How Important is Marketing Gamification to a Robust Online Marketing Plan?

The following is an interview with Gabe Zichermann, author of the new book Gamification by Design. Every marketer needs to stay on top of trends. Gamification is a trend in web and mobile design that is big and getting bigger. My sincere thanks to Gabe for the opportunity to conduct this interview.

Mark McLaren: When I first read the title of your book, Gamification by Design, my reaction was, “Won’t be reading that!” I associated it with online games, “gamers”, massively multiplayer online games. I don’t know. Video games are not my thing. So I thought I wouldn’t be able to relate. But I clearly didn’t know what the word “gamification” meant! Do you have a short and sweet statement for people who think you are talking about gaming or video games or something only kids know about? The importance of gamification for marketers and business decision-makers is hard to overstate.

Gabe Zichermann: The definition I use to help folks better understand the term is this – Gamification is the process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems. We’re not talking about solving the next puzzle or level in a video game, but solving real world problems like how to keep employees engaged and motivated, how to keep customers coming back to your website, and more.

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Mark McLaren: Most of my clients are just starting to realize the need to take smartphones into account when they think about marketing. Usually this means that they want to be sure visitors who find them online have a good experience when they view their website on a smartphone. Gamifying their website adds additional overhead to their web projects, and it will almost certainly add even more overhead if they want to give a similar experience across web browsers, tablets and smartphones. Do you have suggestions about how to approach this? Do you think businesses should design for smartphones first, for example, and then design for web browsers? Can you give any examples of how businesses that don’t have massive marketing budgets are dealing with the incorporation of gamification into their sites? Did you encounter problems like this when you built GamificationU.com (the companion website for the Gamification by Design book)?

Gabe Zichermann: It’s funny how quickly the mobilization of the web has advanced, isn’t it? It’s essential today that your site at least function on mobile devices and tablets. Better yet if it can be optimized for those devices and made to be beautiful and functional even in small real estate. Gamification has the benefit of a number of amazing technology vendors who have developed highly scalable (and often free or low-cost) solutions for implementing Gamification. In this way, the technical effort can be minimized – and it’s worth checking out folks like Bunchball, Badgeville, BigDoor and others. The design work is still incumbent on the site owner, but after all, you probably know your customers best anyway.

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Mark McLaren: Gamifying a business website by adding a system of points, badges, levels, challenges and leaderboards has the potential to introduce a level of fun and engagement that’s lacking on most sites. You give examples in the book where this works, and the positive results can be measured (at least in terms of some kinds of activity on the site) with analytics. It’s clear that businesses are going to have to figure it out if they want to remain competitive in the long run. But I have many clients who cringe at the mention of this kind of “fun”. In fact, some of them have the same reaction to social media. They know everyone’s doing it, but they are still not sure why. When you speak at a conference like the Gamification Summit, you don’t need to convince people of the importance. But do you have a different talk you give to the gamifcationally challenged? the future averse? Kidding aside, I’d like your insights as to how to reach these folks.

Gabe Zichermann: One of the things I like to point out to folks who have doubts about why they should use Gamification is the impending exodus of the Baby Boomer generation from the workforce. The Millenial generation will take it’s place (and really this has already started) – a generation of consumers and employees who have either grown up with video game controllers in their hands or grown up exposed to a society and pop culture thats full of this type of interactive entertainment.

In the case of social media and Gamification for business, everyone is doing it because it works. I find that the most convincing way to approach “the gamificationally challenged” is with real examples of gamified campaigns that produced real results. This can be more than website analytics. It can be Ananth Pai, an elementary school teacher, raising the math and reading levels of his classroom by one whole grade level in a matter of months by gamifying his classroom. It can be Kevin Richardson and his Speed Camera Lottery project which showed how gamifying speed tickets by rewarding good drivers with a lottery of the proceeds from the fines speeders pay can enact real and positive behavioral change. Or it can simply be (and often is the case for older demographics) to explain the power of loyalty programs through a behavior lens.

One thing everyone can agree on is that games are a powerful force for behavior change. Knowing that Gamification doesn’t always (often) mean turning things into a “game” can go a long way toward easing this stress. And the success stories don’t hurt either.

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Mark McLaren: One of the things that really resonates about gamification is that its success depends on constant feedback and testing. As you say in the book, “No gamified system should be built with a set-it-and-forget-it mentality.” Really, the same is true of today’s website. The tools are available to allow us to monitor users and make significant improvements based on their behavior. Businesses that fail to do so are increasingly out of touch with their customers. Gamification promises to increase basic metrics like time-on-site, return visits, social sharing and so on. Hence the appeal for marketers. Like social media integration, from a practical standpoint, unless we can integrate traditional web analytics like Google Analytics together with gamification analytics, marketers are not really going to be able to show a direct connection between gamification and business goals. If I have the budget for dedicated programmers who can incorporate different APIs into my web analytics software, then I’m in good shape. With enough time and money, I can show the connection. But what about smaller businesses? Are their ways to integrate gamification analytics on the cheap?

