Badgeville recently opened up its EMEA office, and is off to meet current and future customers across the globe. (Did you know that Badgeville has customers in more than 15 countries?)

This week, Badgeville is off to Turkey to educate on the business benefits of gamification. We are teaming up with our partner Pixelplus Interactive in Turkey’s first “Gamification Conference,” introducing this popular digital marketing trend to the Turkish market. During this invitation-only event, gamification concepts and the successful examples will be presented to inspire the Turkish marketers and professionals. The audience will have the privilige to listen to the spokesmen from leading global gamification companies and see their successful implementations of this rising trend globally.

At this event Niels van der Linden, Badgeville Gamification Specialist, will present “From Gamification to Behavior Management.”

Where do you want to see Badgeville come to next?

As Esteban Kolsky announced in his latest blog post, he will be working on a series of posts and webinars throughout the year of 2012, using the series to “introduce ideas, research, and what you need to know to leverage Gamification in business.”

The first of the webinar series — The Hidden Business Value of Gamification — is this upcoming Tuesday, March 27^th, at 10:30-11:30 AM PST. Don’t forget to register, as space is limited. Please register here.

Ever since organizations began to use gamification principles in business situations they’ve sought “engagement” as the action and metric that proves it works.  As the theory goes, we can leverage gaming mechanics to improve how we engage with customers and prospects and higher levels of engagement leads to more satisfied customers and users, in turn creating loyal advocates, fans, and supporters.  Problem is, no one can define engagement appropriately – less along measure or use it correctly.

Engagement is not what drives this conversion.  The excessive focus on gaming mechanics and how to bring more people to web sites more often clouds the real reason behind using gamification in business: behavioral economics (the other half of gamification).  Contrary to popular belief, businesses should not use gamification to increase engagement or to entertain their customers and prospects; gamification is mostly about changing behaviors by using gaming techniques – and this is where there has been little attention.

In this webinar we will focus on the backside of gamification: what happens after the entertainment and the engagement and what business value should organizations derive from adopting gamification engines in their organizations.

We will explore at a high level what business should do, what solutions they want to embrace, and what value and metrics to use to make sure they are getting what they need from gamification.  As the first in a series of four webinars, we will cover the big picture and we will explore in the next three the core components of making behavioral changes the goal of gamification: purpose, infrastructure, and metrics and success factors.

Join us to learn more about behavioral economics, loyalty, wallet-share and the reason why any business should take on gamification: habits.

Badgeville’s team has grown significantly in the last 18 months since our launch, to 60 employees. In hiring our executive team, I have been fortunate to bring on thought leaders in their respective spaces. Today, I’m honored to announce that behavior analytics thought leader Chris Duskin has joined Badgeville as our VP of Product.

Chris Duskin is a leading expert in web site testing, behavioral targeting, personalization and optimization. He comes to Badgeville from Adobe’s Omniture business unit, where he was a senior product leader for the conversion optimization products in the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite. At Adobe, he managed product direction and customer satisfaction for a $100+ million SaaS business. Those products, including Test & Target, Scene 7, Recommendations, and Search & Promote, all help marketers improve site effectiveness by delivering more relevant content.

Duskin joined Omniture through its earlier acquisition of Offermatica. Earlier in his career, Duskin worked at Fort Point Partners, where he built large e-commerce systems for Global 1000 companies including Martha Stewart, Joann Fabrics, Best Buy, and Nike.

“Badgeville and their impressive suite of behavior management solutions is the next generation of web analytics,” said Duskin. “Kris Duggan has built an impressive team and product in less than two years since the company launched, and I’m thrilled to come on board at this exciting time in the company’s growth to develop Badgeville’s product roadmap and execution.”

Around 53 percent of all adult cell phone owners now use smartphones instead of feature phones, according to a recent report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. As a result of the rapid growth in mobile, companies seeking to connect with customers and employees must consider ways to increase engagement on their mobile applications, and in cross-platform user experiences.

