gamification

Klout and Peerindex – social network loyalty cards?

September 29, 2011 By Dan Thornton

Like a lot of people, I’m registered on both Klout and Peerindex, which both attempt to track my online influence in slightly different ways to give one overall score which can be compared to others in my areas of interest. And both offer rewards to people deemed influential enough to qualify – from Klout I took advantage of a cheap deal to finally order some Moo business cards, whilst Peerindex has qualified me for pre-release copies of Gods Without Men by Hanzi Kunru (Which I really enjoyed), and Tancredi by James Palumbo (An interesting book with also came accompanied by some Ministry of Sound headphones, as Palumbo is a co-founder)

Measuring influence or just tracking loyalty?

Both Klout and Peerindex require you to hook up various sources in order to calculate your influence – Klout includes Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, Youtube, Instragram, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.com, Last.fm and Flickr.

Peerindex includes Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, and in an important different, a small number of external RSS feeds for your website or blog, which then contributes to your score via rankings pulled from SEOMoz’s database.

Both are still fairly new and developing approaches to calculating influence, and I have no doubt both will become increasingly sophisticated, although there will always be differences between the abilities of algorithms, and the abilities of humans to judge someone’s influence in more subtle ways – the way they act, the clothes they wear, the way they look and speak, etc. As the comparison between television and radio appearances have shown, for instance with presidential debates, it’s not to say humans are necessarily more accurate – but different.

And I don’t know all the inner workings of either algorithm, but much like search engine optimisation, there are a small set of key things which are proven to work:

Having a huge following.
Sharing amazing content which gets lots of interaction.
Sharing a lot of content all the time.

Assuming you’re not a massive celebrity already, the first one is possible but potentially unlikely if you want to get a really high score on either service. You could try paid services to fake it, and certainly your audience will grow organically over time, but unless you’re very lucky it’s not going to suddenly spike. So building your audience is a long haul approach.

The same is generally true with content – if you create something truly amazing and share it, things can suddenly get very big, but in general content is a medium to long-term strategy built on quality and consistency.

Which brings us to quantity – various people have look at how quantity changes your scores, and there’s plenty of evidence alongside the existence of it as an explicit activity metric in Peerindex.

And here’s where the loyalty card element comes in:

Supermarkets and social networks:

The basics of the supermarket loyalty card are pretty simple. You share your data on frequency of visits and what you have purchased with the retailer, and in return they give you some rewards in savings or additional offers. And they benefit by getting more accurate information regarding high value customers and stock levels, for example.

The hook with Klout and Peerindex is that you tend to receive awards if you reach a certain level of influence, which requires you to use specific networks. And as the quickest route to gaining influence, you’re encouraged to visit those places to constantly update your own content, and share that of others. The networks themselves can already access the data on who you are and what you do, but suddenly there’s an additional incentive for those who might not have been otherwise interested in utilising that particular network over another.

And at the same time agencies and companies who don’t want to spend time and effort figuring out influencers and building relationships can quickly and easily bung out a promotion which they know will in theory hit the people in an area who receive the most attention.

So what you end up with is an approved list of venues if you want to be noticed and rewarded. The danger is that it discourages you from committing to alternative sites, because there’s no promotional rewards. In Klout’s case, I can’t hook up my various blogs, so I’d probably benefit by writing this whole post on Facebook and Google +, whereas with Peerindex there are a number of networks not covered, but I do get recognition for 3 of my sites.

Only a couple of sites are covered by both, with Twitter being the biggest source factor due to the fact you can quickly and easily tweet a huge amount, or @reply automatically to appear extremely busy and potentially influential.

Empire Avenue: A third way?

There’s one other interesting horse in the race, which is the stock market gamified alternative of Empire Avenue, which allows humans to invest in each other as a method for showing influence. Again, there’s an approved list of networks to plug-in, and there’s also the option to hook in a number of RSS feeds. But what makes this different is that the game nature of it theoretically allows better judgements to be displayed via the human input, and also that it’s somewhat blurred by the desire of some people to simply become the highest game ranks rather than truly investing in those people they genuinely find interesting.

