It always exciting to grace the Business Day pages of The New York Times, and we had the great honor of being featured in a recent article alongside our extremely innovative customer Samsung (see You’ve Won a Badge And Now We Know All About You, The New York Times, 2/4/12).

The brainchild of Samsung Electronics America Social Media Manager Esteban Contreras, pictured above, Samsung Nation is the first gamification program on a consumer electronics corporate website.

“For companies, the premise of gamification is that it engages people in the kind of reward-seeking behaviors that lead to increased brand loyalty, not to mention increased profits. By tracking the online activities of people who sign up for such programs, companies can also amass more detailed metrics about each user — the better to identify the most active customers,” writes NY Times reporter Natasha Singer in the article.

Contreras added, “visitors who sign in and become active on Samsung Nation tend to explore our Web site much more, learning about our company, our products, and our content.”

I recently had a chance to discuss the early success and makings of Samsung Nation with Contreras. The answers below are quite insightful read regarding how social media marketers in the F1000 can use gamification to increase engagement and loyalty.

Q. Can you tell us a bit about the Samsung Nation program and why you decided to launch it?

A. Samsung Nation is a social loyalty program for Samsung customers and fans. Anyone can unlock badges, earn points, level up and have fun discovering everything Samsung.com has to offer. Watching videos, commenting on articles, participating in user-generated Q&As, and late night visits are just a few ways in which visitors are rewarded.

We have millions of Samsung enthusiasts visiting our website and we focused on them when we started thinking of Samsung Nation because we greatly appreciate their loyalty and interest. We sought out to reward interaction, facilitate discovery and create a sense of real-time interconnectedness among passionate advocates.

Q. How do you define gamification?

A. Gamification is the art and science of applying game-like qualities to non-game environments, like websites. Ultimately, gamification should be about more engaging, memorable, meaningful and fun experiences.

Q. What was your initial goal with launching Samsung Nation for your community?

A. Our goal with Samsung Nation is to increase engagement and advocacy by enhancing the overall experience of our customers and fans on Samsung.com.

Q What advice do you have for a marketer looking to launch a gamification program for their community?

A. Start with your objectives, focus on your customers and gamify purposefully.

Q. Why did you decide to use Badgeville to power Samsung Nation?

A. We knew that we wanted to experiment with game mechanics because we’ve seen how startups like Foursquare and Quora have used them to create meaningful experiences. We knew that we needed to create a new layer on Samsung.com and we were looking into ways to create that layer ourselves. We took note when Badgeville presented at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010. By working with Badgeville’s platform we were able to focus on designing and creating a social loyalty program that can grow and evolve over time.

Find out more at www.samsung.com/us/samsungnation

One of the key missions we have at Badgeville is to provide our customers an easy way to reward top influencers and advocates across their community.

Badgeville’s Behavior Platform tracks user behavior that occurs on brand-owned websites, mobile apps, and connected devices, to reward and recognize brand advocates and influencers. Our Platform provides the most advanced technology to track user behavior that occurs on brand-owned sites, but until today did not provide a way to reward top influencers across external social channels.

Today, we are excited to announce a strategic partnership with Klout, the standard for influence. Klout analyzes engagement across social networks to measure a person’s level of thought leadership and influence. This partnership enables our customers to offer special rewards programs and status for members of their community with high Klout scores, increasing advocacy among the Web’s top influencers.

The partnership, featured in Mashable today (Klout + Gamification = Extra Perks for Influencers?), highlights our dedication to bringing our customers easy integrations with the world’s leading third-party platforms and applications.

“Our goal is to empower every user by unlocking their influence. Being integrated into Badgeville’s Behavior Platform is a great way for Klout to help organizations identify and reward top influencers in their community, and Klout has a unique set of information to help them do that,” said Joe Fernandez, CEO of Klout.