Gabe Zichermann: The aforementioned technology vendors can definitely help with analytics, and most of them come with an integrated analytics and tracking package that is one of their value adds. But one of the most interesting things I’ve found in working with major brands on Gamification strategy and design in my consulting practice (called Dopamine – or http://dopa.mn) is that in following our Gamification process, we often start with a discussion of metrics, success factors and analytics. This helps make Gamification very results-driven and effective, but also has trickle down benefits for the business as a whole (it’s often the first time the organization has tried to figure out the meaning of a “win”).

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Mark McLaren: It seems like the obvious appeal for traditional marketers in all this gamification is still to do permission-based marketing: to get site visitors to tell you who they are so they can be added to a mailing list and contacted. Do you see problems with “players” – site visitors – wanting to play but still remain anonymous? Does gamification give us new, more effective ways to encourage visitors to give up their information? Or, alternatively, can we achieve business goals through gamification without asking for information like real name, company name or email address? Can visitors remain anonymous and still help us spread the word about our products and services? How far along the sales funnel should we permit anonymity?

Gabe Zichermann: I think that the key here is providing visitors with a web experience that is so fun and engaging that they don’t feel a need to stay anonymous. Specific tactics that can help a website turn it’s anonymous visitors into known community members include offering real-world rewards and perks.

But I do also think that websites, companies, and services can benefit from a community of users that stays anonymous. A big part of Gamification is the social nature of people and the web – so it’s important that social media be tied closely to gamified platforms, services, or websites. In this sense, if consumers are engaged and entertained by your offering, they may be more apt to share it with their Facebook or Twitter networks than they would be to share their personal contact info with a corporation.

As always, the key is to make things authentic and rewarding – if you can do those two things you can create powerful and lasting engagement with consumers. Gamification happens to have the best toolkit for making that happen, and that has had no small part in its phenomenal success.

Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps
By Gabe Zichermann, Christopher Cunningham
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Released: July 2011
Pages: 208

Please add your insights and suggestions for other resources in the comments below. Here’s my answer:

There are many ways to add social media buttons to a website. WordPress plugins make it fairly easy, but sometimes these plugins conflict and wind up showing in the wrong place on your pages, or pushing content too far down the page, or leaving big gaps of white space. If you encounter things like this, you may have to resort to manually modifying the code for your theme files, like the single.php file. If you want to add them at the end of your posts, I recommend http://sharethis.com ShareThis has a plugin for WordPress.

You might need different code in order to add a Facebook “Like” button, but check this post first:
http://blog.sharethis.com/2011/07/06/google-1-and-facebook-like-for-sharethis/
Here are some other options:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-like-button/
http://mashable.com/2010/05/07/wordpress-facebook-like-buttons/

Also check out Yoast (a great guy and a great search engine optimization and WordPress resource, generally)
http://your-social-media-guy.posterous.com/social-buttons-adding-them-to-your-site-track
and while you are at it, consider adding a Google+1 button. Maybe ShareThis has +1 covered now. If so, you are in luck! It’s a good idea to keep current by adding a +1 button.

Pingbacks and trackbacks (another form of linking between blogs) are important to search marketing because although many businesses use, or want to use, their blog for online marketing purposes, they usually have no idea what pingbacks and trackbacks are. Although pingbacks look like comments – and, indeed, they show up in the comments section of the WordPress Dashboard – they are quite different.

Publishing pingbacks without knowing what you are doing can have serious detrimental consequences for the search rank of your blog pages and for the search rank of your website as a whole (if it shares the same or a related domain).

I have yet to find a good explanation of pingbacks and trackbacks for newbies. If you know of a good one, please add a link in the comments below.

You can wade through this discussion of pingbacks, if you have time.

Pingbacks are turned on by default in WordPress and most major blog platforms so that if someone creates a link to one of your blog posts in one of their blog posts (rather than leaving a comment directly on your blog), you get a notification (depending on how you configure this in the WordPress Dashboard) and you can publish the pingback. You’ll get an email from WordPress asking whether you want to publish the pingback or not. If you decide to publish the pingback, it will show up at the end of your post along with the published comments. Your readers can then click the link in the published pingback and go see what that person who linked to you is saying about your post – on that person’s blog.

Displaying Pingbacks and Comments Separately

There are also ways to modify the comments.php file in your WordPress theme so that comments are listed first, and pingbacks and/or trackbacks are listed separately below the comments. Instead of leaving pingbacks and trackbacks out altogether, this allows you to publish them without confusing your less blog-savvy readers. This might also encourage readers to link to your posts, because they know they will get a link back to their blog in the form of a published pingback.

