Social Media Marketing for Business

 Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context in order to engage users and solve problems.

Often used in training and human resources, the application of Gamification improves learning, task completion, data quality and Return on Investment.

Although the term, Gamification, was coined in 2002 by Nick Pelling, it didn’t gain widespread usage until 2010, With the rise of social networking, the social and reward aspects of games were incorporated into software. Social sharing increased usage and took interest to a new level and today:

• 50% of companies that seek funding for consumer software applications mention game design in their presentations
• 70% of the top 2,000 global organizations, will use “gamified” applications for marketing, employee performance, training, and health care by 2014
• Still, 80% of current gamified applications fail, primarily because business objectives are not defined at the outset (source: Gartner)

To give you an idea of objectives to shoot for, here are 21 companies who use Gamification and get better business results. 

1. AETNA: adopted Mindbloom’s Life Game platform to help customers and employees adopt healthy life habits. Members visited 4X per week and average engagement was 14 minutes, 41 seconds per visit. It helped users better manage specific physical conditions and monitor areas correlated to health outcomes (souce: Deloitte Review)
2. AUTODESK: raised trial usage by 40% and conversion rates by 15% (source:Huffington Post)
3. BADGEVILLE: customers experienced 20% to more than 200% increases in user behavior, with some customers seeing as high as 500% lift in key objectives (source: Tech Republic)
4. BELL MEDIA: increased customer retention by 33% by incorporating “social loyalty” rewards on its website (source: Society for Human Resource Management)
5. CISCO: used gaming strategies to enhance its virtual global sales meeting and call center company and reduced call time by 15% and improved sales between 8% and 12% (source: Deloitte Review)
   
6. DELOITTE: training programs using Gamification took 50% less time to complete and kept more student involved than ever before (source: Huffington Post)
7. DEVHUB: a place for Web developers, added gaming feedback and watched in awe as the percentage of users who finished their sites shot up from 10% to 80% (source: Forbes)
8. EMC2 increased the amount of feedback it received by 41% (source: Society for Human Resource Management)
9. ENGINE YARD: increased the response rate for its customer service representatives by 40 percent after posting response-time leaders for employees to see (source: Society for Human Resource Management)
10. EXTRACO BANK: raised their customer acquisition by 700% (source: Huffington Post)
11. JOIZ: a Swiss television network, increased sharing by 100% and social referral traffic by 54% with social infrastructure and gamification technology (source:Gigya)
12. LAWLEY INSURANCE: ran a 2-week contest to clean up its sales pipeline and, during that time, generated the same number of activities as had been created in the prior 7.5 months (source: Level Eleven)
13. MARKETO: layered Badgeville games on their community and 67% more engagement, 51% more active members and 10% more engagements per member (source: Badgeville)
14. NEXTJUMP:  used gamification to get 67% of their employees into the gym (source: Huffington Post).
15. NIKE: used gamified feedback to drive over 5,000,000 to beat their personal fitness goals every day of the year (source: Huffington Post)
16. POPCHIPS: has seen its sales rise 40% this year and its 2012 sales could top $100 million. Popchips are using games as a way to personalize mobile advertising and overcome user resistance to ads on their smartphones and tablet computers (Souce: USA Today)
17. PLAYBOY: in its Miss Social game, saw 85% of users play more than once, 50% return the following month and a 60% increase in monthly revenue (source:TNS Brand Equity Center)
18. RECYCLE BANK and OPOWERL increased recycling by 20% and reduced carbon emissions, helping to save the planet with gamified designs.
19. SPOTIFY and LIVING SOCIAL: replaced annual reviews with a mobile, gamified solution — over 90% of employees participated voluntarily (source: Huffington Post)
20. USA NETWORK: saw a 130% jump in page views and a 40% increase in return visits  with the Club Psych game (source: Entrepreneur)
21. VERIZON: users spend over 30% more time on-site with social login games versus a regular site login, The site experienced more than 15% more page views (source: Entrepreneur)

Gamification is not a project…it’s a business channel that gets invested for the long-term. Companies that understand are the ones likely to see the results they are looking for.

Do these case studies prove Gamification can get better business results for your company?