Badgeville customers utilize The Behavior Platform everyday to get the value, adoption, and utilization they always wanted from their technology investments. By influencing and rewarding desired user behavior in employee-facing applications, we help our customers move the needle on key business processes inside their company and maximize employee performance.

One company that shares that goal is Yammer, the leading enterprise social network that connects employees with relevant colleagues, messages, and system updates across their company.

Today, we’re happy to announce an integration that makes it easy for our customers to broadcast achievements that Badgeville rewards in their enterprise applications inside heir Yammer Activity Stream, which can be accessed company wide. In doing so, peers and managers can laud that reward, and encourage others to perform the same behavior that warranted it.

One customer that has leveraged this integration is Deloitte, the world’s largest consulting firm. With its 182,000 consultants worldwide, Deloitte wanted to move their employees out of e-mail and share knowledge more openly in their social intranet powered by Yammer. But since some employees were resistant to share their activities initially, they needed a way to encourage people sharing their activities more openly.

So Deloitte developed the Who-What-Where moble app, leveraging Game Mechanics from Badgeville. The Who-What-Where app asks for some simple information of Deloitte consultants: Who are you meeting with, what did you discuss, and where did it take place? As employees share this information, they’re given rewards that map to their particular area of expertise.

For example, if a consultant checks into several beverage companies and receives a reward for that behavior from Who-What-Where, that achievement is published in Yammer. There, his boss praises that person’s diligence in sharing knowledge. Suddenly, his colleague who also focuses on beverage companies (but who was a hold out in sharing information in Yammer) is more likely to engage.

This is just the beginning. Because we have many mutual customers, we look forward to deepening our integration points with Yammer in the future.

Deloitte and Badgeville today announced the addition of gamification experience for Deloitte Leadership Academy, an innovative digital executive training program for more than 10,000 senior executives at over 150 companies around the world, added Badgeville’s gamification and reputation solution to reward participation, lesson progression, and to certify program completion with an optional diploma.

Deloitte Leadership Academy delivers lessons and insight from some of the world’s best known business schools, such as Harvard Business Publishing and IMD, and global leaders in an easy to consume format via their online portal, newsletter, and mobile access. Badgeville’s dynamic behavior management technology enables Deloitte to measure, surface and reward engagement across this online education platform.

James Sanders, Manager of Deloitte Digital, took a few moments out of his day to answer questions about the program, which showcases how Learning Management Systems can use gamification to drive engagement and increase program process and completion.

Why did Deloitte launch Leadership Academy? How is it different from what else is available for senior executive training?

James: The Leadership Academy was created after Tom Richardson had the idea of delivering business education on airplanes (during a collaborative innovation week with Australia’s national airline, Qantas). Quickly we realised that leaders actually had very few options to access leadership development online; when are where they wanted it. In fact, there are still few options available that includes content from multiple institutions as well as the social interaction/experience sharing that is on the DLA. When the face-to-face interventions are added it becomes a very unique offering.

Why did your team decide to add gamification elements to the program?

James: The idea of gamification was developed when we were considering how to increase engagement among users. We considered other educational scenarios such as University and realised this is a highly gamified environment (there are levels like freshman and sophomore, students get graded and some students come top of class and go on the Dean’s list). So we started to consider how to replicate this on the Leadership Academy.

How do the gamification elements work within the program?

James: There are three main elements we use:

• Leader boards are used in general to rank users but to also rank users based on their usage of our 12 development areas so users compete to become the expert for a topic
• Predictable badges that are earned when a user completes a specific set of controllable actions (such as completing all courses within a competency or completing their monthly learning plan)
• Random variable rewards that uses a slot-machine methodology of rewarding users with badges for completing a largely unknown set of activities. This will provide users with badges without them expecting to receive them.

Executives can register for Deloitte Leadership Academy at Deloitte.la.

