In a world of emerging gamification companies offering universal platforms and SaaS solutions, SocialLair is approaching enterprise gamification with a heavy emphasis of customization and social interaction. The origin of SocialLair starts with its CEO, Padmanabh Dabke, and his first experience with creating an idea-management startup. Dabke quickly learned that creating a one-size-fits-all solution simply did not work. Every company has a different focus, agenda, and culture. Internal agencies may have different values that do not align with the CEO’s and as a result, using a single platform will result in poor ideas and ineffectual projects. Dabke has taken this lesson and produced SocialLair – a cloud-based platform that aims to produce a social-culture and collaboration by deep-customization of 3 different SDKs that can be molded into any workspace environment, including those at SanDisk, Cisco and SunGard.
These 3 SDKs can be divided into three functions: idea management, open leadership solutions, and consumer insights. SocialLair’s greatest strength lies in their approach to offer a dual currency and a variable leaderboard ranking that is backed by a social-validation model. Users can be earn different kinds of currency and be ranked in a variety of ways based on how others view and interact their work.
The idea management SDK initially rewards users for activity in the software, i.e. submitting ideas but if a user’s submitted idea is validated by another to be an effective and helpful idea, then that user also gains achievement points as well. Generally speaking, the activity points encourage initial use of the system and onboarding, whereas the the achievement points cater to long-term, continued used of the program. The presence of these two point currencies enables a stronger cross-sectional view of each users’ activity and the efficacy of their actions. In addition to this, the idea-validator who rated the idea also receives points, raising their reputation index ranking, which is the basis of how the open-leadership SDK works.
The open-leadership model places an emphasis on feedback and attempts to identify the best people in your organization based off their activity. The reputation index rating will incentivize users to actually submit effective ideas because a high-activity score can easily be devalued by an accompanying low reputation index ranking. In fact, SocialLair’s customizable leaderboard could just disable people from seeing their activity ranking altogether. Leaderboards can be quantified according to what is most desirable at any moment, whether it be a general user leaderboard, idea rankings, idea stock prices, and even aggregate a total ranking across each SDK. One particularly compelling ranking is the connector ranking function, where users can be ranked based on their ability to connect community clusters amongst one anothers.
SocialLair’s deep-customization and user-validation model really permits each organization to mold a gamification layer according to the values of each individual in the company. By tying in the most valuable rankings to user-submissions and subsequent user-validating actions, the gamification layer promotes a feeling of progression and mastery for users as they continue to use the program.
