This week on the Gamification Roundup it’s all about power-ups. From Badgeville parterships to Minecraft education and even your personal life hacks, see how gamification is giving everything a buff!
BazaarVoice: Now Featuring Badges
In addition to their recent $40M series B investment, Badgeville has joined forces with BazaarVoice. All of BazaarVoice’s 260 billion customer conversations will now have access to Badgeville’s behavior platform to increase brand loyalty and reputation. The new strategic partnership will focus on increasing on-site engagement, creating additional brand advocates, and rewarding loyal customers.
How Businesses Are Gaining Consumer Loyalty with Games
The Chicago Tribune reports of a number of different businesses adopting gamification to foster customer loyalty. Prominent examples being featured are Exacto Banks’ interactive money saving game and USA Network’s Club Psych. Exacto Banks’ game had around 4,250 visitors and was able to convert 14% of visitors into a bonus banking account from their free checking account. Exact Bank’s’ game shows much promise considering the usual rate of conversion is less than 2%.
Exergames Saving the Aging Brain
ScienceBlog reports on a new study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine has shown that the combination of physical exercise with interactive video games protects against mild cognitive impairment more than just physical exercise alone. While only 7% of seniors over 75 report that they do regular exercise, it is believed that the addition of an interactive environment will compel seniors to exercises more. The study featured a “Cybercycle” game in which players rode a stationary bike equipped with a virtual reality display. Players have to race against another “ghost rider” in which the ghost’s performance is based off the player’s own personal best times.
Teach and Build History with Minecraft
Take all your hard-earned blocks and use them to teach like educator Randy Fujimoto. VentureBeat reports on Fujimoto’s vision of using Minecraft as a basis for game-based learning and recreating Japanese internment camps from WWII. He is currently working on a workshop and curriculum to have students recreate these camps to serve as a future model for Minecraft-based learning activities.
Add Quests to Your Life to Be More Efficient
Jon Guerra, a self-proclaimed life-hacker, blogs about his personal experiment of integrating gamification into his lifestyle. Using gamified forms of questing and tracking progress, Guerra expresses the various motivating factors at play and discusses what worked to promote behavioral change in his life. Could integrating gamification into your life increase your efficiency as well?
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I’ve had great success implementing gamification into my blog which has allowed me to ditch email marketing almost completely. I still do a little.
Essentially my community members get points for:
– Registering
– Returning to the site each day
– Commenting on posts
– Watching YouTube videos
– Publishing guest posts
Points are redeemable for ebooks and other resources that used to sit in front of autoresponders.
I skipped the badges and levels as for my market I believed (and verified with them) that those elements would make it a bit cheesy.
Currently my members are competing for access to the private beta of a blogging program I’m launching soon.
So far engagement is way up on the site, return visits are way up, and newcomers are also getting into the game, so to speak.
A huge +1 for gamification.