Introducing Badgeville’s Social Mechanics: Deliver the Social Experience Your Users Expect

A social experience has become a user expectation, not a nice-to-have. It’s not just that nearly a billion of us are on Facebook connecting with friends and family; we upload and share nearly 250 million photos a day. It’s not just that 161 million of us publish our resume on LinkedIn; we’ve spun up nearly a million groups where we share professional knowledge and insights.

But then there’s the rest of us. Many companies struggle to deliver the same social experience for their own customers and employees. Despite the proliferation of community software and user generated content tools, only 28 percent of us every log into them (Gartner). And even if you invest in your Facebook brand page, and tattoo your site with “Share” buttons, only one percent of users ever return to Pages they “like” (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute). And even there, your competitors can serve up ads to steal customers away.

Today, we launched Social Mechanics, empowering Badgeville customers to deliver a more social experience where it belongs: Right on their site or app, where they control the experience for their users. By connecting people with relevant peers, and the behaviors they perform, it encourages them to mimic those same valuable activities that drive engagement.

Social Mechanics is deeply integrated with Badgeville’s Game Mechanics. So as people are drawn to specific content and products through the social behaviors of their peers, Badgeville’s smart gamification elements can reward them, driving better retention, engagement, and overall user growth.

Social Mechanics are easily configured inside The Behavior Platform, and feature the following key features and functionalities.

The Behavior Graph allows companies to define and measure specific social behaviors across their network of sites and apps. In addition to fostering people-to-people connections like a traditional social graph, the Badgeville Behavior Graph empowers site owners to connect people to objects (such as content, services and products).

Social Context offers rich activity streams that surface contextually rich behaviors being performed by users across a company’s network of sites or apps. With personalized filtering, end users can receive updates from just the people and content they explicitly follow. Leveraging Badgeville’s ability to process rich metadata, companies can also create Custom Streams that map behavior updates to specific content, site sections, and application modules.

Find & Follow empowers users to connect with both the people and content that’s important to them. Users can cull their social networks to see if they have any personal connections on the site and easily follow them and others. They can also follow specific pages, products, and content with the simple click of a button, and see behaviors performed on those objects surfaced in their Social Context streams.

Real-Time Notifications alert users about contextually relevant behaviors as they happen in real-time, driving them to valuable content, products, and services on a company’s site or apps.

Our product and development team has been hard at work on Social Mechanics, and we’re proud of the results. As our press release indicated this morning, Social Mechanics is available a la carte or as an extension to the core Behavior Platform gamification engine. We firmly believe it serves as the next step in our journey to build an engagement layer for world-class companies, and it’s coming to a site or app near you. So stay tuned.