Introduction

A gamification project on a professional community, imminent for 2012, has kept me thinking about ways to improve the current state of gamification on this community platform. This particular community is social network for business software professionals, hosting multiple communities around development, business process experts or universities in regard to corresponding technologies, products and concepts. On the platform several million users contribute to an ever growing repository of how-tos, blogs, white-papers, discussions, FAQs etc. The users are employees from the company's customers and partner companies, students, academic staff, employees and independent contractors. Together they populate the discussions boards for several hundred product and technology topics, several thousand bloggers and several million forum threads so far.

How does it work so far and what are potential areas of engaging the communities even more through gamification? I know the detailed numbers and they have been considered impressive and made this community a model community for business professionals. And they are impressive, by any standard. The community is considered to be a model community for professionals, unrivaled in its value to professionals and with a sky-high Net Promotor Score.

But there is a new kid on the block, called gamification and suddenly we see engagement skyrocketing in the 2 or 3 digit percentage range that is just mind blowing. Gamification industry experts pointed out that there is a huge opportunity for such a professional community with a lot of value.. Engagement figures for gamified systems today run in 2 digit percentage ranges, improvements in the hundreds of percentage range of what was formerly taken for granted are breath taking for everyone involved and recently having been convinced that improvements will be only incrementally possible. I keep a a batch of these figures from a variety of sources available in this document: Gamification Facts & Figures. You are welcome to use it as a reference for your own pitches.

Gamification 1.0

This community has been using game mechanics for several years. Contributors who share a document, write a blog or white-paper receive points. In the forums, users can ask questions and award points to answers that were helpful or helped solve the problem. And users can earn points through editing the WIKI and creating FAQs and correcting pages.

In addition to points, users can be promoted to moderators or mentors. Moderators have administration authorization in the forums, mentors are the kind of outstanding and/or active contributors, who receive a number of perks like direct access to executives.

Each of the forums has its own leader-board with the top posters in this topic area for the actual period. There are multiple overall leader-boards, for actual and past periods, and leader-boards sorted by companies (deducted from the users' email addresses) and countries.

This has been working quite well, at least for some. Users who are often featured on the leader-boards tend to get more new leads, get better offers, better project choices and have better job opportunities. Hiring managers have told me that applications mentioning community points will be looked at first and are a better indication of somebody's skills that the regular resumé. Good contributions indirectly translate into real money, as the users' reputations and achievements are public. And knowing the consulting rates and salaries commanded for experts in the business software world, this is definitely not pocket change.

Beside the obvious success, there are a couple of behaviors on the platform that need to be considered by either encouraging more or discouraging them, that we only learned about after we had the basics right.

Some of the challenges that the community today faces are:

Rewards are focused on contributors only
Top members consist of a limited number of users, where there are not many opportunities for new members to ever reach that level or know about the path towards mentorship
Point system invites cheating (users creating multiple users to award their users points with easy questions)
Leveling off of number of active users
Uneven distribution of contributions in forums, blogs, wiki
Add more social components to the community
User profiles – or business cards as we call them – could be extended by more achievements like displaying completed eLearning offerings

Gamification 2.0

Regarding these challenges, it is time to step back and reconsider the things we have done. And the most important is to rethink of who your users are. Contrary to popular believe, users are not one-dimensional. Gamification applies a multi-dimensional layer on how to look at users/players. In communities, we have at least three dimensions:

User role
Experience level
Player type = user expectation and motivation

Who are the players on my community?

The community has been focusing a lot on contributors. Adding content at any costs has been the an important thing for a long time. Of course mechanisms to guarantee quality have been in place, like flexible point schemes. If your blog sucked, you didn't get points or less points than usual. On the other hand good blogs could get more points. But that all is a tedious manual process, done by administrators.

But in fact it turns out that there are many more user types that are equally important. Chris Anderson spoke about innovative communities, and named multiple roles that you want in your crowd:

Trend-spotter
Evangelist
Superspreader
Skeptic
General participants

On this community beside the contributors, we do not really have any other groups of users who receive rewards. And that is a direction that we have to go.
From a community role perspective, we find the following types:

We have general participants, who mostly consume content. They have not really been pulled in with activities like rating or sharing content on social media.
We have moderators, who once earned their status and are still being rewarded for the contributions, but not for their work as moderators.
We have police: users who detect inappropriate behavior like gaming the system or cheating. This is an important task as well to keep the content clean. Also to keep the trust amongst users up that nobody can cheat their way up the leader-board.
We have editors, who do not necessarily write their own contributions, but edit, restructure and correct materials.
We have teachers, who are able to bring content in forms that allow users to easier understand the material
We have mentors or buddies, who like helping newbies getting started on the community

The experience level (not of the knowledge, but the achieved reputation on the community) of my users is another thing to factor into my design. Nobody starts as an expert, and only few will become recognized on the community as masters for their area. Amy Jo Kim distinguishes at least those three levels:

Beginner
Regular
Master

Each of those experience levels need to be addressed differently. A beginner has be quickly onboarded. Give them a way to easily learn and give them an early feeling of being able to gain value from and contribute to the community. Unlock features after certain milestones for them and give them a sense of that path to mastery and autonomy from the beginning. Once they are over that stage, they become regulars, who are familiar with how the community operates, what is expected from them, and how they can profit and contribute. Here it becomes really playful. Masters you may want to involve more into the daily operation of the community and enable them to create missions and challenges for the rest of the community. They need a toolset and the right authorization to be able to do so. Don't forget that a good investment in these tools and structures will make the community scaleable and you don't need to increase your core operation team. The number of people behind this community hasn't changed significantly. Nearly the same number of people managed 100,000 users as today with several million.

Finally, Bartle's player types have been pretty popular for many gamification discussions.

Killer
Achiever
Socializer
Explorer

Even although many people and Richard Bartle himself have pointed out the flaws and limitations of the (even enhanced) player type matrix, it is worthwhile to consider and keep in mind. Gamification is by many still seen as a competition enabler, while the competitive element might not be the one that you and your users really want on your community. You may loose a lot of useful community work by restricting yourself on competition.

What are the challenges and goals in my community?

Let's look at the goals and challenges from two angles: the community operators and the users.

For the community operators, a vibrant community with many users and quality content are amongst the key factors. These allow to tap into a resource pool of talents to provide solutions and integration scenarios, that indirectly result in more product sales, as customers are confident to get answers and find resources for their own challenges with business software and processes. In addition, never underestimate the power of a happy community to promote your brand and products. As a community operator I also want to keep the users engaged. I want the repeatedly visiting and contributing user, so user loyalty is important as well.

The goals for users on the other hand are less distinct. Some users are looking to find a solution for their problem. Others want to make themselves a name, a reputation, become experts and find jobs and projects. A bunch of others likes to hang out, because they appreciate to social aspect of the professional community. Other users are looking for experts. And I am sure you can name many more reasons.

Conclusion

Considering the above mentioned, this professional community has an opportunity to enhance the way it looks at its users and cater to a wider variety of them. There is a lot of potential and engagement that can be unleashed. Engage the users to activities that haven't been encouraged or have been under-encouraged so far, like social sharing, autonomously forming topic groups, help and reward each other in more ways than answering posts etc.

The value of this community today is without doubt. It's the best professional community out there. But the times are changing fast and many new concepts and technologies have come up that will bring this professional network from level 1.0 to level 2.0. With gamification I have no doubt that the engagement numbers will explode – something that has been deemed impossible and will add even more value to the community - something that has been considered impossible up to now.

Gamification Examples

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