In Part One of #shift to gamification, we explored the basics of the concept with simple examples of gamification both online and, to borrow the online gaming parlance, “IRL” (in real life). By 2015, Gartner Research projects that more than 50% of organizations will have gamified their innovation processes. They go on to say that in the same time span, over 70% of the Global 2000 will have at least one gamified process. In other words, this is not a fad; in the next few years, gamification will continue to sweep its way through businesses of all types.

But what about today? Companies across a vast array of different industries are employing gamification, both internally to motivate and engage their own employees, and externally to build loyalty and consumer engagement on their web sites or in their stores. The strategies employed often vary wildly, so if you’re interested in #shifting to gamify processes at your company, the following examples should provide plenty of inspiration.

Checking-In

A phrase that just yesterday seemed to be reserved for hotels or flights, “checking-in” has a wide variety of meanings in today’s social media- and tech-driven society. Users on several social media sites can “check in” to locations, letting their friends know where they are, and businesses have definitely taken notice.

foursquare, one of the most successful services dedicated to checking into locations, has partnered with businesses around the world to reward users for checking into (and, as a result, virally advertising) stores and restaurants. It is not uncommon to go into your favorite coffee shop or ice cream store and see a foursquare poster detailing what deals you can get for posting your location. And just this month, foursquare announced a new promotional program wherein merchants can pay for promotions that customers can redeem right within the app after checking in. This is one of the most clear-cut examples of gamification being used to encourage behavior: check-in, get a reward, throw in a virtual badge to show off, and be more likely to check-in in the future.

And “checking in” has even extended beyond physical locations! GetGlue, a social network where users can check-in to movies, TV shows, and music, was named Mashable’s Breakout Startup of the Year for 2011. Users of the service are awarded unique badges for checking into particular TV episodes or movie showings. Networks are leveraging this user base as well, offering real-world rewards in exchange for check-ins. As of last summer, GetGlue boasted over 1.5 million users with over 200 million check-ins recorded.

Sales

Salesforce.com is primarily known for its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, a cloud-based system where salespeople can track customer profiles, interact and collaborate with other salespeople, and track and escalate cases as they come in regardless of channel. Salesforce boasts over 2 million subscribers.

Last summer, Bunchball, one of the pioneers of gamification, brought its Nitro platform to Salesforce.com in a big way. Through Nitro for Salesforce™, users can add all sorts of game mechanics to Salesforce.com, adding layers of progression tracking, competition, and rewards. The innately competitive nature of salespeople means that these sorts of metrics are nothing new; we’ve all seen posters comparing the performances of members of a sales team. However, putting all of this visibly into the cloud with a strong social component via Salesforce.com’s Chatter system makes the traditional gamification of sales more seamless than ever before.

Internal Engagement

In addition to utilizing game mechanics to engage consumers, enterprises are turning to gamification to enhance all sorts of internal processes, from employee training to management.

Companies like SAP, Deloitte, and IBM are using things like leaderboards, competitions, and badges to encourage employees to work more productively. For example, an employee might be rewarded for completing assignments or finishing a task in a certain amount of time, and the addition of features like leaderboards encourages friendly competition amongst employees. All of these elements bring an element of fun to typically mundane undertakings. As Gabe Zichermann, a gamification thought-leader and organizer of the Gamification Summit put it, “…most people’s jobs are really freaking boring.” Gamifying your internal processes can help alleviate that problem, leading to happier, more loyal, and more efficient employees.

Health and Fitness

Over the past few years, fitness has enjoyed a boom in new forms of gamification and socialization to bring exercisers together in new ways, often far removed from the gym. In 2006, Nike, in partnership with Apple, created Nike+, an online community built to give runners a way to not only track their personal stats and progression, but also to compare those stats to other runners. Originally the system involved buying a small tracker device that synced with your iPod and recorded things like distance, pace, and calories burned. Today, the Nike+ App runs on a variety of iPod Touches and iPhones without requiring a tracker peripheral, lowering the barrier to entry considerably.

