The BigDoor Blog | Loyalty

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?

This weekend BigDoor’s co-founder and CEO, Keith Smith shared his thoughts about core metrics that really matter with the online publication Geekwire.  Keith walked through the four KPI’s that every site should focus on: Loyalty, Engagement, Virality and Revenue. As Keith stated in the article, “The simplicity provided by these 4 golden metrics allows us to focus on the key drivers of our business, no matter the size and scale of our audience.”

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.

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!

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!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably saw the news that Zynga filed their IPO late last week. After everyone has combed through their S-1 filing, virtual currency emerges over and over, “Zynga’s filing revealed its revenue comes almost entirely from the sale of virtual goods within its otherwise free games.”

At BigDoor we’re also placing emphasis on virtual currency and will be using it as a way to help online publishers create their own monetization moments.  We’ve even done the legal due diligence when it comes to virtual currency and can provide regulatory compliance for USD-backed currencies powered by our platform.

Up until this point, online publishers have really only had two ways to monetize their content: Subscriptions & Advertising.

The reality is both of these ways create a lot of friction for the users’ experience with the content.

At BigDoor we’re working on building a third way for digital publishers to monetize their content: Virtual Currency.

We see virtual currency as the monetization vehicle to increase user engagement and provide a frictionless way for users to engage with content on the web. While we’re not creating social media games like Zynga we do think virtual currency is important and we can only hope we’re heading in a similar direction. Zynga’s epic one hundred million active users in less than a month (Cityville) then thirty million users in under a month (Empires and Allies) is pretty huge.

So how does it all work? Stay tuned. There’s some cool stuff to come as we unveil our Engagement Economy this summer!

The incredibly awesome Adam Loving has graciously penned another blog post for us! We’re happy to share more of Adam’s thoughts around gamification. This post is for all you bloggers out there:

Imagine I wanted to gamify my blog. Visitors to my blog want to learn something and earn recognition (maybe in a link back to themselves). I want visitors to:

1. Read my stuff
2. Comment
3. Sign up for my email list
4. Follow me on Twitter (or friend me on LinkedIn and Facebook)
5. Promote (Tweet) my stuff

So, I would gamify my (or any) blog by adding…

1. Photos for the most recent visitors – like feedjit.com – “click here to sign in and add your photo” (mybloglog pioneered this). Ideally, with inline “follow” buttons.

2. A leaderboard for commenters (including number of comments per week) with a link to their site.

3. A leaderboard for sharer’s (including number of referrals per week).

4. Segment free content from premium content (I’d create levels) – where premium content could be earned by commenting or sharing.

5. Include “reader of the week” as a featured link or special section.

6. Some kind of widget (a badge maybe but something that makes sense for your blog) that readers can earn and easily install on their site.

Finally, I’d offer The BigDoor MiniBar as an excellent start to gamify your blog. The company goes through weekly iterations and recently launched a feature that lets you customize the names of the buttons on your toolbar. As a blogger I think it’s a pretty cool feature; the more your toolbar reflects your site’s personality and your player’s desires, the better the gamification!

-Adam Loving (@adamloving)

We wanted to let everyone know about this amazingly cool experiment Brad Feld is currently testing on his site. For those of you who don’t already know Brad, he’s the managing director at Foundry Group who invests in software and Internet companies (including Zynga). He was recently named the
“Most Respected Venture Capitalist”and he’s also one of our investors. For the next 30 days Brad will use the BigDoor MiniBar on his site to offer 30 minutes of his time as a reward for anyone who wants to exchange 10,000 Feld Gelt for the opportunity to speak with him. With the help of BigDoor’s MiniBar (white-labeled on Brad’s site), users have five easy options to earn Feld Gelt, including Check-in when visiting Brad’s site; Adding a comment to any blog post on the site; Sharing or Tweeting posts; ‘Like’ any post from the MiniBar and most importantly, the best way to earn Feld Gelt is when users click on links you have shared or Like links in your Facebook feed. Users can get started working their way up the Leaderboard for a chance at 30 minutes with Brad!

Update: Brad’s deal was so popular that it took about eight minutes to sell out! Brad mentioned there might be a new deal and we’ll update with any new details!

There’s a hotly debated conversation string that’s been going on Quora since October asking why developers are opposed to gamification. There are more than 20 responses to this thread, many of them iterating similar responses. Games are relevant and useful in people’s lives and gamification can been seen as an extension of that importance. We offer a few examples:

Games are changing the economics of innovation.  Monday’s Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed piece featured a column from Andy Kessler.  Kessler asserts that video games are leading the next wave of productivity revolution. Kessler says that videogames will transform not only the way workers interact but also the face of entertainment and media will change.

Games have become increasingly more important in helping children learn. Last fall the New York Times profiled the Quest to Learn program. Very soon after this profile, President Obama announced the launch of the National STEM Video Game Challenge that works to motivate children in science, technology, engineering and math.

Games are changing lives. Last week NPR aired their interview with veteran reporter Clive Thompson who discussed the influence of gaming who asserts that games are  ”…blazing new trails in technology and art, and I assure you they are changing how you live, whether or not you actually play.”

Like it or not Social Games are a big deal too. We’d even offer up Monday’s Wall Street Journal’s “All Things D” scoop from Kara Swisher as being pretty important. The news of Sean Ryan’s move Facebook to head up their social gaming partnerships caused quite a stir and we think further details the importance of social gaming heading in to the new year.

With all this information about the benefits gaming, we propose that it’s time to change the gamification argument. It’s not really about whether or not gamification is valid or useful anymore we think it’s about how will you use gamification and smart game layers to create something that is compelling, engaging, useful and relevant for your audience.  At BigDoor we eat, sleep and breathe gamification; games of all kinds are a constant topic of conversation so yeah, we think it’s time to change the argument and move towards the future. Now, I guess I’ll get back to that Quora string and propose a new question.

-Carrie

UPDATE: The BigDoor MiniBar has launched and has the same functionality as the WordPress plugin and more! Contact us with any questions info@bigdoor.com.

I recognize that getting into a gamification project may feel a little bit overwhelming. And I also know that while our API is powerful, it’s not easy for everyone to implement.

That’s why I’m excited to announce the first gamification plugin for WordPress. The idea for this plugin is to target a couple of valuable actions common to many site owners (repeat visits and comments) and tie them to a simple widget that rewards users for their participation.

Yes, the game is simple. But that’s the point. We want to help you ease into gamification generally and our service specifically. This plugin gives you a good first step into increased user engagement via game mechanics.

Another benefit is that it also provides a lot of example code to PHP developers out there who would prefer to take a basic implementation and innovate from there. All the key pieces are here – API request signature, economy object management and of course badges.

I know this first one doesn’t solve all of your needs. We’ll keep working on providing more tools and options to help you integrate and customize. Really, I just hope that this helps you and your users start to see the opportunities. A custom game layer on your online experience is indeed possible.

Our final goal for this plugin is to connect with the developers whose immediate reaction is “There is so much more I can do with this.” Awesome – please do! I look forward to your creativity and encourage you to submit any feedback and ideas.

Thanks to Mark at Simpler Computing for helping us put this together. Contact him if you need some custom WordPress development integrating the BigDoor API.

Level up!
Roy

UPDATE: We quickly received feedback on a few issues with certain WordPress instances resulting in some quick adjustments to the plugin. Latest version is v1.0.4. If you had any issues prior to that version, please try the latest.