Badgeville is the only gamification platform that will include users’ Klout scores to surface and reward influencers across a brand’s online communities. The integration will be distributed by Badgeville, and initially for the first half of 2012, will be delivered to Badgeville customers at no incremental cost. For more information on adding Badgeville and Klout to your site, contact us today.

Recently, Badgeville customer Appirio held a hackathon and asked its development community to leverage Badgeville to improve the CloudSpokes gamification engine by integrating with SalesForce.com via its APEX REST API.

Appirio was adding a new gamification service to CloudSpokes using Badgeville. They enabled a Force.com integration using their Gamification SFDC Toolkit challenge but that left the integration part. When user events are generated in Force.com (registering for a challenge, winning money, posting a comment, etc.) they are dumped into a queue for processing. They needed to build a polling engine to retrieve these records from their gamification platform and send them to Badgeville. Thus, they sponsored another CloudSpokes Challenge: Gamification Integration with Badgeville.

Of the developers that participated in the hackathon, William Cheung came out on top. Congrats William!

We received a note from William regarding his experience developing on the Badgeville Platform… “I found using the Badgeville REST API from my Groovy code a cinch,” he said. “The more interesting part was integrating with Salesforce’s Force.com.” Even so, in only two days, William was able to make it work so well, he not only won the competition, they rolled his code into production.  “Since I was new to both Force and Badgeville, it was a little challenging,” William added.

Here is a video of the app he built: http://screencast.com/t/BTbbI5P70c8Z

You can read William’s blog post about the experience here: http://blog.cloudspokes.com/2012/02/ninja-badge-exchange-with-cloudfoundry.html

Appirio joins the growing ranks of Badgeville’s enterprise customers who are sponsoring hackathons to inspire developers to use the Badgeville Behavior Platform to solve engagement problems (and improve the bottom line). In 2011, Appirio launched CloudSpokes, a cloud-focused crowdsourcing community to match companies who need cloud development work with developers. To learn more about how CloudSpokes is leveraging gamification to identify technical expertise and improve the developer experience, visit their Badges page: http://www.cloudspokes.com/badges

You can read about the hackathon on CloudSpokes: http://www.cloudspokes.com/challenges/1350

By 2013, more than 50 percent of all social business initiatives will include an enterprise gamification component, according to Constellation Research. Brands and enterprises know that motivation and incentive programs can help produce revenue and productivity gains among internal users and external communities. These business leaders also know it can be time-consuming and difficult to streamline, manage and implement such programs.

Even though it is still early days for enterprise gamification, many businesses have already begun to deploy robust gamification programs, and as a result there are valuable best practices that we can share with you. Badgeville is proud to present the first-ever webinar on Enterprise Gamification, Demystifying Enterprise Gamification, featuring Engagement Expert R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst, Constellation Research.

DETAILS

Wed., Feb 1, 2012
10:30am PST
Free with Advance Registration

Join us as we explore how organizations can leverage game mechanics to turbo charge engagement, loyalty, and profitability. Spaces are limited. Sign up now!

Badgeville’s vision for the gamified enterprise is one where a customer or employee’s reputation is integrated across all digital touch points with your brand’s digital experience. That is why global leaders such as Dell, Samsung, Chesapeake Energy, NBC, and hundreds more rely on our solution to measure and influence behavior.

Today, as a key piece of our mission to gamify the enterprise, we’ve announced the launch of our Enterprise Cloud Connectors program. These powerful connectors integrate Badgeville seamlessly into the world’s leading enterprise applications, beginning with Omniture, JIVE, and Salesforce.com. The key goals and results for these systems include:

• Social Software: Increase participation in employee and customer-facing communities
• CRM: Drive adoption, utilization, and productivity across sales and support teams
• Analytics: Provide business insight and enhanced targeting via incorporation of behavior data

Since Badgeville’s launch in 2010, the company has integrated with leading third-party systems including Janrain, Livefyre, Yammer, Gigya, Atlassian, Drupal, SAP, Lithium, Facebook and more. Earlier this month, Badgeville also announced a strategic partnership with Bazaarvoice, which selected Badgeville to integrate into their industry-leading social commerce solutions.