The service started simply as a cool way to combine music and fitness. It has since evolved into a gamified marketing juggernaut, with over 6 million runners engaged in the Nike+ system. Runners can see how they stack up against other runners through stats and leaderboards and even challenge their friends through a “tag” metagame wherein a friend becomes “it” unless they match or beat your run. Nike is constantly exploring new ways to convert this audience; in February of 2012, Nike released the Nike+ Fuelband, a sleek device worn on the wrist that tracks your physical activity throughout the day. It retails for $149 and presales sold out in four minutes.

Another fitness company of note is Fitocracy, a network designed around socializing and improving fitness through heavy gamification. Users can accrue points and level up on Fitocracy by completing exercises, often also completing quests and gaining achievements along the way. Started as an invite-only site in early 2011, Fitocracy is now open to the public and boasts 230,000 users as of January 2012. In November of 2011, Fitocracy announced its first monetization strategy, Fitocracy Hero, a subscription service that adds additional features and places a special badge on the user’s profile.

There’s really no end to the possibilities for gamifying just about any type of business, product, or marketing campaign, and the potential for innovation in the space moving forward is huge. However, gamification alone isn’t enough. Internal gamification won’t suddenly make an ineffectual manager effective, nor will external gamification lead to increased profitability if the underlying product or service is not compelling.

In the third and final part of the #shift to gamification series, we’ll take a look at the future of gamification, both in terms of potential new applications and the potential of the industry itself.

 

I love games. It’s not too long ago that such a declaration would carry with it an unfortunate stigma; the shut-in nerd, living in his parents’ basement, shunning social interaction for the soft glow of a monitor, surrounded by soda cans and empty potato chip bags. Or, my personal favorite, the idea that games create violent sociopaths, a seemingly endless argument that was just recently reopened. However, the days of gaming as a fringe hobby are long behind us. As technology has come to permeate all aspects of our work and social lives, games too have become cheaper, easier to use, and far more accessible. As of 2010, 72% of American households play computer or video games. Globally in 2010 the industry generated more than $25 billion in revenue.

I’m not here to talk about games themselves, though. Rather, this series is going to explore the concept of gamification, the application of game mechanics and psychological strategies by businesses to increase consumer and employee engagement and, ultimately, the bottom line. While the concept of gamification has been around for years, only recently has it turned into a full-blown industry; currently estimated at around $100 million, it is projected to grow to $2.8 billion by 2016.

The Basics (or, the Oldies but Goodies)

Have you ever gotten a free sandwich simply for buying a certain number of sandwiches? If so, you’ve been exposed to gamification. When you were handed that little punch card, you received a quest, or a task to be completed. Every time you got a new punch, you got to see your progression towards completing your goal. And finally, delicious free sandwich in hand, you received a reward for achieving your objective.

Or maybe you’re involved in a Frequent Flyer program. Every time you fly, you receive points, one of the most common of all game mechanics. As you continue to accrue points, you can redeem them for rewards like free flights or discounted fares. Furthermore, if you keep participating in this particular game, you can even level up to different tiers of the program, unlocking new reward possibilities and maybe even earning a new card with greater privileges or special incentives as an achievement that you can show off to others.

Why?

Gamification in use on Salesforce.com

Gamification is all about increasing engagement. Whether it’s aimed externally at consumers to increase participation in a website or promotion, or internally at employees to encourage professional development or collaboration, it employs psychological tricks to get people more involved. And whether you were aware of its existence or not, you’re bombarded with these concepts daily: businesses reward you for “checking in,” they give you virtual badges for you to show off to your friends on social media, they dole out points for participating in forums, and so on.

All of these strategies play to a particular human need or desire. For example, gaining access to a new membership card or VIP lounge because of Frequent Flyer participation touches on the human desires of competition and status; people want to show off things they’ve worked hard to earn, particularly if it’s something that other people don’t have.

To put it simply, gamification exploits these desires to motivate consumers and employees to engage with products or websites in increasingly interactive ways.

Why now?

As the sandwich and Frequent Flyer examples above illustrate, these are not new concepts; so why, then, has gamification boomed in recent years?

