Badgeville, the gold standard for gamification, today announced the release of the world's first Gamification Frameworks, a collection of prescriptive, turnkey gamification solutions to enable rapid deployment and successful engagement across customer and employee audiences. Driving user behavior requires the careful application of social, game, and reputation mechanics across a company's websites and apps. Until today, businesses had to rely on game design internally to build sustainable gamification programs, limiting ROI, quality, and scalability. The Gamification Frameworks make it easy for marketers, IT leaders, and other enterprise stakeholders to influence user behaviors that matter to them, increasing customer loyalty and employee performance.

"Frameworks have slashed our customer deployment cycles from months to weeks, and dramatically enhanced each customer's real business results," said Kris Duggan, CEO, Badgeville. "As the gamification market matures, business leaders expect gamification providers to supply expertise tying together game design, psychology and science to drive behavior, not just the technology alone. We've taken what we've learned from over 150 major deployments to package those learnings into these proprietary frameworks, and are now making them available to all world-class companies." Based on Badgeville's experience in gamification global companies including Deloitte, Samsung, Dell, CA, eBay, NBC, Universal Music and Kaiser Permanente's Avivia Health, the Gamification Frameworks offer robust models for customer-facing and employee-facing programs, proven effective game and social mechanic design, world-class configurable widgets, and a holistic reporting and analytic suite for a sophisticated, smart, and fast gamification deployment. Badgeville's Gamification Frameworks include these six turnkey approaches:

Boyd Gaming Corporation has launched the next generation of B Connected Online, the Web-based home of the company’s nationwide player loyalty program.

The centerpiece of the new B Connected Online is “B Connected Social”—the first comprehensive social gaming platform linked to a casino industry loyalty program. Through B Connected Social, members can now earn “Social Points” for using various features of B Connected Online or other Boyd Gaming websites—such as booking rooms or logging onto B Connected Online—as well as promoting their activities, offers, and events on major social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Foursquare.

In addition to competing with other B Connected members and earning “badges” for various achievements, B Connected Social users can redeem Social Points for entries into regular giveaways for valuable prizes.

“Since its launch three years ago, B Connected Online has become one of the gaming industry’s most visited Web sites,” said Paul Chakmak, executive vice president and COO of Boyd Gaming in prepared statement. “The popularity of online social gaming is exploding, and we are confident the groundbreaking features of B Connected Social will further distinguish B Connected Online as the leading website in the gaming industry.”

Leading market research specialists eDigitalResearch have today announced the launch of their HUB Text Analysis solution, combining technology and research expertise to provide a bespoke and automated insight solution for unstructured comments.

The significance of listening to the ‘Voice of the Customer’ and gaining real-time feedback has never been so apparent for companies and organisations as turbulent trading conditions continue to plague industries. Customers are increasingly leaving detailed feedback for businesses that is littered insight on their customer experience and what they feel needs to be done to improve.

Reputation Management Authority (RMA), a company that aims to help people gain control over their own brand, recently announced a hundred percent success rate in helping people redeem their good name after it has been besmirched in one way or another. Thus far, RMA has always gotten excellent results in ranking new content above any existing negative content about its clients, effectively eclipsing the bad stuff into oblivion.

RMA is on top of the search engine algorithmic updates and is conscious of what they, particularly Google, require for content to place at the top of search results. “Our success rate has been a hundred percent because, from our extensive research and development efforts, we understand what Google wants and we deliver just that,” company CEO and Internet marketing expert James Schramko explains.

Just one area of content distribution is already capable in itself of influencing the ranking of positive content, but compounded with the other features of the package, this will definitely bury any bad material in the nether regions of search results. “We a great tool for spreading the customer’s good message and having it syndicated across very high profile sites, such as Yahoo! News and Fox News,” reveals Schramko.

We’ve written a lot about the importance of actionability of feedback (VOC) data — a topic very close to our hearts.  With that in mind, this example from AgentMatch takes actionability to the next level.

What we like about this one is that they baking both feedback incentives and actionability “right into the bread” (to use a food analogy).    The strategic element is the understanding that the agent - buyer / seller relationship is the Critical Success Factor (CSF) in the world of real estate.

The benefit of the Agent Match / NeighborCity offering is three fold:

1) Agents are highly aligned to the needs of clients via publicly available ratings
2) Consumers are matched to agents by both regional and performance data
3) Negative initial rating by customers of a newly assigned agent triggers an immediate change of agent

All three of these point to the next level of actionability of VOC data — when the questions being asked are directly connected to the CSF’s of the business.

It’s the age old debate between quality and quantity — only it’s focused towards the new medium of social networks.   A recent study by StickyEyes focused on measuring the balance between volume of social media activity and degree of engagement of target audiences.

The results of the study highlighted that the most active social media players in the retail space were generating impact but were not necessarily winning the engagement game.  

For us the key takeaway here is that companies need to be clear about their ultimate goals on social media and then adapt their efforts to ensure they are meeting them.  Social programs, like other marketing efforts, is full of ‘false achievements’ which allow companies to fool themselves into thinking they’ve achieved a lot in their social efforts.

The findings about top UK retailers brings home the point that many companies are not clear about exactly where they’re aiming — and ultimately affects the ROI of social programs.