Brands and the Gamification thing...

Gamification is the new black!

 

Gamification is about challenge, achievement, success, pleasure, but most importantly it’s about engagement. it is about connecting a brand with people through the thing moves the world; competition!

 

According to the ’2011 Gartner Research Report’, it is estimated that by 2015 more than 50% of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes. Wanda Meloni at M2 Research, calculates that gamification industry revenue amounted to about $100 million in 2011, but she expects it to balloon to $1.6 billion in 2015.  

 

At the most fundamental level, gamification is the use of game mechanics to drive game-like engagement and actions....in everyday life, we are often presented with activities we hate, whether it is boring chores or stressful works.

Gamification is the process of introducing game mechanics into these abhorred activities to make them more game-like (i.e. fun, rewarding, desirable, etc.), so that people would want to proactively take part in these tasks."

For the last 40 years, consumer expectations have been fundamentally altered by exposure to games. Specifically, this means that our beliefs are about; meaning and value of fun, frequency and context of rewards, and omnipresence of sociability. The simple shorthand is; feedback, friends and fun.

 

The consumer has changed, and smart businesses must adapt to survive and thrive. The use of gamification to drive social change is a big movement in culture. It’s worth remembering that in early 2010 there were no hits on the term, gamification, on Google; today there are millions.

 

Gamification is a new discipline with deep roots and extraordinary potential…

Today’s youth mandates a more engaging experience.

Gamification makes things more engaging so people will pay more attention and stay focused for a longer period of time. Seth Priebatsch agrees. “It feels like the next natural evolution of human-technological interaction… as we complete the social layer; we’ll begin construction, in earnest, on the game layer”. The five most commonly used game-mechanics are;points, badges, levels, leaderboards, challenges.  

 

According to Zickerman, “It’s easier than you think to bring the power of games to your business by adding game-mechanics to your marketing mix with these steps”:

●        Ask: What consumer behavior are you trying to drive?

●        Assign points to those behaviors.

●        Create a leaderboard to display points.

●        Develop challenges and message them.

●        Make ‘fun’ your goal!

For anyone unfamiliar with gamification, it’s the application of game-like elements, such as; challenges, points, badges and levels to business and other non-game websites.

 

An estimated 70% of the top 2,000 public companies in the world will have at least one gamified application by 2014, predicts Gartner.

 

Patrick Salyer believes there are two keys to success with gamification:

One is making sure that all gamified elements are inherently social.

That is, don’t restrict engagement to the internal site community. 

 Award points for activities that reach users’ social [networks] to bring in referral traffic.

The other is to focus on rewarding activities that create value for your businesses.

 

Companies should weigh a number of factors before deciding whether to get into the gamification game.  

Dustin DiTommaso, suggests that companies think seriously about why they’re interested in gamification and how it could help them meet their business goals.

 

Before gamifying, he says, a business should be able to answer these questions:

 ●        What is the reason for gamifying your product or service?

 ●        How does it benefit users? Will they enjoy it?

 ●        What are your business goals?

 ●        How do you get users to fulfill those business goals?

 ●        What actions do you want users to take?

Gamification, it’s really not about gaming; it’s about good old behavioral economics using game-mechanics.

 

According to John Bell; the world of ‘gamification’ is certainly buzzy if not frothy.

Many marketers are talking about it and startups are employing it, as if it were the magic sauce that could overcome anything even a bad business plan. We can easily identify these techniques throughout the history of business and marketing as tools for getting users engaged.

 

There is wisdom underneath it all and gamification, as a sometime appropriate feature to stimulate behavior change, is here to stay.  

 

This surge of game-mechanics is all over the Web and is being applied to many things including; brand advocacy, environmental, health behavior, fundraising…

 

But, how did you sell the company management on the idea of games in a very non-gaming business?

 

According to Le-Te;  “This is not about games… it’s about strategy and tools for engaging customers and reaching business goals”.

The benefit to successful gamification is that you see an uptick in:

●        Repeat visitors/

●        Unique visitors

●        membership acquisition

●        Page views per visitor

●        Time spent on site

●        Time spent per user

●        Depth of visit (which is different than just page views as this implicates an exploration further into the site’s architecture)

●        Social sharing (Likes, +1, etc.)

 

5 brands using gamification well

In the article below there are 5 amazing gamification projects listed.

http://www.simplyzesty.com/advertising-and-marketing/brands/5-brands-using-gamification-well/ 

and of course 4 successful facebook gaming contests

http://mashable.com/2011/09/11/successful-facebook-contests/ 

Therefore A brand can increase efficiency in the three areas below.

 ●        Innovation: website modernization can increase brand awareness, loyalty and customer engagement. Much more than your traditional loyalty program Microsoft, Google, Playboy, Ford and others have realized these benefits by adopting game dynamics.

 ●        Monetization: DevHub increased engagement rate of 300% and increased revenue for virtual goods grew to 30% of overall revenue within 3 months.

 ●        Productivity: Microsoft gamified software development testing to drive significant improvements and user participation. Microsoft’s Beta1 Game from the Vista release increased beta testers by 400% and their Language Quality Game for Windows 7 had users provide feedback and commentary on 500,000 screenshots.

 

The primary goal will be not only to increase customer base but also to interact more with existent email receivers, engage them more with places we share and last but not least to increase the value of each email receiver as participant in something which combines social, mobile and location.

 

Last but not least it can be the marketing and engagement tool in brands and agencies hands aiming to achieve having more loyal customers and returning audience

( http://blog.graphicmail.com/post/2011/10/09/Gamification-strategies-for-email-marketing.aspx).