One of the primary culprits is the explosion of social gaming. Social games are simple by design, much simpler than their console or PC counterparts. They tend, at their base level, to be a set of basic game design principles (like the ones gamification employs) with the actual “game” being fairly inconsequential — whether it’s running a zoo, a skyscraper, or a kingdom, the game is really just about filling in a progress bar or collecting scores of virtual goods.  And quite frankly, their popularity is staggering: the top three social game developers boast over 300 million monthly active users combined.  With those kinds of numbers (and the associated revenues), it’s no surprise that companies and marketing departments are trying to tap into the same impulses that keep millions of people around the world tending their virtual farms each day.

Another driver of gamification is the ubiquity of mobile technology. The proliferation of smart phones and other sophisticated mobile technologies has allowed marketers to tap into the kinds of behaviors these devices encourage: check in at your favorite restaurant, get a free coupon for your next visit. Tweet about an awesome sale at a clothing store and get 10% off.

People already want to be doing these things. So why not add a layer of game elements to reward them, encourage the behaviors, and create some viral buzz in the process? Ultimately, it’s all about reinforcement, in exactly the same way any video game is about reinforcement. Do X, lose a life. Do Y, and get a reward. Which one would you do again?

With a working knowledge of the concept of gamification, Part 2 of the #shift to Gamification series will take an in-depth look at how specific companies are applying the concept and the results they’ve achieved.

Image Credits: gamestipsntricks.com, Personal Metrics, Cosmos Magazine

 

Bigger and better technology is not the end goal, but the means to the end. Whether you are a marketer, a sales guy or an engineer, I encourage you to think about how technology creates and inspires new worlds, how it heals our lives—not about the technology or tools themselves. Challenge yourselves to be storytellers, architects and visionaries, not simply marketers or business owners, and tell a story that engages your audience on a deeper level:

Video courtesy of Alive Inside

 

According to a recent article on the Moneyland blog of Time.com, writer Dan Schawbel says, “Advances in video conferencing, social media and other technologies, the increased need in the modern-day business world to be on the job 24/7 and forward-thinking workplace-flexibility programs have given rise to a new era of the remote worker.”

Remote working is a topic that is so close to us at PGi.  In fact, we concluded our #shiftSXSW series with “‘Up in the Air’: On the Move with the Working Nomad.” Evernote’s Andrew Sinkov joined PGi’s Digital Nomad Cora Rodenbusch, Green Strategist Lewis Perkins, and Social People’s James Andrews in a discussion about trends and tools that have emerged as a result of the growing number of professionals that work remotely or telecommute.

Our event gathered together a number of digital nomads who shared their unique stories about how they entered the remote workforce, and where they believe the culture is heading. Smartphones, mobile apps, virtual meeting tools like iMeet, and productivity resources like Evernote have all come into existence thanks to our desire to have unlimited accessibility and convenience. We no longer have to be limited by four walls when it comes to getting things done. Today, the workplace is wherever you are.

For more information on life as a telecommuter and how working from home, working at coworking spaces and working remotely can create a healthier planet, be sure to check out the PGiGreen blog for more conversations and dialogue about ways PGi builds tools and practices around greener choices.

Photo credit: The Big Picture

 

Closing the diversity gap in technology and technology entrepreneurship is of paramount concern.

For many, technology presently serves as the final frontier.  Let’s consider how former frontiers have impacted disparities in wealth. In a very simplified history, the gold rush and land snatching early years of America created the beginning of an initial social gap, in socioeconomic status at least. This gap, of course along with slavery and other societal and governmental prejudices, fostered the continued disenfranchisement of minorities. The control of wealth by a small percent of the population helped fuel a cycle of capitalism that has slowly depleted the middle class and landed the US with one of the highest gini coefficients amongst developed nations (an economic measure demonstrating the difference between the wealthiest and poorest in a country). In other words, today technology has become the gold of the old Wild West.