I looked for a clear explanation of how to separate pingbacks from comments, and I searched for a WordPress plugin that would do it for you, but I found no plugins and I did not find any easy instructions about how to modify the code in a WordPress comments.php file to accomplish this.

While we are on the subject of blog comments and rewarding commenters on your blog, I want to mention a great WordPress plugin called CommentLuv. As the developer says, the plugin rewards commenters by “automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment.”

Should You Disable Pingbacks?

To disable pingbacks in WordPress, in the Dashboard go to Settings > Discussion > Default article settings. Uncheck the box for “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)” I prefer not to disable pingbacks. I like to know if someone, or some bot (spambot), has linked to my blog, so I leave this box checked.

Pingbacks and Search Engine Optimization

In terms of search engine optimization, link building and attracting traffic to a blog, it’s more beneficial for the person who links to your site to do so than it is to leave a comment on your blog (as long as you actually publish the pingback). Why? (a) It means your readers have to go to the other person’s blog to read what they are saying about your post, and (b) – more importantly – when you publish the pingback, you create a link to the post on their blog that is directly relevant to the topic of your post. Otherwise, when someone leaves a comment on your blog, they will typically only use their top-level domain as the URL along with their name.

For example, if you look at the comments below, each of the commenters’ names is a clickable link, but each of them has used a URL that is the general address of their website or blog, not the address of a post about pingbacks.

How to Disable “Internal” Pingbacks

It’s worth mentioning that, whenever you link to a page on your own WordPress site from one of your blog posts, you will get a pingback notification letting you know. Of course, you  don’t need to get these. You already know if you linked to your own site. There is a way to disable these internal pingbacks using a plugin or by editing the functions.php file for your theme.

Pingbacks and Spam

The most common use of pingbacks is for spam. By publishing a pingback, you give a “vote” to any link provided by the person or bot linking to your site, and you associate your site with the site you link to. If the pingback is spam, you are putting a spammy link on your blog. This is bad. It waters down the quality of your site in the eyes of search engines, and it looks pretty bad to human readers as well. It looks like you don’t know – and don’t seem to care about – what’s on your blog. In this sense, spam pingbacks and spam comments are very similar.

Since some blogs automatically publish pingbacks, a spambot can create a link to one of your posts and once it’s published, the bot/website creating the link to you will automatically get a link back to their site. Perfect! For spammers, that is. The image at the top of the page shows what pingbacks look like in the Comments section of your WordPress Dashboard. These happen to be spam pingbacks. The square brackets and ellipses [...] signify a pingback as opposed to a comment.

Should You Publish Pingbacks?

I don’t publish pingbacks, not even the legitimate ones from humans who link to my site. I think they are generally confusing to readers. Pingbacks are for serious bloggers – people who blog every day. If I were a big-time blogger, I probably would publish pingbacks so that other bloggers would reciprocate. But it’s worth noting that even a successful blogger (and very smart guy) like Ian Lurie does not publish pingbacks.

If you want to include pingbacks on your WordPress blog, as I said, you can probably use a plugin that will put them at the bottom of the page, below all the comments. (Although I have seen this done, I haven’t found a plugin yet that will do it.) That way people can read the comments before getting to the pingbacks and getting confused. In most cases, unless your readers are also big-time bloggers, they will get confused because pingbacks mixed with comments don’t make sense unless you already know what they are (or maybe your readers will just ignore the pingbacks). So why include them?

Most of us underestimate the importance of a great elevator pitch. We think it’s just for salesmen. But it’s much more than that. You may have patented the most amazing invention since the electric light bulb, but if no one knows about it and sees its significance, your business will fail.

Just like every business has an online profile whether they create one themselves or not, every business has an elevator pitch. It’s called the value proposition. Stating it clearly, and in way that makes the listener want to learn more, is essential to success. In big organizations, this responsibility traditionally lies with the marketing department. But in the age of social media, articulation of the value prop can be carried out by every person in the organization – and by the media, customers, “fans” and “followers” – certainly not just the marketing department.

Today it’s all the more important to have a killer elevator pitch to capture the spirit and value of what your business offers. Perfect it, and it will practically spread by itself.

The successful elevator pitch is as close as you can get to a silver bullet for business success. It’s particularly useful for understanding what makes a good pay-per-click (e.g. Google AdWords) ad. These are the short ads that appear as “Sponsored links” next to search results on Google, Yahoo! and other search pages. A good AdWords ad grabs your attention without using hype. It offers to relieve an itch or a pain or a desire. It makes you want to learn more. It does so by speaking your language. It’s not necessarily the language of the company making the offer.