 

how eveyrthing gets wired...

World of mouth, talks, rumors, socializing, networking, communities, on the go, on demand, spreading news, get connected, wired, feeding with news, information, new media, social media....

/ga

Brands have to change the way the get Advertised through Social Media

Social Network Advertising is a Waste of Time…” from left the box.

I was impressed by reading that. The last months the only thing you can read around and about is how impressive is to use Social Networks for Advertising Brands.

The old model of int eruptive advertising will not work well on a platform based on communication.
Not only that it becomes from many examples more and more obvious that we can't use new things inspired by old models and approaches.

But it's not the ad network inside Facebook that is at fault but how it is being used... Randall Stross takes his own look at brands on Facebook in the NY Times. He questions the meager examples offered up by P&G and the somewhat empty experience of becoming a "fan" or "friend" of many brands. The Crest Whitestrips fan page dwindled from 14,000 back down to 10,000 following the wake of a promotion.
Randall wonders if the effort of endless promotions to keep that number up may be prohibitive. Actually, it looks like Whitestrips has a weekly drawing or free product. While not the most inventive promotion, I can actually imagine that being useful to people. He questions the promise of "social advertising" and the latest shiny object from the Facebook ad sales team, "engagement ads." A micro targeting test revealed a single person who perfectly fit that profile. Brands are struggling (when experimentation gets "hard" it feels like a struggle) with how to make use of Facebook and other social networks. Some go the advertising route. Some create fan or group pages without much strategy beyond acquisition of fans or friends. Even Victoria's Secret which has "acquired" some 790K fans on it's Pink Facebook pages, has not demonstrated the ability to do anything with that list yet. Why not create a contest around my brand idea? Because it is not something people care about. This is also one of those cases where the real action was happening on the brand domain contest site.

Facebook was merely an "acquisition window" for contestants. At least Victoria's Secret is delivering content right into their Facebook page.

Wrong Conclusion

Brands can spend a fortune creating "genuinely entertaining commercials." Wrong.

Brands have a third path. They can shift gears from being the entertainment between the real entertainment to being of-use to people. To truly earn their attention and engagement, brands must provide customers something of value via their marketing efforts. An application that helps them save money or be more productive. Content that helps them do something more than just buy more product. An experience with the product. Or an invitation for customers to contribute what is important to them - content, product ideas, feedback, communications, messages make things and approaches better, more interesting.

There is so much more that brands can do to deliver value beyond the next generation of hyped-up advertising. Brands have to use their imagination in order to get the best out of Social Media and not use old tricks to new areas. What is necessary is complete new approach about how brands can use New Media and Social Media in order to get advertised. Social Media isn't the trend you have to use it, you are obligated to use it. Social Media is a brand new world where only new tricks, ways, approaches will make it interesting to people, to audience to final consumers. At the end they are the most important

/ga

Twitter, more important than traditional media to inform people

The last days Athens go through a really huge and serious demonstrations, disasters and of course battles between anarchists and police.
Athens Center now is almost completely destroyed. One interesting thing among others was how impressive was the fact that Twitter, this micro blogging miracle won the race to inform people.
Everyone using a mobile or his computer became a front line correspondent.
But as in all things, it’s more probable to grasp the idea of something if you participate in it, rather than judging as an observer
Lines of what is happening in real team in city's streets were arriving every second to subject #griots. People through twitter were giving what was happening on the streets, where to go, how to protect each other.

Twitter delivers anymore the news faster than media!

Had it been only for status updates, I’d still consider it silly, but it turned out that Twitter evolved into the so-called micro-blogging platform which has potential and momentum.
Messages are instant, short (hence easier to read), spread around all followers immediately, it allows personal communication and it’s accessible on-the-go from virtually anywhere on Earth there’s cell signal. If you provide useful content, people follow you and get informed; you can evangelize and promote your stuff and services; you can get the news first.
Get the news first? Write the News First! Send the news first! Be around, comment what is going on around!There’s no “breaking news” sessions in Twitter, that’s only in TV.

Through Twitter all the news are breaking!

But the latest tragic incidents in India, showcase (in a very sad way) that the microblogging platform is not only a news source, but the news come faster than traditional media.
People knew more about what is going in Athens or in Mumbai some weeks ago, or things about American elections through Twitter. And they got more information, or real time, in raw format... without any kind of editing from any kind editors.
Traditionally, the power of information was a privilege of the media, so when people begin to claim back some part of it, it sure is not a small thing.
De-centralizing the news sources and spreading it to individuals around the globe could potentially harm long-standing balances in society. People-casting is radically different from news media, yet quite powerful.
The strange thing with people is that there are too many of us and almost totally uncoordinated, yet from within this soup of (mostly useless) information, patterns begin to emerge and it’s not at all improbable for a small piece of information to cause a “hurricane” in a worldwide scale. It’s chaotic, and it can’t be controlled.
I’m pretty sure more and more power will come to the hands of individuals and if the media don’t jump on this wagon they’ll probably regret it.

Media lose their power to break the news, to make people feel surprise.

But perhaps the most thrilling aspect of this interconnected information chaos is how it can be (ab)used to deliberately inject information into the network.
At the same time newspapers or other more traditional media followed news flow through twitter where the information got up first!
Twitter is here to stay and get used from more and more and more people and not only geeks like me or others out there! Twitter is an amazing way to bring people closer, inform them faster, share information faster, opinions, ideas, fight in style but always in short and speedy mode!

/ga