This is a chocolate and bacon discussion, according to the very excited facilitator Jeremiah Owyang (who did a great job). Gamification is like chocolate because it's sweet and addictive. Big data is like bacon. In its raw form, it's nasty and it's not until we cook it and apply analysis and insights before it becomes awesome.
Weird analogy? Yes, but it all makes sense at the end when Jeremiah starts giving out bacon flavoured chocolate.
The panel for the discussion consisted of:
Tim Piatenko, behaviour analytics architect from Badgeville
Michelle Accardi, VP of internet marketing from CA Technologies
Brendan Wallace, co-founder & co-chief executive from Identified.com
So what is gamification? Taking elements from the gaming world, then applying them to processes and services to motivate people to complete a task or provide information. When planned and designed properly with the business objective and user experience in mind, the participants should be provided with a sense of progress and achievement while providing the business the information or service they require. Where the ultimate goal is to have either a returning user to continue providing useful information or a one-time user that will complete the objective.
Big data is simply that. Massive amounts of collected data that has logic and analysis applied to it with insights being the end result. The guys at Identified.com predominantly work with data from the social web to help guide people's career decisions.
For me, combining gamification and big data has and always will make sense. We can start with analysis and insights from big data we already own to provide a well designed gamified user experience. And/or use a gamification platform to build and gain large amounts of mostly accurate behaviour data.
While the panel felt a little disjointed to me, there were some key insights:
- You may think you know who your advocates are however gamification can uncover new hidden advocates.
- It isn't about just rewarding people with discounts or monetary offers. Providing feedback and recognition to the people can be a stronger reward.
- The more successful gamification platforms are those that are based on the real life games that we already play.
- People are skeptical about brands using their data from Facebook and Twitter so the brands need to be transparent with how the data is going to be used.
- People will only be willing to provide their data if the value is greater than the risk.
Finally, one of the questions from the audience was, when wouldn't you consider using gamification? The panel was struggling to respond and finally Tim said when you never wanted anything back from the user. So why don't we apply this more often with our work? We need to think about gamification as simply motivating our users and providing them with a sense of progress or status. I feel we often get bogged down in trying to create a fun and engaging game we forget the reasoning why we are doing it in the first place.
Aaron Collyer
Technical director
303Lowe