Badgeville Targets Online Communities with Gamification Software
Nearly a year after launching a “behavior lab” aimed at helping it better address the needs of enterprises, Badgeville, a provider of gamification software, is introducing Badgeville for Communities, a solution for adding game, reputation and social mechanics to community and collaboration products.
According to the company, the Badgeville for Communities product can integrate with popular enterprise social network and collaboration products, including Yammer, Jive, Lithium, Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Connections and Drupal or WordPress deployments.
The company is focusing on gamification use cases that are maturing, said Badgeville President and CEO Jon Shalowitz. “Online communities are a very ripe area for gamification since large investments have been made and success hinges on customer and employee engagement,” he said.
Online communities are an area in which packaged turnkey solutions could be built to reduce customer deployment time, he said, adding , “we are seeing strong customer demand” from companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and EMC.
Shalowitz said the product supports both customer-facing communities and internal workplace communities.
Brace Rennels, director of Social Community Strategy at Badgeville customer EMC, said the company had experienced a 21 percent increase in overall user engagement since layering Badgeville’s Behavior Platform on top of EMC’s existing Jive community network. The company also discovered that community users spend 240 percent more on average than non-community members.
“Most importantly, Badgeville has really given us the ability to understand the reputation and value of individual community members, and to hone in on and reward champions of our brand,” Rennels said.
Notable features of the Badgeville for Communities platform include simple configuration for community use cases including Social Enterprise, Conversation Starter, Forum Expert and Content Creator, and the ability to combine customer and employee communities with portable reputations and transfer existing profile reputations to new communities.
Shalowitz offered several tips for successful communities:
- Make sure the community is designed to motivate individual users and is not just focused on the top-down business objective.
- Tap into users’ intrinsic motivations of feeling smart, successful, socially valued or structured.
- Reduce friction in the interaction and provide user feedback in as near real time as possible. “The better one can accomplish this in the design, the better the overall experience will be,” he said.
- Monitor and tweak communities over time. “Gamification programs change over time as the user base evolves,” he said. “People start as new users, become more adept at using the system over time, eventually becoming experts. Making sure behavioral models are tuned and new content is added to keep the implementation fresh will increase your odds for longer-term success.”
In addition to EMC and Booz Allen Hamilton, Badgeville customers include American Express, Oracle, Samsung, Bell Media, Kendall Jackson and Philips Electronics.
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