The BigDoor Blog | BigDoor news

It’s worth mentioning that today BigDoor Co-Founder and CEO Keith Smith is featured in Forbes, “The Net Breeds Promiscuity; Hang on To Your Customers.”  The article focuses on loyalty. As Keith states, “…your online customers aren’t as committed as you think they are. They’re just as happy to get into bed with some other brand as they are with you. That’s because the Internet has largely killed brand loyalty.”

Keith outlines a few strategies for gaining loyalty including creating valuable content, improving your site’s usability, excellent customer service, fostering online communities and of course adding gamification.

What’s your Loyalty Score?

With all the negative press that’s been out about working at startups we thought we’d share our experience. Like most startups, we’re moving at an incredibly fast pace.  To keep up with the demand our BigDoor team continues to grow. Today we welcome Gerry Narvaja the to team as our new DBA. Early next week Bill Dias will join as our new Operations Developer. Gerry and Bill will bring our team to a grand total of 34 employees – 26 of which are developers dedicated to working directly on our product. Since closing our Series B funding in Summer 2010 we’ve more than doubled in head count, twice!

As the company continues to grow and scale we keep ordering more desks. We thought we’d share this great photo of our Chief Technology Officer, Jeff Malek and our Chief Operations Officer, Ring Nishioka, as they pitched in to build one of our new desks yesterday. In a true startup, everyone pitches in to help. Taking ownership and wearing many different hats are two of the best things about working in a startup.  Thanks guys, and a BIG welcome to Gerry and Bill!

Tomorrow we are excited to have a visit from our investor, Brad Feld of Foundry Group. With his busy schedule, we feel lucky to get the opportunity to sit down with him over lunch and have an opportunity to ask questions. Last time he visited, we discussed everything from the business to how he stays sane with such a demanding schedule. If you aren’t familiar with Brad, check out his blog feld.com.

Recently, Brad gave a lecture for Stanford’s ‘Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture Series’. You can view the entire lecture here, but we had to share his insight on ‘trying’ and how it can undermine entrepreneurs from the start. We think any VC who quotes Yoda in a lecture for Stanford is pretty awesome, but take a look for yourself.

Happy Halloween! Here is some gamification news that you may have missed last week.

Profiting by Playing Games Human Resources Executive Online 10/27/2011 An interesting look at how organizations that manage innovation processes are jumping into gamification. Brian Burke, a Gartner analyst says that by 2014 a “gamified service for consumer-goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon and more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application.” The article also details Hosting.com’s implementation of a Harry Potter-themed gamification program into their learning management system using BigDoor’s technology.

Game Mechanics; 3 mobile fitness apps that get it right GameAccess 10/27/2011 Our mobile product manager, Scott Mullins, did a great post over on GameAccess highlighting 3 mobile fitness apps that are great examples of gamification. These three apps use game mechanics to motivate and reward you on your fitness goals.

How Gamification Can Make News Sites More Engaging Mashable 10/27/2011 Mashable did a great post on how their gamification implementation Mashable Follow has been successful, as well as a look at elements they feel contributed to the success. The Follow program encourages readers of the website to stay logged in, reading and commenting in reward for site status, creative badges and a chance to compete in Mashable contests.

Tech Moves: Spoonemore named CEO of Dwellable; BigDoor adds staff, etc Geekwire 10/24/2011 We are super excited to announce 4 new staff members here at BigDoor. We are growing like crazy with more than 25 new hires this year. Welcome Sean Zhong, Fayez Mohamood, Scott Mullins and Paige Petersen!

If you’re a marketer get a jump on next week and start planning to attend this webinar: Crowdsourcing Solutions for SMB Marketers on Thursday, 9/29 at 3:15pm. EST.

The Webinar features six thought leaders in the crowdsourcing industry, including our very own Bryan Estes! CrowdFlower, Wooshii, crowdSPRING and GeniusRocket will weigh in on leveraging the power of a crowd, managing expectations/results, and best practices for integrating crowdsourcing into a digital marketing strategy. Bryan will focus on our concept of Directed User Engagement and how gamification can really engage a community.

We hope to have a lively discussion and look forward to your questions! To sign up for the webinar click here.

