Badgeville provides the Behavior Platform™ a cloud-based gamification platform that allows organizations to build custom gamification programs for their employees, business partners, and customers. I recently spoke with Kevin Akeroryd, SVP Field Operations of Badgeville, about their offering.
My first question was why there is so much buzz today over a concept that has been around for decades. Like many others I was involved in creating incentive programs for employee participation in learning efforts in the 80s and knowledge management programs in the 90s. Kevin said that he sees four main reasons. First, the social games from companies like Zynga and Playdom, along with geolocation check-in applications such as Foursquare, have created awareness and high interest in behavior recognition and gaming activities on the Web.
Secondly, many thought leaders and pundits have begun to write about gamification and academics have started to research the topic. Third, there are new tools that make it easy to build such programs, especially those that work through the cloud. Badgeville is one of these. Fourth, there are more advanced analytics to track the results. This all makes sense to me.
The advent of social networking site and online communities has kicked this trend into high gear. In the past companies invested in monetary incentives, usually in the form of free products. Now with the social Web, companies are finding that status and associated privileges are actually more effective that simply providing product rewards.
For example, getting to vote on the coffee of the month or some other status can be more rewarding to the customer and generate greater loyalty that a free cup of coffee. This trend has the dual benefit of costing less money and gathering customer intelligence on preferences.
As Kevin explained Badgeville is a SaaS platform, not an app. It is not an out-of-the-box solution. You customize it to fit the individual needs of your program and it enables your business to track behavior across all of your web and mobile properties. This is a good thing since every program has different audiences and different goals. Here is a sample Badegeville screen from Deloitte.
Badgeville also provides a team of experts in make your program more effective. They can look at such issues as what motivates people, social mechanics and game design, how to build loyalty, and how to build effective analytics and make use of them to fine tune your program. Here is another Badgeville screen from Deloitte.
Badgeville can also be integrated with such applications as Salesforce.com and Jive. It has a partnership with Klout to help organizations identify and reward top influencers in their community. Badgeville also has a partnership with Bazaarvoice – through game mechanics – to provide reputation and social loyalty programs to Bazaarvoice’s network. Bazaarvoice’s solutions are now integrated with Badgeville’s Behavior Platform to increase contribution of customer-generated content and online social sharing.
Badgeville provides a Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK) for iOS and Android devices. Deloitte, Apontador, Menuism, George Mobile and BAMM.tv are among Badgeville’s global customers that have added gamified mobile experiences using Badgeville’s API and SDKs.
I have written about BAMM.tv and spoke with their CEO Chris Hansen. I like what they are doing to provide exposure and profit to emerging bands. He is quoted as saying, “BAMM.tv will be launching a new iPad application for discovering emerging bands that places users in a virtual venue with live performance HD videos and includes a gamification program built on top of Badgeville's Behavior Platform."
Founded in 2010, Badgeville is based in Menlo Park, Calif. Clients include: Samsung, Recyclebank, Deloitte, Dell, eBay, Universal Music, The Active Network, and more.
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