The gamification of B2B

Image cour­tesy of http://www.adpulp.com/gamification_se/

There is a grow­ing opin­ion in the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing com­mu­nity that the con­struc­tion of the social layer of the web is now com­plete, espe­cially with the dom­i­nance of Face­book. The next phase will move from estab­lish­ing social con­nec­tions to the devel­op­ment of game dynam­ics that encour­age long-term brand engage­ment and loyalty.

It’s cer­tainly easy to see how game the­ory has already been applied in con­sumer mar­ket­ing e.g. building-up points on FourSquare to get a free cof­fee at Star­bucks. But, the big ques­tion is how will it work for B2B?

Well, it’s already hap­pen­ing on sites like LinkedIn, where users feel a sense of achieve­ment if they have more con­nec­tions than their peers, are rec­om­mended more and have a more com­plete pro­file. Users are dri­ven by their need for sta­tus and influ­ence and the fact that pro­gress­ing to a new level is rel­a­tively straight­for­ward e.g. adding spe­cial­i­ties gives you and addi­tional 5% on your pro­file com­plete­ness. The same applies to Twit­ter updates and followers.

I believe that we’ll see a num­ber of game-based expe­ri­ences on web­sites and mobile appli­ca­tions devel­oped specif­i­cally to engage the busi­ness audi­ence. Whilst they will ini­tially be focused on train­ing and edu­ca­tion, over time they will moti­vate prospects and cus­tomers to pro­vide lev­els of cus­tomer insight that would be impos­si­ble to obtain through tra­di­tional meth­ods – it’s eas­ier to get infor­ma­tion from peo­ple if they get an imme­di­ate reward for doing it.

But, by cre­at­ing game-based con­nec­tions with our cus­tomers, we need to ensure we align their moti­va­tions with deliv­er­ing real busi­ness value to your organ­i­sa­tion. In this way, we’ll iden­tify indi­vid­u­als and groups who are gen­uinely inter­ested in our prod­ucts and ser­vices and who will be long-term advocates.

Image cour­tesy of The Pow­er­Point Alchemist

Here’s a good exam­ple from Microsoft Office Labs. Rib­bon Hero 2 teaches peo­ple to use the fea­tures of Microsoft Office (Excel, Pow­er­Point and Word) by play­ing a series of themed games. They can then com­pete against friends and col­leagues while becom­ing pro­fi­cient with the soft­ware and emerg­ing as loyal users. Try it out here.

Image cour­tesy of IBM

And finally, IBM City­One innov8 is a long-term play to pro­mote Big Blue’s sus­tain­abil­ity and con­sult­ing cre­den­tials around smart city plan­ning. The core mes­sage is that IBM wants users to dis­cover how busi­ness process man­age­ment, col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies, and ser­vice ori­ented archi­tec­ture enable com­pa­nies and indus­tries to adapt to new demands and build a sus­tain­able advan­tage. Nancy Pear­son, IBM vice pres­i­dent of SOA, BPM and Web­Sphere says “Seri­ous games allow pro­fes­sion­als to inher­ently com­pre­hend sys­tem inter­ac­tions, and accu­rately model the poten­tial busi­ness out­comes that can result, in a way that no other medium can do.” You can find out more here.

So watch out for the gam­i­fi­ca­tion of your next B2B mar­ket­ing cam­paign. If done right, your prospects may not even notice how their behav­iour is being influ­enced. They’ll be too busy build­ing their online sta­tus and scor­ing points.

Getting the most out of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an unde­ni­able force when it comes to B2B social net­works. Henry Clifford-Jones showed us some fas­ci­nat­ing sta­tis­tics – over 80 mil­lion pro­fes­sion­als view­ing 1.5billion pages per month across 600,000 pro­fes­sional groups.

When you want to build a group on LinkedIn, it’s only going to be a suc­cess if you build it around a com­mon inter­est and pur­pose. An empty LinkedIn group can be a very lonely place…

So, the more focused and well-defined the group is, the higher the level of par­tic­i­pa­tion and engage­ment. Also, don’t get too dis­ap­pointed if most peo­ple aren’t con­tribut­ing. LinkedIn reckon that for every per­son that con­tributes on the site, nine will com­ment and inter­act, whilst 90 will just sit back and con­sume the content.

The new inPages Platform

 

We were also lucky to take a sneak peak at the brand new inPages Plat­form. Our Hud­dle saw it just ahead of its global launch in New York. So, a bit of a scoop for our company.

So, what does inPages enable mar­keters to do?

Well, it does seem that LinkedIn has picked up on a well known fact – rec­om­men­da­tions from per­sonal acquain­tances are the most trusted form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion – and intro­duced a new tab on the com­pany pro­file page called Prod­ucts & Ser­vices. This areas of the site enables com­pa­nies to fea­ture infor­ma­tion about their prod­ucts, with onward links to their cor­po­rate sites.

LinkedIn Com­pany Prod­ucts and Ser­vices Page

But the clever bit here is that the new plat­form enables mem­bers to fea­ture in their pro­files the prod­ucts and ser­vices they use and to rec­om­mend them. This gives rec­om­men­da­tions a new level of cred­i­bil­ity – because they’re directly linked to a person’s pro­file. Thereby over­com­ing the con­cerns that many com­pa­nies actively “mas­sage” prod­uct rat­ings and rec­om­men­da­tions on other third party sites. I sus­pect that many tech mar­keters are already in a mad rush to get their prod­ucts and ser­vices listed.

How­ever, on reflec­tion, this new plat­form does raise a num­ber of inter­est­ing questions:

• Will com­pa­nies need to update their social guide­lines to encom­pass their employ­ees rec­om­mend­ing their own prod­ucts or those from other companies?
• If your pro­file fea­tures a large num­ber of prod­ucts and ser­vices, does this just open you up as a tar­get for sales guys? You’re clearly a per­son who influ­ences the pur­chase and based on the num­ber of prod­ucts, you’ve clearly got the budget…
• Look­ing at the demo of the plat­form, there doesn’t seem to be the func­tion­al­ity to pro­vide neg­a­tive feed­back. Surely these are often more impor­tant than pos­i­tive recommendations?

I’d be inter­ested to hear your thoughts on this topic.