The BigDoor Blog | Badges

Today we are very proud to announce a partnership with MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM), the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball. Major League Baseball! Fans visiting MLB.com’s Gameday section can earn and collect unique player badges that provide prestige, personalization and recognition.

Our CEO Keith Smith put it best, “It’s incredible validation for us that MLBAM chose BigDoor as its gamification partner. This is another critical milestone for us as we endeavor to build a loyalty and rewards program that will increase engagement and revenue for our partners.” MLB.com’s CTO, Joe Choti said,“Integrating a badging rewards program for fans as they consume content on MLB.com was a priority for the 2011 season. We’re pleased to deliver this enhanced level of fan engagement through our partnership with BigDoor and its powerful and flexible gamification solution.”

What’s even more exciting is we’ll be working with MLBAM in the future and will continue implementing additional opportunities for fans to earn badges and engage on their site. “Play Ball!”

The holidays are full of emotional experiences that can drive people to act irrationally. I tend to be annoyed by much of the consumerism going on during December, and was thinking about whether or not there were ways I could make them more fun via gamification. But then, as I started to look more closely, it’s obvious that the basic tools of gamification are already well integrated with the season.

For example, some kids are happy to take advantage of the rewards a “Nice” reputation offers, while others aren’t too satisfied with the “Lump of Coal” negative achievement received for “Naughty” status. Achieving and maintaining the right status level can keep a kid focused on the right actions for a full year – just like me and my Starwood account.

Another example is how my True Love gave me a total of 364 items for sticking around through twelve days of repetitive lyrics – I will likely need to regift some of the Piping Pipers as the neighbors aren’t too happy about them. The lesson here is that those ongoing rewards for my loyalty kept me engaged and made me feel valued. Though I would have preferred an iPad or twelve.

An example of charitable giving in this realm is the typical Salvation Army kettle – it takes advantage of your sense of immediate gratification, providing you a small bit of warmth in exchange for some spare change as you walk into a store.  Everyone benefits from a small opportunistic transaction.

The retail stores love to play the appointment and scarcity cards to offer up all kinds of Black Friday riches to only the most dedicated of customers. The excitement of the potential deal and the sense of adventure actually overcome the entirely horrible experience of lining up at stores at odd hours to get trampled.

Incidentally, this specific example illustrates how not all implementations work for all audiences – I would never be motivated by the promise of Black Friday deals; stores would need to find another way to engage me.

Finally, the New Year is the ultimate example of leveling up – everyone celebrates a collective achievement of getting to the next year, optimistic about the New Year to come and all the possibilities, and looking back on all the work and experiences that led to the new achievement. And better yet, this achievement typically comes with a kiss!

We’d love to find ways to make the holidays more fun, but we have plenty of work doing the same for client websites right now. So instead, we just would like to extend our warmest holiday wishes to you all. Please try to avoid stress this holiday season and have some fun. Make sure your holidays include the appropriate amount of love and goodwill – the sense of community and helping others is certainly the key and should be the focus. But just don’t tell that to my 7-yr old daughter – she’ll be doing her best to hit the top of the leaderboard of presents received, certain to share her achievement through her social network.

- Roy

So you’ve already decided you want to reward your users for performing certain actions by giving them points and badges. Level up! But you’re stuck on the next step: “Now how do I make my stinkin’ badges?”

In our system, awarding the progressive badges as users hit different thresholds of activity used to require a little bit of tinkering. You would create URL objects for the badge images, and then you had to tie them to the different Level objects in a Level Collection, which was tied to a Currency, etc. It worked great and kept track of everything for you, but simply wasn’t very user friendly to set up.

With that difficult experience in mind, we’ve introduced the Badge-O-Matic to our account tools. This new quick start tool ties together the different objects in our system so that you can easily create and edit Badge levels without having to jump around in your Economy settings. It’s even got a few template badge level tracks that you can use directly in your own gamification experience, or that you can just feel free to play with to learn how things all work together.

Even if we don’t have a premade template that matches exactly what you want to do, remember that Badges in our system are entirely customizable with your own creative since you can always point URLs to your own image resources and define them any way you want. Want to create a badge set that awards 25 different levels of custom Unicorn Horn badges for users who add more and more virtual Glitter to their profile page? Badge-O-Matic can do that. But it may feel a little bit embarrassed and not talk about it at home.

Check it out now to get yourself some stinkin’ badges. Or watch the video below for more details.

- roy