The world’s most innovative enterprises rely on Badgeville to power their customer- and employee-facing gamification and reputation programs. Gamification and reputation programs have an even higher business impact when integrated across an enterprise’s multiple touch points. The launch of our Cloud Connector program makes it easy for our customers to realize even higher ROI on these software investments when the benefits of gamification are seamlessly integrated.

If you are interested in learning more about integrating Badgeville with your enterprise applications, I encourage you to contact us today at sales@badgeville.com.

Any fool riding a bandwagon can tell you what gamification has in common with a social game, or even a slot machine.  It’s the psychological triggers, the positive reinforcement.

However, the better question to ask, and the one that will explain why so many gamification programs end in failure, is what makes smart gamification different.  After all, despite the similarities, there are few people who would mistake a gamified experience for a real game.  The reason for this is context and it’s the most important word in any conversation about making games out of existing content.

Although we might not be conscious of the fact, we automatically recognize all games to define their own contexts.  The context of a game is simply its implied set of rules and values – the dimensions of the game and the reasons for playing. Evidence of this context is in the fact that we might do something in a game we would never do in real life, like run up and down a grass field for an hour or spontaneously whoop and shout and dance in a circle in front of complete strangers.  Sometimes the context is even literally addressed, like when a child playing a game calls ‘time out’ and tries to temporarily put the game context on hold.

In the case of gamification, a context already exists.  Imagine a website.  The website already contains an inherent purpose – a value proposition that draws visitors.  This is the site’s context and it exists with or without the addition of gamification.  Proper gamification does not strive to bring a new context to the site; it does not create a self-contained game on top of or beside the preexisting site, rather it strives to build a game around the existing site.  The intent should be to enhance the value proposition, to deepen the existing context.

With smart gamification, the primary value of the site will not change.  Neither will the primary user behaviors or objectives.  It is important to recognize that the site’s visitors did not come to play a game, they came to interact with the site.

So then what’s the value of Smart Gamification?
Gamification, when done right, supports and enhances the natural context of the site.  It measures valued behaviors.  It sets goals.  It recognizes accomplishments.  It opens windows of visibility between like-minded visitors and it makes valuable suggestions.

It’s important to acknowledge that gamification is not creating a game, it is borrowing game techniques to improve an existing experience, and to measure and influence user behavior.

For Gamification to succeed, the natural values of the site must be a constant consideration during the design process. In other words, the design has to respect the context.

In my last post, I covered Badgeville’s five key analytics principles:

• Keep things simple
• Store as much raw data as possible
• Don’t separate analytics into internal and client facing
• Stay flexible, learn and adjust as you go
• Never build black box, canned solutions

We believe in getting the basics right before we evolve complexity. What does that mean in terms of building the right data processing and visualization engine? It means identifying what’s most important and focusing on it. How? By talking to everyone involved, both internally and externally.

Analytics is empty without the proper consumer. It’s not about recording and measuring everything and producing numerous and complicated reports and dashboards. It’s about narrowing in on what really drives the business and surfacing it in the best, most easily digestible way possible. And what’s important varies by business unit and each individual client. One may be interested in getting more users to visit the site and load multiple pages, or getting core users to return regularly, or to tweet about what they saw to all of their followers, or to buy something from a sponsor. These various scenarios fall into different categories and require different approaches.

So let’s start with the basics and lay out a simple framework for the different types of metrics that most modern web destinations should be paying attention to:

1. User acquisition and “accounting”
   This is the 10K feet overview of your product: how many users do you have? Are you growing? Are you getting new users or reengaging the old? What’s the demographic breakdown? Are you affected by daily/weekly/seasonal trends?
   
