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Written by Manuel Lemos
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Sunday, 05 May 2013 21:46 |
 Advertising: Mass Media vs. Targeting Community Websites
The traditional way for businesses to reach large audiences of potential costumers is to pay to advertise on mass media. But, the wide dissemination of the web allowed us to see a different path to reach many customers at once, eventually in a more efficient way to generate more sales.
Many sites have been built to gather users with specific interests. These sites are known as community websites. Users with similar interests gather around those sites and participate in activities that are useful and fun, like discussing in forums, asking questions and providing answers, publishing articles, sharing content of interest, group challenges, competitions, etc..
Paying to Advertise in Community Websites vs. Building the Community Websites
In some cases businesses pay to advertise specifically in those community websites, so they can reach their target markets. For instance, a business that sells bicycles can target their advertising efforts to Web site communities for bicycle users.
Here is a different approach. What if instead of paying to advertise in community websites, those businesses would actually be the ones in charge of building and fostering those communities? This way they would be able to gather a community of potential customers highly interested in their products. The businesses could expose their products the website users without having to pay to advertise.
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Written by Mario Herger
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Thursday, 02 May 2013 21:20 |
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 "Sales people are competitive! They love competing." Or so the logic goes. But with the raise of gamification and a better understanding of the behavioral and motivational science, this popular stereotype should make way for better incentive systems.
The global financial crisis of 2008 – under which we still suffer – spectacularly demonstrated the flaws in ill-designed and misunderstood reward systems. A melange of multi-layer detachment of metrics from real money, short-term thinking, unlimited reward potential, bad management and oversight, players willing to beat the system, and other factors profited few, but hurt many. What seems so obvious in hindsight for most of us, is also a tell-tale sign of our ability to ignore the facts when we think it can help our short-term goals.
Sales people across the globe are basically managed by the same type of incentive system: close a deal, get a commission. The more deals, the more money they get. But we know that this is not always leading to the best outcomes. We shiver thinking of the "car sales guy" who's pushing more care features on my list and me to buy today and not tomorrow. Or we have met the sales person in a tourist resort who's switching from "I am your friend"- to "please buy or my kids go to bed hungry"-mode.
It turns out that this is not the exception, but the standard. Customers show buyer's remorse more often than you may think. And the reaction is that customer avoid these stores or that person in the future and the long-term relationship is destroyed. From where does this behavior originate and what can be changed? And if it's changed, would the world be a better place?
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Written by Mario Herger
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Thursday, 02 May 2013 17:36 |
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 It may come as no surprise that people working in the gamification space like a challenge. And what other industry than that one needs to apply the very same game design components to have a little fun? This is what Toby Beresford does with his monthly updated gamification guru list, and which he uses to showcase his Leaderboarded gamification technology.
In the two years that Toby has compiled the list, using different criteria to rank the gamification gurus, mostly Gabe Zichermann – the man behind the GSummit and Gamification.co – has been dominating (with a short early stint by Jane McGonigal, who anyways considers herself a game-, but not a gamification-designer).
Anyways, April 2013 is the first time that I unseated Gabe Zichermann from the top spot. What a day! I had aimed for #2, but #1 is a sensation. Now of course, this is a little competition, and we need to understand what competition means, what types of competition are there, when it works, and how winners and losers react.
The Wikipedia defines competition as follows:
Competition in ecology and sociology is a contest between individuals and entities for territory, a niche, or a location of resources, for resources and goods, for prestige, recognition, awards, mates, or group or social status, for leadership. It is the opposite of cooperation. |
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Written by Zoë Epstein
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Wednesday, 24 April 2013 00:56 |
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 Abstract
Enterprise gamification, a popular trend in the business world right now, refers to the application of game mechanics to the workplace. Gamification practitioners believe that the goals of games – to create motivation, retention, loyalty, and satisfaction – are the same as the goals of employee engagement initiatives. Though a widely cited 2011 Gartner study predicts the widespread use of enterprise gamification, it is too early to conclude whether gamification will be a lasting new standard of workplace engagement. Therefore, the goal of this study is to increase understanding of how enterprise gamification is being implemented on a practical level in organizations. Keywords Gamification - the application of game mechanics and game thinking to any non-game environment, like customer engagement, education, training, and business
Enterprise Gamification - applying gamification elements like badges, levels, and leaderboards specifically to the workplace environment
Employee Engagement - employee involvement, satisfaction with work, and emotional commitment to their organizations Game Mechanics - building blocks like leaderboards, badges, and progress bars, that can be used for gamification
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Written by Gal Rimon
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Tuesday, 23 April 2013 19:11 |
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 The Japanese word Kaizen means “Good Change”. Kaizen is a practical philosophy and methodology that focus upon continuous improvement of business processes.
