanics to enable people to experience something they like. In general terms, here are a few things people like:
Recognition: Recognition, a foundational building block for gamification, simply means acknowledging desired behaviors.
General Business
It may be that your gamification system will benefit from the use of a multiple point system. This system enables you to issue points for gameplay behaviors, directing them into different “buckets.” It depends on what gameplay behaviors you want to reward. In some cases, a point unit will contribute to real, extrinsic rewards.
General Business
You can attract users to your gamified business website using various types of rewards. Arguably, business gamification rewards are in three categories, recognition, privileges, and monetary:
Recognition: Pretty much everyone wants to be recognized for their achievements. Recognition for completing a task or accomplishing a goal not only feeds this basic human need, it also encourages engagement and increases repetition — both of which are probably in your list of business objectives.
General Business
A gamification framework is a holistic program designed to achieve a specific business objective. The framework you use depends on the outcome you want to achieve. Note that you can mix frameworks. As you might expect, you have many options in terms of gamification frameworks. We’ve identified six broad approaches, each designed to address a specific business need:
Social loyalty: This framework is for customer-facing experiences that occur in nonsocial environments, such as a traditional e-commerce experience.
General Business
The more you know about what motivates your target audience, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to design a gamification system that drives their behavior in just the right way.
Extrinsic motivators in business gamification
These are rewards that come from outside. Want to win a gold medal in the Olympics?
Gamification refers to the use of game mechanics and rewards in a non-game setting to increase user engagement and drive desired user behaviors. Gamification in business is used to increase such things as stickiness, sharing, content creation, and purchases.
So what are some of the industries that are already using gamification?
General Business
Although your gamification program won’t be an actual game, understanding the different types of game players is important, as is applying those specific player types to your business's customers and employees to drive desired behaviors.
Just as there are many reasons for playing games, there are various types of players — four, if you ask game scholar Richard Bartle.
Simply put, business gamification refers to the use of game mechanics and rewards in a business setting to increase user engagement and drive desired user behaviors. Businesses can use gamification to increase such things as stickiness, sharing, content creation, and purchases.
What gamification is
In part, the idea behind gamification is to influence how people (in this case, customers and fans) behave and what they do by tapping into their innate desire to play games.
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