This morning, we announced the world’s first gamification software development kits (SDKs) for iOS and Android, bringing gamification experiences across the web to tablets and mobile devices everywhere.

Deloitte, Apontador, Menuism, George Mobile and BAMM.tv are among our customers that have deployed gamified mobile experiences using Badgeville’s API and SDKs. The applications of gamification in these mobile use cases are diverse, ranging from customer- to employee-facing experiences, and sharing in the common goal to measure and influence user behavior.

Deloitte Digital, an innovator in social and mobile technology to improve the modern workplace, has built a proprietary geo-location service on top of Badgeville’s Behavior Platform.

“We have been impressed by Badgeville’s ease of use and flexibility in deploying Who What Where, a program to connect our consultants when they’re on the go,” said Frank Farrall, Leader of Deloitte’s Online practice. “With Badgeville, we were able to create a robust proprietary geo-location service, and reward check-ins, for our team. This program was extremely easy to get up and running, and enables us to not only reward our people for checking in at locations, but also to surface expertise.”

Meanwhile, other Badgeville customers are focusing on experiences centered around Apple’s iPad. “BAMM.tv will be launching a new iPad application for discovering emerging bands that places users in a virtual venue with live performance HD videos and includes a gamification program built on top of Badgeville’s Behavior Platform,” said Chris Hansen, CEO, BAMM.tv. “We selected Badgeville’s gamification solution for its ease of integration into iOS and our iPad application.”

In yet another popular use case, crowdsourced review communities, such as Apontador and Menuism, rely on Badgeville to encourage user contributions by adding status and social rewards across their websites. “It was easy to develop the advanced gamified features for our iPhone and iPad applications using Badgeville. The cross-platform experience offers our top users the opportunity to earn status for participation across both our web and mobile experiences,” said Rafael Siqueira, CTO, Apontador, the leading online review community in Brazil with 15 million unique visitors per month. “The mobile gamification program has already increased review contributions across our community.”

The Badgeville SDKs contain a robust API Library that allows developers to optimize for applications running on iOS and Android. For information on how to launch your own gamified mobile application on top of Badgeville, contact us today.

Following our Engagement Experts Webinar with Ray Wang of Constellation Research in February showcasing why brands are using gamification, we wanted to explore ways of how brands are driving engagement with game mechanics. As such, we are absolutely thrilled that Forrester Research’s Elizabeth Shaw is joining us in this next installment!

Webinar: How Brands Drive Engagement With Game Mechanics
Tuesday, March 6, 2012: 10:30AM PST
Spaces are limited. Register here now!

Shaw’s research focus includes social gaming, tablet advertising, youth marketing, and interactive and social TV. She helps leading brands assess how and when to test emerging technologies and how to integrate emerging channels into the overall marketing mix. In addition, Shaw is proficient in social media and word-of-mouth marketing.

In discussing the content and theme of the webinar, we asked Shaw a few questions.

Q. Why is “Game Mechanics for Brands” a subject that you’re researching and why are you excited about this market?
As an emerging media analyst, I always have my eyes and ears open to discover new opportunities for marketers. While game mechanics are nothing new, marketers using them to drive engagement on the web and in mobile was, and I quickly made it a part of my research agenda. It has really resonated with our clients and continues to be a large focus of mine.

Q. How has the “gamification” industry grown?
At first, we saw a lot of media companies integrate gamification into their marketing strategies mostly because they had access to large volumes of content that they could gamify. One year later, we see gamification across all industries—even in financial services and healthcare.

Q. How do you define gamification?
The insertion of game mechanics in non-game activities to drive a desired behavior.

Q. Why do brands need to pay attention to gamification and game mechanics to drive engagement?
Well, they don’t need to pay attention to it to drive engagement, they just need to understand how it drives engagement and the opportunity that may exist otherwise they may miss out on a good marketing opportunity.

