Game mechanics in business applications

Few days ago I had the opportunity to attend the 2011 Social Matchbox, which is an annual presentation of top 10 tech startups preselected trough a competitive process. Each one has 5 minutes to present their project to potential investors, media and tech experts. The winners were OMGiLuv.it, which enables users to share their fashion preferences and Watch party that enables people to engage with other users that are watching the same program. The full list of winners and details is located in their page: http://socialmatchbox.com/wp/ I really suggest to the class to keep an eye in these startups and event like this, one of them might became the new facebook or living social!. 

One of the topics that captured my attention is that a good portion of the presenters talked about incorporating game mechanics into their mobile solutions, so I did some quick research about it. Gartner research “Gamification Primer: Life Becomes a Game” defines gamification as “… is the application of game mechanics to nongame environments to motivate people and change behavior. Business managers must understand this trend — how it may be leveraged in their organizations and how it may affect their industries.”

The concept is simple, what better strategy to engage your users than rewarding them for following a sequence of steps of tasks within you application. Successful games are addictive and users are engaged to earn more and more rewards or get to the next level. Add it a social media component and you have users addicted to your application and sharing their experience to their network and beyond. 

A Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2011 notes that the market penetration is still very low (1 to 5%), moderate benefit and still 5 to 10 years for mainstream adoption, so even if we already have some applications taking advantage of these features, there is still a long path and opportunity in this field.  Google trends data on gamification: http://www.google.com/trends?q=gamification shows a quick growing too since this year. 

So the question is, are we evaluating the potential of incorporating game mechanics in our capstone projects?

Challenges of social media software for internal use

I am supporter the emerging technologies like social media software for internal communication tool, knowledge sharing and internal networking. There are a couple articles I totally support and found very useful like the ones below, so in this post would focus in few challenges related to engaging users with these tools.

http://mashable.com/2010/09/03/world-without-email/

http://www.brandpilgrim.com/2010/09/the-case-for-enterprise-microblogging.html

One social media tool I really like is Yammer, which is a micro blogging tool that creates a closed network based in your corporate email. In the organization I work for, it started just as an informal experiment of few users and then it grew up organically and there is a great potential there. The challenge I see with these tools is the integration and information access policies, as users might thing is an official corporate tool as they have to use their corporate email and they will found their colleagues there. In the other hand, the corporate tools as SharePoint 2010 has some noteboard and status updates features not quite powerful as Yammer (there is no SharePoint out of the box rich mobile client for the status updates and note board in a Twitter or Yammer style) but as it runs inside the company environment, it can be deeply integrated into the corporate search and you can have a single space for collaborate using business data and corporate document management. Yammer offers some integration too but even with the paid plan it is a basic integration and as information resides outside the company environment, information access policies needs to taken into consideration. So the challenge is to either embrace tools like Yammer or block them and force the use of corporate tools but limit functionality that users are already used to.

What do you think?