Two New Products Improve Entry Points for Gamification Adoption

Bunchball, a leading gamification vendor in the Silicon Valley, is best known for its Nitro gamification platform which organizations use to implement game mechanics across social networks, mobile applications, and websites.  Today the solution reaches more than 70 million unique users and creates 2.3 billion actions per month.  Companies such as Comcast, Hasbro, LiveOps, USA Network, and Warner Brothers use the Nitro solution to engage with customers, employees, and partners.
On August 24th, the company announced two new solutions:

• Nitro for salesforce. Bunchball delivers a solution that works natively in Salesforce.com's user interface (see Figure 1).  Users will see a new menu item labeled Nitro that provides key elements in gamification: points, badges, levels, leader boards, and real-time feedback mechanisms.  The solution ships at the end of Q3, 2011 and will be made available via AppExchange.
  
  Point of View (POV): Motivation of the sales force represents a key area of opportunity to demonstrate the impact of gamification in the enterprise.  Using techniques that reinforce both monetary and non-monetary incentives, Bunchball can create systems that provide recognition, access, and impact in driving sales team performance.  Users can expect a direct impact to opportunity development, win rates, knowledge transfer, and internal collaboration.

Figure 1.  Nitro For salesforce.com Delivers Key Gamification Elements Such As Leader Boards

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  Nitro Elements.

  FanBox and GameBox represent two new ways to consume elements of the Nitro Gamification platform.  Bunchball will make both solutions available to customers as of August 24, 2011.  FanBox provides a turnkey rewards system for website owners (see Figure 2).  FanBox prices 125 credits for $50.  Each credit = 1 user action.  GameBox provides owners with free access to social games such as online poker.  GameBox is free to users. Customers can buy additional chips.
  
  POV: FanBox will appeal to organizations who seek ways to improve engagement.  Actions such as clicking, sharing, tweeting, contributing, and watching can be rewarded through a universal points system.  The result - organizations can focus on driving behavior without worrying about the technical aspects of building a rewards system.  If successful, FanBox gives BunchBall the opportunity to aggregate a universal virtual currency for earning and redeeming rewards.  Meanwhile, GameBox's engagement content delivery system cleverly gives BunchBall an opportunity to aggregate and distribute social gaming content to its customers.  As a cloud delivered solution,  Nitro Elements gives customers logical entry points to take advantage of gamification and progress to the full Nitro platform as their needs expand.

Figure 2. Nitro Elements Provides Brands A Turnkey Approach


Figure 3. Additional Screenshots of Nitro for Salesfore.com and Nitro Elements

The Bottom Line: Enterprise Gamification Will Require More Than Just Turning On The Platform

Intrinsic and extrinsic rewards are nothing new.  While gamification is today's term du jour, organizations will not be able to resist the power of crafting properly aligned incentives.  Expect most early adopters to embrace gamification in the enterprise by early 2012.
While the technologies to deliver a gamification platform continue to improve, successful gamification will require organizations to rethink their engagement strategy with key stakeholders.   What key actions do you want to incentivize for partners, suppliers, customers, and employees?    How will organizations align these incentives with their business processes?
Companies such as Bunchball and Actionable are leading the way in delivering platforms for the enterprise with their gamification of Salesforce.com.  Expect more models to emerge, especially in multi channel commerce, advertising networks, and even HR.  Training and development, incentive compensation, and employee feedback show great promise for gamification.
Gamification is here to stay and enterprises who get it will gain a strategic advantage in engaging their community of stakeholders.
Your POV.
Designing your gamification models?  What enterprise application will you gamify first? next?  Have you tested out Actionable or the 3B’s (i.e. Badgeville, Bigdoor, and Bunchball?  Ready to here how you can apply the white arts of the 7 Virtues to work?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.
Related Resources
20110223 Best Practices: Applying The Seven Deadly Sins To Successful Gamification
20110120 Trends: 5 Engagement Factors For Gamification And The Enterprise
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