Q. Who should attend your webinar on Tuesday?
The webinar is focused on how brands are leveraging gamification but that doesn’t mean only marketers should attend. Anyone with an interest in this topic will be able to follow the content and should be able to draw implications it could potentially have on their business from IT to HR to small business owners.

To join us for this special webinar sign up now for one of our few remaining spots!

This week, Facebook announced that within 30 days, all brand pages will be converted to the “Timeline” layout. This is a huge blow to 99% of brands on Facebook, and yet another sign that the behemoth social network is focused on advertising revenue versus providing brands a free, quality experience to connect with users.

It’s important to remember that Facebook’s business model is to sell highly targeted, and thus, higher-cost CPM and CPC advertising. This is not to say Facebook is a bad or evil company, but we must all remember they are an advertising network. Every move the company makes is to increase advertising revenue and reduce expenses, while keeping the hundreds of millions of users on the site happy enough to stick around… and look at more ads. The transition to Timeline for brand pages is a very clear example of this.

Realistically, Facebook had to transition its brand page model to Timeline. There is no reason for Facebook to dedicate technology and design resources to add new features to brand pages, where brands are able to engage for free with their audience. What Facebook wants to do is capture as much data around your audience as possible. They do not want to provide this data to you, they want to use it to sell ads.

The only benefactors from this transition other than Facebook will be the specialist agencies and community managers who will need to be hired to manage the new format. Many of the people touting that this is good for brands, outside of Facebook, are agencies that are excited to charge brands more to manage these pages that require more frequent, carefully-planned updates.

The Timeline setup, managed effectively, requires these agencies and community managers to post highly-engaging content (often media such as videos and photos), which then receive views, clicks, and comments from their loyal audience. Who has access to this data? The brand manager? Of course not. Facebook owns your audience data, even though you are heavily investing in managing this new social channel.

What does Facebook do with this data? Again, they use it to sell targeted advertising to your customers. You can certainly buy advertising that will reach your customers this way, but so can your competitors. All of your investment in your Facebook page is helping your competitors to effectively target your audience.

Facebook touts the following benefits to brands (here):

• Brand Your Page: Add a unique cover photo and showcase your most important news
• Highlight What Matters: “Pin” a new post to the top of your page each week so people notice what’s important
• Manage Everything in One Place: See and respond to your recent activity and private messages right from the top of your Page.

The change actually hurts brands. Let’s look at what Facebook failed to mention about the tactical elements of the new brand page:

1. Adding a giant graphic to the top of your page may help you make your page look nice, but that graphic does not drive any action that benefits your business. Instead, it pushes all of the engagement elements further down the page. It gives brands less control over what interactive experiences they are offering to their audience.
2. “Highlight what matters” is supposedly a benefit where you can now pin one post to the top of your page that you want your audience to see. The question still remains, how many of your fans are actually visiting your page in the first place? Statistics prove time and again that people do not return to a Facebook fan page once they’ve liked the brand. If they did not return to fan pages that had unique engaging experiences such as polls, contests and interactive experiences, why would they return to a page that looks like every other page on Facebook?
3. “Private messages” — in this release, Facebook added a “benefit” to brands which enables them to respond directly to fans who send them a private message. There is a big “message” button at the top of their pages. The problem with this is that for popular brands it will generate thousands of messages per day, with many of them being pure spam. Who has the time or resources to sort through this mess to dig out the few comments that might be valuable? What brands really want is to be able to gain insight across their entire audience so they can reach out to people who are engaging with their content, not just the people that opt to message them.
4. Facebook’s Timeline is not designed for brands. At best, it is designed to showcase a “timeline” of a person’s life experience. For many brands, this concept does not translate. Brands, however human we try to make them, are not people. The story you want to tell about your brand today may be night and day from the story you told last year. What matters is your brand today, but Facebook’s Timeline focuses on the past as much as the present.
5. Facebook’s Timeline encourages showcasing spam. Brands who want to allow their audience to comment on posts will find that they have hundreds of spam posts that are displayed prominently in their community. This requires a huge amount of resources to manage, deleting comments that are spam or worse, so the quality comments can bubble up on the profile.