2. User retention
   Simply put, do you keep the users you bring in? For how long? Are certain cohorts retaining better than others? Are their times when you are significantly more or less successful?
3. User Engagement
   This is our bread and butter. What are your users doing? How often? Is their experience rich or stale? Are they progressing? Are certain activities performed much more (or less) than others? Are your users spreading the word?

(Most would probably add “conversion” to the list, but I’d say that’s a subset of #3, being just one more activity in a chain of events. There’s also the can of worms that is “social” data beyond simple broadcasting, but we’ll leave that discussion for another day.)

Armed with even this simple template, we could go ahead and implement 100 different metrics, combining them all in a very sophisticated graphical front end with endless buttons and drop-downs. We could populate pages and pages of dashboards and throw them at our clients. But that’s not what we do. That’s not who we want to be.

We want to do things that matter for YOU. What problem are you trying to solve right now? Getting more users? Keeping more users? Converting more users? Are you just starting to grow, or are you a mature site that wants to reinvent itself? Are you running aggressive marketing campaigns, or are you building long-term loyalty? Understanding where you are in your product’s lifecycle allows us to figure out what you need the most. And we always keep in mind that situations are ever evolving, and it’s important to maintain the ability to adjust to change.

A blank sheet of paper has little to no value. The same sheet of paper, emblazoned in gold showing that I went to an Ivy League school has tremendous value. Same piece of paper, but now it carries status & reputation with it. I did something of value. I accomplished something. I’m elite.

The concept of recognizing and rewarding people for positive behavior has been around forever. I don’t think that is going anywhere soon, either. Human beings generally tend to be more carrot driven than stick driven so the value of recognizing and rewarding these types of positive behaviors, even for small tasks, is enormous.

Some examples of rewards for positive behaviors that are were applied well before the internet age:

• S&H Green Stamps
• Total Rewards
• BurgerKing started offering collectible Star Wars Glasses in 1977 — What is a low cost, high value collectible glass that you received for behaving in a way that is valuable to someone? A badge.
• Premiums started in 1793 — “This practice caught on and was used by many merchants throughout the 19th Century. Sweet Home laundry soap, a product of the B. A. Babbit Company, came with certificates that could be collected and redeemed for color lithographs.”

Again, the lithograph is a *badge* that the participant received for behaving in a way valuable to the business owner.

In the Roman Army ‘Civilians could also be rewarded for their assistance to the Roman Legions. In return for outstanding service, a citizen was given an arrow without a head. This was considered a great honour and would bring the recipient much prestige.’

In other words, 2,000 years ago, if I had done something to risk my life for the Army that I wasn’t part of, I got a stick (an arrow without a head). Low cost, immensely high value, huge on reputation.

Again, I think that this concept will be around for a very long time.

The challenge that you face, as a designer, is how do you make the experience compelling to your customers? How do you ensure that you don’t end up with an experience that is either too easy to complete (and users don’t come back) or too difficult (and users don’t come back).

Anyone can give out a simple badge for a simple behavior. A 1:1 relationship is fairly simple, but it isn’t compelling. It isn’t sticky. It is very boring. It is an online degree vs. Stanford.

The question you want to ask yourself is how do you make your customers want to do one more thing? How do you create an experience of ‘almost there’? How do you make your rewards, levels, recognition much more valuable than just another badge on their phone?

That is hard work, but my experience is that the payoff is significant.

In Week 16 of the NFL season a record once thought to be cemented forever in football history and arguably the most sought after record for a quarterback was broken, then shattered by Drew Brees as he surpassed Dan Marino’s historic 5,089 passing yards during the 1984 season. We also saw New England’s, Rob Gronkowski set the single season touch down record for a tight end with 16, and San Francisco’s David Akers kick more fields in one season than any other kicker in the history of the game.

The Super Bowl, wins and losses will always be paramount in the NFL just like a revenue to a company, but breaking & setting records with context like individual, position, division, conference, team, season, year, etc., is just as important. The records set outside of the win loss column, provide context to the game of football, and give others something to relate to, be a part of by way of fantasy ownership and for some, aspire to break.

