Gigya is all-in on Social Gamification
Gigya has recently released a new infographic that shares some statistics about their gamification implementations in 2012. According to their internal study, Gigya was able to raise website commenting by 13%, social sharing by 22%, and content discovery via activity feeds by 68%. Overall, Gigya has claimed their implementations in 2012 have resulted in a general 29% increase in site actions.
No details exist about how Gigya arrived at these numbers, but what is interesting is Gigya’s emphasis on driving social behaviors with their gamification plugins.
In an interview with VentureBeat, Gigya’s Marketing Manager, Victor White spoke heavily about the importance of social sharing for business and explicitly tying social actions to gamification for it to be truly social.
White says, “[Gamification] is often thought to be social inherently, but it’s not – there’s a difference between getting a badge, and getting a badge and sharing it. One is social, and one is not.”
Gigya touts themselves as a social infrastructure provider rather than a general gamification/engagement company. They primarily seek to engage brands, businesses, and users with more social experiences and given the stats from the infographic, it seems to be an effective strategy.
Looking at the three big B companies in gamification right now (Badgeville, Bunchball, and BigDoor) in comparison to Gigya’s standing in the industry places Gigya in an interesting position with their social strategy.
Badgeville’s new gamification toolkit for Salesforce comes relatively soon after news of Bunchball’s release of Nitro 5.0 for enterprise and points to each company’s desire to be the top employee engagement provider. BigDoor looks to be going in a different direction, focused on using gamification for loyalty.
While the gamification community currently refers to the biggest gamification company as the 3 B’s (mostly from their oddly convenient naming conventions), it may become less appropriate to group all three of these companies together as their gamification strategies shift. I would say that Badgeville and Bunchball are very much in the same “camp of gamification” but Gigya’s growth in the industry may be more along the lines of BigDoor’s for engaging with brands, loyalty, and top fans.
Each of these companies have all grown significantly since they’ve first been reported on this site and it’s fascinating to see how each of their gamification strategies are pivoting overtime and how that’ been affecting the gamification community.
It is unfortunate Gigya has not participated much in the gamification community and strictly maintains its image as a social infrastructure company. They have a strong gamification product but continue to be absent from gamification discussions.
Nonetheless, observers of the industry should maintain perspective on the big gamification companies and see how their focuses are branching off over-time. We may find ourselves in amidst some really pivotal changes in the next few months.