I’m honored to announce that Tony Nemelka recently joined Badgeville’s executive team as Vice President of Business Development. We are thrilled to have him on board to lead our fast-growing partner program and as the newest member of our executive team.

Nemelka is a seasoned business executive, having held leadership roles in numerous Fortune 1000 enterprises and startups. In his most recent role as Interim CMO at YouSendIt, he was responsible for the launch of the company’s new enterprise document collaboration line. Previous to YouSendIt he completed strategic management consulting engagements at several Silicon Valley technology companies including Socialtext (where he served as Interim COO), and Teleplace (where he served as Interim CEO). Previously, Nemelka served as co-founder and CEO of Helpstream, Vice President of Asia Pacific region at Adobe Systems, co-founder and CEO of Epiphany Japan, President and General Manager of PeopleSoft Japan, and spent over a decade in senior marketing roles at IBM.

While Nemelka has been quite busy since his first day at Badgeville, we were able to sit down this week for a conversation around why he joined Badgeville and what he hopes to accomplish here.

Q: Why did you decide to join the Badgeville team to lead business development?

A: What Badgeville does — in the Behavior Platform — creates and proves the “R” in Social ROI. And it touches absolutely everything companies do both internally (around productivity and performance) and externally (around driving top line growth.)

Q: What experiences from your past are most relevant to your new role?

A: My career has been centered on helping enterprises leverage technology to re-engineer processes for improved performance. Whether as a marketer, financial analyst, sales rep, GM, CMO, COO, or CEO, that’s what I’ve been focused on creating value in this context, and that’s exactly what we do. The difference with engagement mechanics is that we’re fusing technology with people rather than replacing people–and that’s very exciting.

Q: When was the first time in your career you encountered gamification?

A: Early on my career, I was a sales rep for IBM assigned to First Enterprise Bank (bought by Wells later on), and we were designing a Teller system that was capturing and presenting client value “scores” to tellers and using game mechanics to incent and compare Teller effectiveness in serving high value clients. That was back in 1989, well before the rise of social gaming and today’s interest in enterprise gamification.

Q: While business has evolved over the years to become more social and collaborative, what is still missing that you’re looking to help evolve?

A: I’m still waiting to see a comprehensive mindset change in the new value of customer and employee relationships, and how to nurture that value. The ROI equation for companies for technology investment since the beginning of time has always be driven by their ability to reduce headcount. We’ve driven out all the people we can. Some would answer that we’ve gone too far and have lost the ability to have a relationship with the customer. Social Business inserts people back into over-automated processes. But to embraced widely, companies need to stop thinking about automating people out of processes and start thinking about how to automate them into processes. The beauty is that engagement mechanics cross the bridge between the conceptualizers who have been quick to embrace social and the builders who need to actually make it work and prove it adds value.

If you are interested in learning more about our partnership program and speaking with Nemelka, contact us here.

Today Badgeville announced the release of the world’s first Gamification Frameworks, a collection of prescriptive, turnkey gamification solutions to enable rapid deployment and successful engagement across customer and employee audiences.

Since our launch in 2010, we have worked with thousands of executives and technologists to help deploy gamification and reputation programs. Through this experience, we uncovered six key frameworks which are applicable for most business use cases of gamification. Instead of reinventing the wheel on each deployment, our research has found that these Frameworks enable our customers to drastically decrease time to launch, while deploying proven gamification programs with real business results.

Until today, businesses had to rely on game design internally to build sustainable gamification programs, limiting ROI, quality, and scalability. The Gamification Frameworks make it easy for marketers, IT leaders, and other enterprise stakeholders to influence user behaviors that matter to them, increasing customer loyalty and employee performance. The Gamification Frameworks have slashed our customer deployment cycles from months to weeks, offering robust models for customer-facing and employee-facing programs, proven effective game and social mechanic design, world-class configurable widgets, and a holistic reporting and analytic suite for a sophisticated, smart, and fast gamification deployment.