As the world watched Drew Brees connect with Darren Sproles to break Dan Marino’s passing record, I could not help but think about the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of contextual records that are held in the NFL and across all sports. Then, naturally, I began to analogize this to Badgeville, our customers, and the ones we passionately believe we should be working with.

The team at Badgeville understands that in order for us to realize our own goals, an unrelenting focus on the win, loss column with the obvious goal of getting our customers to the ‘Super Bowl’ is primary. We work with customers to realize this goal by forging strong partnerships through our niche expertise and market leading technology. We engage players on the field of competition to set contextual records important to the individual and the brand they interact with.

While the New Orleans Saints, New England Patriots, and San Francisco 49ers are advancing to the playoffs, it is clear that individual players setting records in passing yards, touchdowns by a tight end, and field goals made have put their teams in a position to compete for a Super Bowl victory. Like NFL teams, it is important for brands to seek out the contextual record setters while inspiring the others to break them. Whatever it is, reviews, ‘Likes,’ purchases, ‘Tweets,’ or page views, Badgeville elevates brands to become ‘Super Bowl’ contenders in an increasingly competitive landscape by creating an engaging experience through social and game mechanics.

With the NFL Playoffs kicking off this weekend, it is critical for brands to ask the question, “What records do we need broken in order to be a contender?”

Go Niners!

At its fundamental level, Gamification involves measuring behaviors and rewarding them. Rewards can be thought of as coming in 3 basic forms:

• Monetary
• Privileges
• Labels

Monetary describes rewards with measurable cash value. Things like discounts, free shipping, trips to Hawaii or monogrammed key-chains. Typically this includes any kind of rewards that require a budget to award.

Privileges describes rewards with contextual value. Things like early-access, increased voting rights, priority sorting, etc. Typically any kind of rewards that carry literal value, but cost nothing to reward.

Labels describes rewards with no value other than as indicators, either of status, accomplishment or both. Things like badges, trophies, titles, decorations, etc. Typically any reward that acts as only an indicator and carry no literal value whatsoever.

The value of these three reward types changes depending on the socialness of the context, as you can see in the diagram below. Labels are in Orange, Privileges in blue and Monetary in green.

In solo experiences, labels carry little value –if there is no one else around to see them or compare against, the difference between ‘rookie’ and ‘master’ carries little value. Some privileges have a certain degree of inherent value that is present regardless of whether there are any other users around or not. Monetary rewards have a constant value –a $5 discount is the same on every site.

As social context increases, and users are better able to see and interact with other users on a site, a community forms, bound by a shared interest in a particular subject. Along with the development of community comes a change in perceived value of rewards. With privileges, both the monetary value and status value increase; things like early access become more significant when competition and coveting are introduced. Labels set the community hierarchy and, with more people to compare with, labels become increasingly more valuable; they define who has seniority, who has talent and who has respectability. Labels become the ranking system of the site –the very things the community values most are measured and reported through badges and titles.

While Gamification brings improvement to all sites, it’s worth noting the advantages of a social site:

More Gamification options: A solo experience has only one viable option for making significant engagement changes: monetary.

Greater total improvement: The more social the site, the more impact privileges and labels will carry and, if all three forms of reward are used, the more overall engagement will increase.

Cheaper implementation: It should come as no surprise that monetary rewards cost money. Any business looking to reduce costs can find value in free rewards like privileges and labels.

Social Fabric
To be social, an online social community needs three things:

• Interaction areas
• Connections
• Notifications

It needs places where users can interact (for example comments threads or user reviews), it needs a persistent means of connecting users to each other and to content and it needs to notify users of developments in content and people of interest.

With Social Fabric, Badgeville has introduced a means to support both Connections and Notifications. Social Fabric ties directly into the users’ behaviors to target dynamic, meaningful connections and events. It puts sites well on the way to more social user experiences and more effective labels and privileges and that means deeper engagement and stronger loyalty.