Again, it’s still early days, and it’s intriguingly different, but perhaps goes a little too far in the opposite direction.

Why worry?

The nature of influence has always had gatekeepers. Personally my influences are consciously and subconsciously selected, but the media has traditional lifted some to be seen as influential.

Automating this process and essentially codifying what it means can enable people to attempt to ‘game’ the system, but could also have far-reaching implications in terms of offline interactions when you combine it with smart phones, and facial recognition. Particularly if a bug or glitch could diminish your score and suddenly leave you as someone of the digital unwashed with barely any influence.

In my own work reaching out to people for PR and marketing, I use all 3 services augmented by a fair amount of legwork, but the temptation for a quick and simple answer for some businesses and agencies means that you may end up with fewer people willing to go the extra mile for accurate information, which is obviously a concern for me. And for bloggers etc who aren’t in the top ranks of what to some extent becomes a self-reinforcing list, particularly when absolutely no tracking system is ever completely accurate – whether that’s your website analytics or any social tracking service. There’s always a percentage of error, which humans aren’t seemingly built to remember and cope with in the preference of accepting numbers as certainties.

And one of the arguments for not worrying unduly about the dominance of Facebook or Twitter is that the cyclical nature of things suggests someone will come along at some point and replace them, just as has happened to businesses and industries throughout time. But the eligibility for ranking systems reinforces those selected as the only options.

So are you on Klout, Peerindex and Empire Avenue? Is it an accurate reflection of influence? Or is it just a very basic quantity measure for most of us? And have you been tempted to pump out content more often on the ‘approved’ networks, or try to game them?

It feels like everything is a game now…

November 26, 2010 By Dan Thornton

Using games to develop ideas and awareness for business isn’t new, but it appears to be growing in popularity at the moment, perhaps driven by the buzz around game mechanics and gamification.

For instance, EDF Energy is just launching a game for young engineers, which lasts for 3 weeks in January 2011, and involves you in an interactive adventure game to devise and produce energy and consume it efficiently. If you happen to be a young engineer, you can sign up here. Oh, and there’s a handy video:

All the world’s a game, and all the men and women merely players, with apologies to Shakespeare. More importantly, I think we’ll see a greater pace of gaming adoption by companies once more, and a larger number of gaming-based promotions proving to be successful by offering better interaction, engagement and rewards than in the past, due to the fact so many more people have a far greater understanding of how games actually work.

An example of the direct effect of social…

November 11, 2010 By Dan Thornton

As a specialist in social media (as part of digital and mobile marketing), I’m not immune to the influence of my own social networks. And that was driven home to me earlier this week, with a direct result in financial terms.

I’ve been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 a lot over the past year, and during that time, a group of mainly UK, 30-something gamers has gathered within one or two degrees of my social circle. It’s quite a small group in terms of the more organised ‘Clans’, but there’s enough of us, and enough dedication/obsession to mean that some of the group are online pretty much any evening that you care to look. (And many of them are 30+ professionals, backing up the theory online gaming is the new golf for business networking!)

Last Monday at midnight saw the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops – the new game in the CoD series. Given that MW2 is the biggest-selling game of all time in the UK (20 million sold), and a cursory look at my own friends list reveals a range in ranks going down to the 13 million+ mark, it’s fair to say that Black Ops was a pretty big event. Although even I was a little surprised to see exactly how many people turned out locally for the launch – hundreds were queuing when I happened to finish an evening of work and make the snap decision to try and pick up a copy in the middle of the night.

That’s right – I went out at about 00:30 on Tuesday morning to pick up a videogame, thinking there might be a few other obsessives, and I turned the corner of the shopping centre to find a few hundred people.

And I was purely driven by social motives:

I already have more games than I can feasibly finish, including the previous games in the series. And although the fun of a new game is attractive, Black Ops isn’t something which attracted me for that reason (as compared to Kinect, Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport etc).

