White Paper Gamification Five plays for winning the Game Your users want to be engaged. Nothing gets that done better than Gamification. Yet, to succeed, it must be done right. For that, you need to know the five keys to success in Gamification.
Introduction To thrive, it s not enough for web sites to be attractive and interesting. Not today. Now, web sites must also be highly social and engaging if they are to attract visitors, maintain their interest, and keep them coming back. Take the trend toward social login on websites, for instance, which makes it possible for users to have a deeply immersive social experience even when outside of their core social networks. And, by linking their activity on your site with their existing social network credentials, it reduces registration time and quickly gets them active on your site. And the more ways you enable your customers to engage, through social plugins such as commenting, content sharing, activity feeds, and chat, the more loyal they ll become, and the more they ll return to your site. That s exactly the objective behind the practice of gamification because when done right, gamification enhances all of those social features. The application of game mechanics, once a purview pertinent only to game developers has rapidly become a mainstream topic among marketers as it applies to websites and online content. This aims to attract visitor interest by offering social standing and rewards for certain website activities. Rewards can be delivered through the creation of leaderboards, badges, and loyalty programs that encourage visitors to have fun and perform the site activity desired by your organization. Don t be fooled by the name: Gamification isn t about turning your site into a game it s about incentivizing the right behavior that is aligned with your business goals. It may be new, but gamification is already having a significant impact on business marketing. Consider Foursquare, where people check in to all of the places they visit, including hotels, restaurants, airports, coffee houses, and everything in between. As they check in, they earn points for doing so, and even get fun designations such as mayor for visiting a certain number of times. The strategy has caught on. Gamification isn t about turning your site into a game. Increasingly, businesses are gamifying their own marketing efforts, such as a national hotel chain that is using gamification to entice its customers to visit locations where they ve yet to stay. Another example: an online clothing retailer has made a game of customer feedback by designating commenters as a guru or a senior buyer for those who share their insight with the company. Not convinced? By 2015, M2 Research forecasts that organizations will invest $1.6 billion in gamification production and that gamification revenue will be about 23 percent of all social media marketing budgets. Gamification works because, at its essence, it incentivizes users to act while it subtly taps into their competitive nature. When done right, it leverages the proven principles of rewards and incentives to help create customer action. Through loyalty programs, games, and social recognition, site visitors help promote your brand and content and they do so because they are having fun. The reality is that most companies currently don t have a strategy in place to succeed at socialization let alone gamification. The good news is that this means there s still great opportunity for firms that choose to move fast. Below, we list what we ve found and what it takes to succeed at keeping customers engaged and getting them to return to your web site again and again through the power of gamification.
Play #1: Encourage More User-generated Content By incentivizing content creation, your web site becomes richer, more dynamic, and engaging, and search engine optimization is improved dramatically. In fact, one of the most basic ways to improve user-generated content is to encourage feedback on the content you produce and present such as with comments, ratings, and reviews. Today, forward-looking businesses also are looking for ways to add elements of gamification to their usergenerated content. For instance, with gamification, one can reward top commenters and allow users to rate the value of user comments; thus, over time, certain commenters observations would carry greater weight. This accomplishes a number of things: it incentivizes your most knowledgeable and active evangelists to participate and promote your product, services, or content. Second, it helps all of your users to find the most relevant information. Third, it calls for everyone in the community to provide thoughtful and high-quality input, comments, and reviews. All of this means more engagement and higher quality content, and a resulting loyalty that will keep them returning. Play #2: Savvy Sharing It s important to promote sharing, but do so with a larger goal in mind. Sharing of content on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others is extremely powerful. And with rewards for doing so, users are even more compelled to syndicate your content. But be careful: rewarding a user simply for sharing is in violation of many of the social networks terms of service. To prevent users from spamming their feeds with content, social networks prohibit immediate incentives for clicking the share button. One potential solution is to have users work toward a larger goal or ranking as a result of sharing not for the sharing itself. Instead of prodding them to click to share and earn ten points, sharing can be a means to bring users toward an achievement. Doing so tells visitors that sharing has value, but does not drive them toward mindless clicking. They ll share what actually matters to them instead of just spamming their social networks. That s a win for everybody. Play #3: Feedback Social network reaction buttons (such as Facebook s Like and Google s +1 ) are powerful features. They serve as both content contribution and sharing tools as they allow users to express an opinion with just one click. Furthermore, you can incorporate gamification by rewarding users for sharing content on your site and by prioritizing the opinions and the feed activity of highly-ranked users. For example, when a website s activity feed displays popular articles and top user reactions, a visitor is more likely to click because those users opinions will be more valued. It also is important to show the counters near these reaction buttons; this way, those active users get instant feedback and see that their opinions make a difference. Also, the ranking will encourage others to strive for a high level of status -- and all of this helps to promote even more engagement on your site.