Enterprise Gamification aims for behavior modification in business processes using gaming dynamics and mechanisms. The Kaizen model is based on the assumption that people resist extreme changes.
Instead, gradual changes usually are much more effective. So how will we combine those two approaches together? PDCA model enables the implementation of small changes in the process. For example, one of our clients wanted to improve its sales process, after some analysis they reached a conclusion that instead of office work, more field work would improve the performances of their sales workforce. So the KPIs were set to more meetings with the potential customers and lead generation. This small change was implemented using Gamification. |
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Written by Mario Herger
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Tuesday, 23 April 2013 04:57 |
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 Aaah, the good, old times … never were. And "ye good olde" Gamification Summit? Never existed! I can say that, because I have attended all four of them. With the first one in January 2011 and the most recent one just last week in San Francisco. From 300 attendees with 12 agenda items to 77(!) talks, panels, workshops vying for the attention of 600+ attendees, the GSummit has come a long way.
In the first year, Gabe Zichermann, "grey-eminence" and gamification guru #1 had to beg people to fill the slots and a full day of conference, with a then still mind-bending roster of speakers (including Jane McGonigal for the keynote) and topics. For me at least, it was the revelation that I had come to the right place and met the very people that I could talk to without feeling odd or out-of-place. What a relief to speak to people who could relate to the challenges that I faced at work. The only thing that I missed back then were the enterprise gamification speakers – of which there was not really anyone that Gabe could ask. This discipline and the speakers who could cover that topic were non-exist.
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Written by Gal Rimon
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Thursday, 11 April 2013 16:30 |
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L adies and Gentlemen, start your engines!
You have less than 90 days to turn a new recruit into a productive employee. Sure, you have a well-established Onboarding process.
But it is BORING and the new recruits consider it a burden. How to gain faster time-to-productivity? How to engage your new recruit in the Onboarding process? How to reduce failure and early-attrition rates? The concept of Gamification might help to improve the process. Gamification, involves applying Gaming dynamics and mechanisms in a non-game environment for the purpose of improving engagement. Let’s dive into the process with Martin. Martin is a seasoned sales person, he just signed the contract and should join our company in 30 days. |
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Written by Mario Herger
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Friday, 29 March 2013 04:55 |
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 When the goCatch team saw the first time a taxi-driver fist-pumping, they knew they were on to something. The reason for the happy taxi-driver was not a great tip or a good fare that he had gotten, but the level up on the goCatch-taxi-app that has been soaring in popularity in Australia.
When Andrew Campbell co-founded the peer-to-peer taxi booking app in Sydney with Ned Moorfield, they didn't plan to gamify the apps. The drivers downloaded their app to see customers waiting for taxis, the customers can see on a map taxis in their vicinity and order them and tell the destination. But drivers started cherry-picking only the long and more valuable fares, and ignored the short ones. The goCatch-team had to come up with an incentive-system in order to encourage the drivers to pick the short fares as well. And the solution was: points and badges. Yes, I know, it sounds stupid and we are always pointing out not to just simply "pointsificate" or "badgify" and app, but the goCatch-team had to do something. And this fast. For each fare the drivers accepted, they earned points, with the short fares worth relatively more points than the large ones. The points translated into badges reflecting level-ups, which then gave higher ranked drivers priority access to the more valuable fares. Drivers accepting shorter fares can level-up faster. |
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