Continue reading »

Published in Health Plan Week, April 23 issue, copyright © 2012 by Atlantic Information Services, Inc. Reprinted with permission from Atlantic Information Services, Inc.

If UnitedHealth Group had its way, all of its members would own a Microsoft Xbox video game system and would use it every day. While promoting video games might sound like a way to grow couch potatoes, UnitedHealth and several other major insurers are using concepts behind popular video games to promote wellness, encourage exercise and boost social interactions between people — and ultimately improve health outcomes and lower costs.

But health insurers have yet to harness the full potential of gaming for their members, says Kris Duggan, CEO of Menlo Park, Calif.-based Badgeville, which consults with companies and helps develop products for “gamification” efforts. Kaiser Permanente is one of its customers through its Avivia Health unit.

Bob Plourde, vice president of innovation and research and development at UnitedHealth, agrees and says that despite the excitement over using games to drive member behavior, insurers still have a long way to go and need to make significant investments if they are to achieve sustained results.

“If you look at the health care industry in general, it’s not the most terribly exciting of times. People tend to check out very quickly. If we can get people engaged, more knowledgeable and get them to do activities, that’s a huge win for us,” he says. Continue reading »

We are thrilled to have Ant’s Eye View CEO Sean O’Driscoll as our next guest on The Engagement Experts Webinar Series:

It’s No Game: Playing Your Way to Becoming a Fully Engaged Enterprise
Wednesday April 25th, 10:30AM PST
Registrations are limited, register HERE now!

Sean is the co-chair of the influencer council for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, and co-founder and CEO of Ant’s Eye View, a global leader in helping F1000 enterprises become social. Prior to co-founding Ant’s Eye View, Sean was a 15-year veteran at Microsoft Corporation, where he developed the social media and community-based support models, leading the Microsoft MVP program. He works closely with large companies, including Cisco, Bloomingdale’s, Dell, Jack in the Box and KPMG, to help design and build a fully engaged enterprise.

This exclusive webinar will answer the following questions:

• Are you activating your customers and driving the behaviors that are most valuable to your brand?
• Are your employees educated, trained, and invested in collaborating to improve how business gets done?
• Are you closing the gap between your company and your customers to build loyalty?
• Can you measure the real impact of those efforts?

Sign up now to join Badgeville and Ant’s Eye View for this exclusive webinar.

I had a great time at Bazaarvoice Summit this past week… and I’m not the only one.

The various tracks — Jump-Start Your Loyalty Loop; Reach Customers Everywhere; and Creating the Insights-Fueled Organization — and the endless announcements, keynotes, and activities kept me thoroughly engaged, intrigued, and excited. Thank you, Bazaarvoice, for inviting the Badgeville team to participate in this incredible event.

Our very own Senior Game Designer, Tony Ventrice, spoke on a panel discussing the “loyalty loop” and how repeat business can be attained by nurturing brand-consumer relationships. The takeaway here is that businesses that deliver meaningful customer experiences before, during, and after a sale, have the opportunity to pull customers into said “loyalty loop” which is crucial for repeat and returning business. Here, Tony discussed the use of game mechanics as a strategy to help develop and foster the brand-consumer relationship. The fact that at the conclusion of this panel, 50% of the audience questions were related to gamification, shows that much more of the world is ready to learn how gamification can impact loyalty and engagement strategies–awesome.

Although unable to attend every session while working the Badgeville for Bazaarvoice demo table in the [impressive!] Innovation Cafe, I was able to have compelling and meaningful conversations with the Summit attendees. This was not only a wonderful opportunity to connect with the audience, but it proved to be an invaluable personal experience as well.

The people who made this event happen (the speakers, sponsors, partners, and Bazaarvoice team) really raised the bar.

How does this impact you? I’ve come back from Austin completely rejuvenated and inspired to host our own Badgeville events with the same attention to detail and quality. Stay tuned… in a few weeks, we will be announcing the dates and locations for our invite-only city tours and events! Want us to swing by your neck of the woods? Want to get on the invite list? Email me at events@badgeville.com.