Play #4: Social Login Social login is a powerful tool for engagement, and it brings an invaluable ingredient for gamification: the user s social graph. Wanting to be a valued and respected part of a community is a big part of human nature, and a basic tenet of gamification is that users are more inclined to participate if there is a real-world benefit behind the rewards. This can be as simple as increased reputation within a community. Once a user logs in via social APIs such as Facebook Connect or Twitter, she can then conveniently compare herself with others on the site, including her social network friends. What if your visitor knows some people in the site community but they re still new to the game? How can we encourage participation? Simple by awarding them points just for clicking around, logging in or for remaining on a page and consuming content. This brings a user into the game by automatically rewarding her with badges and points. As soon as a user recognizes the value in earning points (perhaps her comment appears higher in the activity feed), she ll get hooked and then participate with intent. Keeping users involved in a game without much effort on their part is a powerful strategy to convert them into active participants, and they ll be much more likely to return again and again. Play #5: Scorekeeping Any effective implementation of gamification is clear on the rules of the game, as well as the rewards for participation. That means users need to be educated about how to achieve recognition and how to advance within the system. To educate, don t blast them with endless notifications. Rather, consider using gentle notifications that don t monopolize their entire screen. Additionally, rewards must have meaning, and that meaning must be understood by the entire community to have value. Rewards are just like currency; instead of monetary value, however, it s social value prestige and influence.
The Challenge of Current Technologies The reality is that having the best gamification strategy laid out is a great start, but doesn t mean much if you can t execute your plans effectively. One reason why many attempts at gamification don t reach business objectives, or fail outright, is that all of their social elements sharing, commenting, chatting, and log-on are siloed, stand-alone implementations. As detailed above, gamification needs to relate directly to the social elements of your site the user-generated content, sharing, feedback, social login, and scorekeeping. But all these elements need to be integrated in such a way that they work in unison. This is much easier said than done. Today, there is a hodgepodge of social and gamification plugins. In fact, the market is littered with point solutions all offering different components that are coded in different languages. This creates an unmanageable mess to develop, support, and maintain, let alone to extract the optimal value from your efforts. Gamification needs to relate directly to the social elements of your site. Such complexity makes it more challenging for your IT team to keep up with social networks and API changes, which can break your site s social elements and leave visitors confused and unengaged. As the technology evolves, site owners will be tempted to layer even more point products onto their sites, increasing complexity even further. Just like other areas of technology, such as web site performance and measurement tools, network and system management and security have converged and there s no reason why social engagement and gamification won t be the same.
Success through Unifying Social and Gamification To simplify management and to extract as much value as possible from your gamification and social infrastructure platform, it makes sense to turn to a platform that consolidates crucial capabilities such as registration, sharing, gamification, and analytics, including the ability to seamlessly integrate custom-built elements. This way, businesses can connect their sites more easily to all the major social platforms, including Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Yahoo!, and LinkedIn. This makes it possible to enhance users connected experience through authentication via existing identity, one-click sharing, as well as on-site social features such as live chat, and then analyze the business results of their on-site social optimization efforts through detailed metrics and real-time data. The importance of this type of tight integration only grows as user engagement becomes more significant to marketing efforts. It means an increased understanding of how users are engaging with your site, and that provides better insight into how to weave gamification into your site successfully, based on your most important business objectives. This is what Gigya does for its customers every day. Gigya makes websites social by integrating online businesses with the top social networks and identity providers, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The company enables customers to apply friend and profile data to drive social registrations, scalable word-of-mouth marketing, and broad community interaction. Through analytics, best practices, consulting, and support, Gigya optimizes every implementation, delivering measurable social return-on-investment. Gigya s Gamification platform is a social loyalty and rewards engine that makes it easy to reward users and stimulate activity on your site. Gigya s Gamification platform helps you to reward users for performing actions that benefit your business through its plug-and-play and fully customizable integration options. And the platform is fully integrated with all Gigya plugins and social analytics so you can quickly and easily reward your users for activities you want them to perform. Conclusion Today s web users want to engage with the sites they visit. They want to be rewarded for their participation, and know how to find the most knowledgeable and useful members of the community. The best way to provide it for them, in a way that also builds visitors, shoppers, and long-term loyalty, is through gamification. Gamification works because it incentivizes users to act and, through its unified social platform, no one knows consumer gamification better than Gigya. Supporting more than 1 billion users each month across more than 500,000 sites, Gigya s technology is the choice of global leaders in publishing and commerce, including CBS, Fox Sports, Intuit, The Coca-Cola Company, The Home Depot, and Turner Networks.