This is not to say brands should ignore Facebook’s new pages, but it is time to draw the line around where Facebook lives in your marketing model, and your own “owned” user experiences. Brands must invest heavily in creating social experiences on their own web sites and mobile applications. Facebook will never be a place for your audience, who share a passion for your brand, to connect. As a brand marketer, you have a huge opportunity to create this community on your sites, ultimately owning your data, your audience, your brand, and your experience.

If you put together a list of the most successful SaaS companies over the past decade, Bazaarvoice’s name would certainly grace the list. The Austin-based company fast rose to the leader in social commerce conversations since its launch in 2005. The company’s solutions are now used by over 30% of the world’s leading global brands including Macy’s, Lowe’s, Samsung, IBM, Walmart, and many more.

Today, I’m happy to congratulate Bazaarvoice, an inspiring SaaS company, and valued Badgeville partner, in their successful IPO. Founded by Brett Hurt, former founder of Coremetrics, Bazaarvoice is a rare company where product, company culture, and brand are orchestrated and executed flawlessly. Hurt and his team have a rare understanding of customer behavior, how to drive value to social commerce experiences, and how to communicate this value through its solid marketing throughout the years. All growing SaaS companies, like Badgeville, look to Bazaarvoice as a leader and innovator in this space.

Badgeville recently announced a partnership with Bazaarvoice to encourage engagement across their Ratings & Reviews and Ask & Answer products. Our beta customers are already experiencing 300% increases in user-generated content across their joint integrations. For more information on Badgeville for Bazaarvoice, email us at bazaarvoice@badgeville.com.

This post was jointly posted to the Ant’s Eye View’s blog today.

By: Sean O’Driscoll, CEO, Ant’s Eye View, a leading strategic management and consulting firm for the social enterprise. Prior to co-founding Ant’s Eye View, Sean was a 15 year veteran at Microsoft Corporation. In his most recent capacity as General Manager, Community Support Services, Sean was responsible for developing social media and community-based support models and leading the global Microsoft MVP program. Ant’s Eye View has also created enterprise loyalty and reputation programs including Cisco VIP, Dell Community Rockstar and Salesforce MVP.

One of the distinguishing features of a socially engaged enterprise is a company’s ability to programmatically identify, engage and activate its most avid customers. At Ant’s Eye View, we know first hand just how valuable such advocate and influencer programs can be, from our history with the Microsoft MVP Program, to our current efforts helping companies like Dell, T-Mobile, Cisco and Salesforce tap into that expertise and enthusiasm.

Which is why today we’re thrilled to announce a partnership with Badgeville, a Silicon Valley startup that shares our belief in delivering measurable business impact through sustained customer engagement. Badgeville’s Behavior Platform uniquely blends gamification, reputation management and social networking to drive user engagement and customer loyalty.

Our partnership with Badgeville enables Ant’s Eye View to provide clients with a technology platform to support their social business strategy by analyzing consumer behavior and increasing participation in online communities. Badgeville has also proven to be an effective solution for companies trying to increase employee collaboration, or deliver training in engaging and effective ways. In addition, the platform’s deep analytics capabilities give clients the ability to monitor and reward individual behavior, as well as customize the gaming mechanics in response to real world real-time activities.

Badgeville was recently named one of Forbes’ 100 Most Promising New Companies in America and upholds an impressive enterprise client roster. We are thrilled to partner with them, and offer new capabilities to our clients as they engage with their online communities. Learn more about the partnership in the announcement release.

It always exciting to grace the Business Day pages of The New York Times, and we had the great honor of being featured in a recent article alongside our extremely innovative customer Samsung (see You’ve Won a Badge And Now We Know All About You, The New York Times, 2/4/12).