The final installment in my series on What Makes Games Fun on Gamasutra.com

I investigate the phenomenon psychologists call ‘Flow‘ and how it relates to the intangible aspects of games that make them seem ‘addictive’.

I cover the commonly held requirements for flow:

• Intrinsically rewarding
• Clear unobstructed goals
• Immediate feedback
• Balance between ability level and challenge

And challenge that with my own version, tailored for understanding flow in games:

Three Aspects of Flow

• a stream of learned automatic choices
• a stream of subjective, creative choices
• a source of growth

To read the whole article, go here.

Let’s face it, not all of your customers will be your best customers. Not all of your employees will be your best employees either.

They won’t be the worst, but they won’t be the best. They’ll be average. They will perform averagely. They buy averagely. They will interact averagely.

They are your lurkers and they are insanely valuable. They make up 50% or more of your sales. They drive a huge chunk of your traffic. They are the backbone of your business.

They are the 90 & 9 in the 90/9/1.

Lurkers are that person that shows up to work day in and day out never expecting a promotion. They are the constant reader of your content, never commenting on it, but always enjoying it. They buy something from you more than once per month, but you don’t even know their name.

And they need love.

They need to know that they are important. That their contribution is important to you.

And you need to show them that love. You need to recognize and reward them for their contribution. The world is getting too flat for you to not do that.

At some point, the lurkers will go away. Someone will come along with more interesting content. A recruiter will call them with a better job offer. They will find a better price for that widget you sell.

And all you need to do is recognize them. Give them an experience that they can engage with without having to expound a ton of energy. Recognize them at your company. Show them that their purchases are valued.

The how of this isn’t simple. Context is king. In a company with 10,000 people, I might not be the best programmer, but I might have the best ideas in my regional office. I might not buy the most, but maybe I write the best reviews. I may not read the most, but I read daily damn it.

It is easy to reward top people, but driving the middle is really hard. The costs to do this are miniscule, though. You can help your employees build their reputation, which will keep them employed with you longer. You can reward your readers for showing up daily, which will get them to do more on your site. You can connect shoppers socially to help them find new people whose opinions they trust, which will drive more sales.

Lurkers need love too. The technology to track, recognize and reward these lurkers is so easily available. You just need to implement it.

Otherwise, assume the majority of your customers, the majority of readers and the majority of your employees will continue to turn over faster and faster.

Can you live with that or can you just give them some love?

Ford Escape Routes is a new interactive reality series debuting this Saturday. The show features a cast of six teams of two, participating in a unique road trip competition with real-world challenges.

However, unlike other reality adventure shows, at-home viewers across the country can participate in real-time via EscapeRoutes.com, to help their favorite Escape Routes team win. Viewers impact the outcome of the show through playing and winning on their team’s behalf through the interactive challenges and games online. Team Detroit (TDI) and Rokkan came up with the innovative vision for the online experience, and turned to Badgeville to power its dynamic gamification program.

“Badgeville’s technology enabled the team at Rokkan to easily deploy their strategic, creative, and technical visions around this new interactive form of entertainment. We selected Badgeville as one of our key technology partners because of their flexible and powerful gamification platform. Working with Badgeville’s unique features, we were able to easily build a sophisticated and unique gamified user experience that couldn’t have been achieved otherwise.”  – Jim Blackwelder, Executive Technical Director at Rokkan

The more fans interact with the site by completing challenges or recruiting friends, the more points they earn to win prizes. One lucky fan will win a new Ford Escape, while others can win trips, cameras, bikes and other prizes. Each of the TV team members also have their own social channels that fans can directly interact with to help them win the overall TV competition with clues and other bonuses.

You can experience Badgeville today and engage with this new form of reality entertainment by registering at EscapeRoutes.com. Don’t forget to tune in for the TV show which begins airing March 31 on NBC.