Columnist David F. Carr wrote this piece for “Brainyard News” on Informationweek.com. Carr interviewed BigDoor co-founder and CEO as well as Dell’s executive director of online marketing for public and large enterprise at Dell, Rishi Dave and Red Method’s CEO Matt Walton.  An excerpt below – read the entire article here:

“Dell will use a mobile app and gamification techniques to encourage attendees to get the most out of its upcoming Dell World conference…At Dell World, which will be held October 12 to 14 in Austin, Dell will use a mobile application linked to BigDoor Media‘s gamification system to guide conference goers through the event program, while recognizing the most active participants…The application uses BigDoor’s gamification engine on the back end to track and score attendee activities at the show, together with a custom mobile application from Red Method that runs natively on iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7, as well as in HTML5 for BlackBerry. BigDoor provides the gamification logic, and Red Method’s app provides the user interface, including the icons displayed for achievement.”

Today, during the second annual Gamification Summit we’re very proud to announce that we have been selected by Dell to power gamification of the mobile application for the inaugural Dell World 2011 Conference. The conference takes place October 12-14 in Austin, TX and will bring together the most influential leaders and visionaries in the technology industry today. BigDoor was selected by Dell to create and power a gamified experience for conferences goers using the Dell World Mobile app.

Throughout the Dell World conference, attendees will find hundreds of QR codes to scan with the Dell World mobile app at various booths, panels, and in all presentations. BigDoor has created multiple ways to engage attendees through Journeys, allowing Dell to see in real-time which exhibits, sessions and even food trucks are the most popular and heavily trafficked. Each Journey is customized to a specific conference track including Cloud, Social Media, Data Center, Workforce Productivity and Data Management. Attendees are rewarded with achievements for every scanned QR code and completed Journey. Additionally, BigDoor and Dell have ensured that the attendee engagement doesn’t stop when the conference hall closes.

We’re finding that gamification has really turned a corner this past year as large brands begin to embrace this industry. We’re working with companies like Dell to help accomplish their gamification needs and bring deeper user engagement in both the online and offline world. Our technology is flexible and we’re able to implement seamlessly in the mobile space for conferences and tradeshows. We’re working with digital agencies to help large brands strategize and build robust social loyalty programs that truly drive engagement.

If you’re at G Summit today – come by and say ‘hello;’ if you didn’t make it out for the conference please shoot us an email at info@bigdoor.com and let us know how we can help with your gamification needs!

We’re really excited about this Infographic that our designer Chad put together. We’ve been talking about the private beta of our Engagement Economy and today we reveal some early results. At BigDoor we have built a framework that focuses on the four things that matter most to online publishers: Frequency, Engagement, Virality and Revenue. Check out the results!

A busy week ahead for the BigDoor team; we’re heading to New York City for the second annual Gamification Summit. We still had some time to put together some of the gamification news you may have missed from last week. Enjoy and if you’re at #GSummit come by and say ‘hello’ to the team!

The Intersection of QR Codes and Gamification Research Access Blog 9/9/11 An interesting article with some good stats – including “11 out of 50 Fortune companies are incorporating QR codes into their marketing strategy; and QR code uptake has increased 4589% from early 2010 to early 2011.”

Can gamification help solve the online anonymity problem? GigaOm 9/6/11 The article focuses on Google+ and the companies “Real Names Policy.” The article asks if #gamification might be a way to solve this problem. A great read and this article brings up some good points.

This week’s most talked about social media tools The Next Web 9/9/11 The 12th in a weekly series the article focuses on five social media tools that have received some buzz over the week. A good roundup here of social media tools and how the site Photorank.me uses gamification to engage their audience.

BigDoor Buys OneTrueFan as gamification consolidation begins GigaOm 9/7/11 We couldn’t let last week’s news recap go by without some of our own news.  On Thursday we officially announced that BigDoor has acquired OneTrueFan. Stay tuned to see what kind of cool stuff the teams are going to come up with!

Today we’re very excited to announce the acquisition of San Francisco-based OneTrueFan, a distributed community and web check-in rewards system. Demand has been so great that we have taken the bold step in acquiring OTF as a way to accelerate our product development and phenomenal growth. There’s been some great articles written about our news already including VentureBeat, GigaOm and All Things D.

Through this acquisition, we’ll gain access to an incredible team of web industry pioneers!  OTF Co-founders Todd Sampson and Eric Marcoullier were responsible for IGN.com (IPO in 2000, acquired by NewsCorp in 2005), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo in ’07) and Gnip. Not only do we now have access to this incredible team but also to thousands of publishers and technology that fit perfectly in to our gamified loyalty platform. We’ll be focusing on building and running our BigDoor branded rewards program. We’ll be launching Bigdoor Rewards next month and it will carry with it many of the same characteristics publishers loved from OneTrueFan: easy to implement, great analytics, and increased user engagement. Then in late-October we’ll also be taking the wraps off our Engagement Economy and making it publicly available to larger publishers and online communities. There’s more to come – stay tuned!