The brainchild of Samsung Electronics America Social Media Manager Esteban Contreras, pictured above, Samsung Nation is the first gamification program on a consumer electronics corporate website.

“For companies, the premise of gamification is that it engages people in the kind of reward-seeking behaviors that lead to increased brand loyalty, not to mention increased profits. By tracking the online activities of people who sign up for such programs, companies can also amass more detailed metrics about each user — the better to identify the most active customers,” writes NY Times reporter Natasha Singer in the article.

Contreras added, “visitors who sign in and become active on Samsung Nation tend to explore our Web site much more, learning about our company, our products, and our content.”

I recently had a chance to discuss the early success and makings of Samsung Nation with Contreras. The answers below are quite insightful read regarding how social media marketers in the F1000 can use gamification to increase engagement and loyalty.

Q. Can you tell us a bit about the Samsung Nation program and why you decided to launch it?

A. Samsung Nation is a social loyalty program for Samsung customers and fans. Anyone can unlock badges, earn points, level up and have fun discovering everything Samsung.com has to offer. Watching videos, commenting on articles, participating in user-generated Q&As, and late night visits are just a few ways in which visitors are rewarded.

We have millions of Samsung enthusiasts visiting our website and we focused on them when we started thinking of Samsung Nation because we greatly appreciate their loyalty and interest. We sought out to reward interaction, facilitate discovery and create a sense of real-time interconnectedness among passionate advocates.

Q. How do you define gamification?

A. Gamification is the art and science of applying game-like qualities to non-game environments, like websites. Ultimately, gamification should be about more engaging, memorable, meaningful and fun experiences.

Q. What was your initial goal with launching Samsung Nation for your community?

A. Our goal with Samsung Nation is to increase engagement and advocacy by enhancing the overall experience of our customers and fans on Samsung.com.

Q What advice do you have for a marketer looking to launch a gamification program for their community?

A. Start with your objectives, focus on your customers and gamify purposefully.

Q. Why did you decide to use Badgeville to power Samsung Nation?

A. We knew that we wanted to experiment with game mechanics because we’ve seen how startups like Foursquare and Quora have used them to create meaningful experiences. We knew that we needed to create a new layer on Samsung.com and we were looking into ways to create that layer ourselves. We took note when Badgeville presented at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010. By working with Badgeville’s platform we were able to focus on designing and creating a social loyalty program that can grow and evolve over time.

Find out more at www.samsung.com/us/samsungnation

One of the key missions we have at Badgeville is to provide our customers an easy way to reward top influencers and advocates across their community.

Badgeville’s Behavior Platform tracks user behavior that occurs on brand-owned websites, mobile apps, and connected devices, to reward and recognize brand advocates and influencers. Our Platform provides the most advanced technology to track user behavior that occurs on brand-owned sites, but until today did not provide a way to reward top influencers across external social channels.

Today, we are excited to announce a strategic partnership with Klout, the standard for influence. Klout analyzes engagement across social networks to measure a person’s level of thought leadership and influence. This partnership enables our customers to offer special rewards programs and status for members of their community with high Klout scores, increasing advocacy among the Web’s top influencers.

The partnership, featured in Mashable today (Klout + Gamification = Extra Perks for Influencers?), highlights our dedication to bringing our customers easy integrations with the world’s leading third-party platforms and applications.

“Our goal is to empower every user by unlocking their influence. Being integrated into Badgeville’s Behavior Platform is a great way for Klout to help organizations identify and reward top influencers in their community, and Klout has a unique set of information to help them do that,” said Joe Fernandez, CEO of Klout.

Badgeville is the only gamification platform that will include users’ Klout scores to surface and reward influencers across a brand’s online communities. The integration will be distributed by Badgeville, and initially for the first half of 2012, will be delivered to Badgeville customers at no incremental cost. For more information on adding Badgeville and Klout to your site, contact us today.