Closing the diversity gap in technology is largely a proactive mission to establish minorities in a position of promise. Placed ahead of the curve, rather than trailing behind. The demographic in the tech industry as it stands today is a troubling one. “Only one percent of web-tech startups are started by African-Americans,” states Wayne Sutton partner at NewMe Accelerator in a Mashable interview. He continues describing that what really needs to happen is a mindset or culture change from finding work to creating work. Furthermore, within the tech industry, “Latinos were employed in only 5.5% of information technology jobs nationally and only 5.8% of key non-IT high technology jobs,” says the Latino Technology Alliance.   

It’s this vital need for change that brings Baratunde into the conversation. Ever embracing technology, Thurston’s book incorporates the new medium of social tech thoroughly. Whether in his live-blogging-esque publishing style or the hashtags scattered throughout the book indicating “the conversation around a phrase,” Baratunde breaks down racial barriers in a refreshingly real way. He draws from massive twitter conversations, forums where everyone can state their opinion to him at his @baratunde feed. Combining ideas and building a book from conversation proves profoundly positive, as everyone who wants to can get involved with the conversation. Especially when, “Continuing the conversation,” is half the battle, according to Sutton.

Thurston is a bridge in the efforts to close the diversity gap surrounding technology, but these efforts require continued communication on all our parts. To use Baratunde’s words, communication, with the help of technology, “allows us to see ourselves in others so the other becomes less other.” Read more about Baratunde and our other #Shift speakers from #ShiftSXSW, and remember everyone can play a part in removing barriers from each other in our society.

 

Last year I was asked to participate in an “un-conference” called #shift by my friend, Joey Rubin. I’ve known Joey for a few years while working in nightlife, producing events, and DJ-ing in New York City. At the time, I was working as the director of marketing for flash-sales start-up Exclusively.In, a company that sells Indian fashion to the American audience. While working with them, I was required to maintain daily communication with a team that was based in India. Because of this, Joey thought it was only fitting that I participate in a panel That focused on communicating with teams, while working remotely. It was an enlightening panel, and I learned a lot from those who also work in similar situations.

At the same time of #shift, unbeknownst to Joey and others at the event, I was on the verge of branching out and starting my own social media acquisition and analytics business called Etiquette Creative. The first day of #shift, I randomly sat next to Lynette Townes during a break in the Shift sessions. As we introduced ourselves to each other, there were instant synergies in our businesses – well, my new business. After a brief conversation, I learned that Lynette is a publicist that represents DJ Jazzy Jeff, Greg Watkins (co-founder of AllHipHop.com), and is founder of Remix Public Relations. I was immediately excited about the possibility of working with her. I was able to identify ways in which I could improve online visibility of her clients. We exchanged information, and the rest is history. Thanks to #shift, Etiquette Creative can add world-renowned DJ and Grammy-winning producer DJ Jazzy Jeff to its client roster.

And this wasn’t the only case. Nearly everyone that I met at #shift inspired me to feel confidence as I continue to grow my business. The tools and tactics I learned, the stories and approaches I heard, and the leaders I met, all served as great motivators for me as I launched Etiquette Creative. I’m very thankful to Joey, Social People, iMeet and PGi for building this great event, and I look forward to attending more #shift events. The #shift series is an amazing forum to discuss topics that are relative to innovators and forward-thinking entrepreneurs. The experience was invaluable.

 

For all those who attended the second evening of #shiftsxsw, the time we spent together was nothing short of magical. The audience sat in awe as Baratunde recounted his childhood story, sharing  his unique experiences — and uniquely humorous perspectives — as a young African-American male working in the technology industry. Watch this video recap from #shiftSXSW to listen to Baratunde explain how book originated, how race and identity shape the stories of both self and other, and how social media played a powerful role in collaboration.

 

The Saturday evening discussion titled “Revolution with Brian Solis” paired Solis with James Andrews that focused on how social media is transforming the way people connect with each other.  As Solis sees it, much of the complexity with emerging technology and new media platforms, hundreds of which are launched during SXSW each year, ironically prohibits people from having meaningful missions. He has observed that the take away of SXSW shouldn’t be a greater awareness of the tools, but rather there should be a relationship between the people centered on a common mission. Solis consults companies to work on building these relationships so that they can have better connected companies and employee relationships to rewire the way success is defined.