There were two reasons for paying a premium in terms of financial cost (Wait a while and copies will be cheaper), and time (Sacrificing sleep to make a purchase, and the time since that I’ve already put into the game).

The loss of my social circle: All of my MW2 friends had stated they’d buy Black Ops within the first 1-2 days. That almost immediate loss of a social group was a prime driver in sending me out to the shops.
A chance to gain social status: I’m not the best at Call of Duty, although I blame a lot of it on slow internet speeds. During MW2 I suffered a couple of console hardware failures and as a result, missed large amounts of game time. This meant that I was only able to reach the medium level of in-game ranks – lower than quite a number of friends. By purchasing at launch, I had the chance to possibly get a little headstart on some of the group, and potentially I might end up as one of the top players in the group (Sadly that plan hasn’t quite worked, as I’m still not playing the new game particularly well!).

The end result?

£42 for the game purchase with added special offer of Xbox gamer points.
1.5 hour of time spent purchasing the game and immediately coming home to try it instead of sleeping.
10+ hours of time spent playing the game since I first brought it home.

And in case you’re tempted to think about this as the example of a particularly unusual and obsessive gamer, Black Ops has largely been sold on the online multi-player aspect of the game. And the first day figures have just been released:

UK and US sales in first day: 5.6 million copies, beating 4.7 million for MW2.
Revenue to publishers Activision in the first two days is estimated at $360 million.

Learning about the game layer is vital (thewayoftheweb.net)
Three more reasons not to under-estimate gaming (thewayoftheweb.net)
The gamification generation (thewayoftheweb.net)

Three more reasons not to under-estimate gaming

November 3, 2010 By Dan Thornton

Most people are probably aware that I’m deeply interested in videogames and the gamification of the world which is occurring as more and more businesses and individuals look at what is able to be produced by game methodology.

For example:

More than a billion hours are being spent on Xbox Live each month. That’s just one of the three console platforms, and it equates to each of the 25 million current Xbox Live subscribers contributing around 40 hours of time each month.
Taken globally across every platform, there are figures as high as 3 billion hours a week. And while efforts to adapt that productivity are underway, it turns out that besides the potential risks of addiction etc, gaming actually may be beneficial to your health and wellbeing in some specific ways. That is – no matter how superficial the game and the output, by enabling you to experience positive emotions and social bonds, you’re likely to live longer, do better at work, and even have longer, happier marriages.
There’s a brilliant quote in the video of Tom Chatfield embedded below which sums up online gaming perfectly. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have evolved in certain ways to perform tasks and get enjoyment from them. Crucially, videogames allow us to reverse-engineer everything, to create worlds which are perfectly tailored to the ways that humans have evolved.

Another of the points he makes which deserves repeating is the fact that an online game allows the measurement of over 1 billion data points – everything that anyone has ever done in that entire world can be tracked, measured and used for optimisation.

And it also justifies the inordinate amount of time I’ve spent in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 recently – the combination of a social group who are online almost nightly, and the rat pellet feed of rewards and achievements for frenetic (and frustrating on a slow net connection) action.

The other element of the games industry that will be of interest to the publishing/marketing/media non-gamers is that the games industry is relatively young, highly technical, and going through the same challenges as traditional media – how to compete with the challenges of a second-hand games market, how to utilise the ability for gamers to digitally download content, how to implement freemium and subscription models etc.

The difference is that there’s a lot less legacy and inertia to overcome – hence the success of Steam, or the release of the demo/minigame Dead Rising 2:Case Zero as a paid download exclusively for the Xbox 360. It sold 300,000 copies in the first week, and over 500,000 in the first fortnight as a prequel to the forthcoming full retail game, and as content sufficient enough to stand alone.

Through in motion-controls which are going to reach enough people to have an influence almost on a par with the touchscreens of smartphones and tablets, and there’s a lot there – something I’ll continue to expand upon…