Did gamification fail to live up to the hype or is there still  untapped potential?

It wasn’t long ago that leading experts were making a big fuss about it. In 2012, Gartner, for instance, predicted that by today the use of gamified services for consumer goods marketing and customer retention would become as important as Facebook. The research house also forecast that more than 70% of Global 2000 organisations would have at least one gamified application by 2015, and that the gamification industry would be worth US$2.8 billion by 2016. Big numbers. Big predictions. But also, as it transpires, a big miscalculation. It’s fair to say that the business world circa 2015 isn’t in thrall to gamification in the way that Gartner predicted, and the research house is now estimating that market penetration is a measly 5-10%. Indeed, an Infosys study into gamification in…

5 key elements that distinguish the great online quiz from the ignored

In July 2014, quizzes built using Interact were viewed 1 million times. Of those million views, 90% came from the top 10% of quizzes built. To discover what sets excellent quizzes apart from the rest, we ran some statistics, put together graphs, and delved deep into the psychology of what causes some quizzes to outperform the rest. What we found is that all the best quizzes have a good degree of similarity, meaning that there IS a formula for the perfect quiz. I'm here today to share that formula with you.

Every great quiz has 5 essential elements that come together to make up the content.

1. A title that stands out above social media noise 2. A cover image hook 3. Conversational questions 4. Uplifting and challenging results 5. A sharing plan Let's take a look at each element and the data behind what works.

Step 1: Differentiating yourself with an…

Research and examples show what gamification needs to succeed

Making its debut onto the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies just a year ago, gamification continued to reach the peak of inflated expectations this year alongside other technologies such as Big Data, crowdsourcing and HTML5.

Applying gaming concepts, such as challenges rewarded by points and badges is thought to influence purchase behaviour, create incentives and help companies receive feedback about the customer‘s experience. In 2011, Gartner Analyst Brian Burke predicted that by 2014, more than 70% of Global 2,000 organisations will have at least one “gamified” application with gamification potentially becoming “as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon.” This is supported by our love of video games playing. According to research from the IAB, nearly 33m people in the UK of all ages, gender and social groups…

Practical customer engagement examples #2

Last time I talked about the use of QR codes for engagement. My customer engagement example this time shows how to use gamification to make an app (or website) more involving and shareable. Dropbox is one of those utilities I now find I can’t live without and I noticed this use of game mechanics (gamification) on their ‘Get Started’ page. The goals for building this feature fit nicely with what I see as the essence of engagement in this definition of customer engagement: “Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand”. To encourage you to learn more about the product, use it and share with friends Dropbox have set a ‘quest’ to complete seven tasks. Your reward should you become a ‘Dropbox Guru’ is extra storage space. Motivating, fun and rewarding! Other nice elements on the…