Invariably, this language includes keywords. Words that you type into a search engine to do a search. When you are looking for a product on the Internet, you don’t sit there and think, hmm, I wonder what words the manufacturer uses to talk about his products. You just type the first thing that comes to mind. That’s a keyword.

Keywords are often the hardest part of the search marketing process, in search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising like Google AdWords. To be successful, keywords have to capture the thinking of the site visitor or person doing a search. They are the essence of whatever it is that makes them want to learn more, to click. And they are the essence of whatever it is that makes that person want to share an idea – or product or brand – with friends and family.

The next stranger you meet might be in a position to change the course of your business or your career. They might be looking for an opportunity, or they might be ready to put you in touch with someone who will be your greatest investor or partner or boss. Why not be ready? As the saying goes, “Luck is the time when preparation and opportunity meet.”

Mel Pircheski is the master of the elevator pitch. Take a minute to read this short post that gives you the essence of a successful elevator pitch. Put his words into practice, and I guarantee you’ll see positive results.

I was talking with a client about Social Media Marketing and ways to host video on a WordPress site. If your WordPress website is self-hosted, you have plenty of options. I won’t even begin to go into the many video plugins for WordPress. That is a different topic. But when it comes to video hosting, there a lot of reasons to use YouTube rather than anything else. Visit the McBuzz YouTube Channel here.

Because uploading and inserting images is so easy with WordPress, you might think that video should be simple in the same way. But because you need a video player – which is complicated – and video files are typically quite large (unless they are converted to Flash and compressed), there are lots of factors that make handling video different than handling images.

[Click on the image above right for larger view. The screen shot shows Google search results for "introduction to wordpress dashboard". Google Universal Search Results feature video, images and other kinds of content along with the standard text listings for web pages. Here video thumbnails appear near the top of the results. The McBuzz Business Blogging 101 tutorial featuring the same video is at the bottom of the results page. Two listings for the price of one!
   Click on the image below right for larger view. Similar results for "wordpress static page". This time, video thumbnails are at the bottom of the page, and Business Blogging 101 is at the top.]

WordPress makes it super easy to embed a video when you use the URL from YouTube or a similar hosting service like Vimeo or VodPod. These other services are as easy to use as YouTube, but YouTube is the best easy solution for lots of other reasons. Unless, for some reason, you want complete control over your videos and you want to limit access to them or keep them out of the Google Index altogether, there are many good reasons to use YouTube or a similar service as a host for your video files. In terms of search engine visibility, these services – and especially YouTube – are far superior to hosting video on your own server.

Here are 10 reasons why YouTube is the best choice for WordPress video hosting:

1. YouTube is free.
2. YouTube works with many file formats and converts those files into several different sizes of Flash movie, including HD. If someone has HD capability on their computer or other device, they can watch in HD, otherwise they can watch at a lower resolution. Creating these options on your own would be time-consuming and require special software and skills.
3. You can add unique, keyword-rich titles and descriptions for every video you upload.
4. Your YouTube account itself is great for your personal visibility and for your business.
5. In many cases, YouTube searches exceed the number of Google searches as a source of viewer traffic for your videos. That traffic will, in turn, see your YouTube profile and you can do a lot on your profile and in the video descriptions to encourage visitors to go to your main website.
6. Google owns YouTube; they pay very close attention to content on YouTube.
7. As part of “Google Universal Search Results“, video thumbnails often appear on search results pages independent of other search results, this means you have a better chance of being found in Google results when you keep video on YouTube. It’s possible to get a standard search result listing along with a video thumbnail or image thumbnail listing, so you get multiple listings on the same search results page.
8. People will pick up and embed your videos in their own website or blog. This is great for inbound links and for increasing traffic to your site because you can include a URL in the video description as well as a URL that displays at the beginning or end of your videos. (Branding your videos is very important for this reason. Sometimes I do a good job at this, sometimes not. Here’s one example I’m happy with: Installing WordPress on BlueHost)
9. YouTube gives you fairly comprehensive stats (YouTube calls these viewer analytics “Insight”) over time regarding how many people watch your videos, how they found them (via YouTube search, a search engine, direct link, etc.), their demographics and so forth. You won’t get any of that if you host your own videos.
10. Many web hosts will charge you an additional fee for the increased bandwidth and server space demands you put on their servers when you host your own video. Whether or not they have fees, they may limit the bandwidth and space you are allowed for large files like video.

Free Social Media Marketing Tool: Press Release Grader

Unlike monitoring tools, Press Release Grader is not about gathering information and figuring out what to do with it. It’s an instructive tool that runs your press release through a checklist, giving you feedback about things like the readability level (high school, college, graduate school), overused words and words used most often.

One of my favorite features is a link checker that inspects the number and quality of links you include in the body of the release. Since many press releases will wind up on the Web, links are especially important. You need to be sure to include good links: think about the pages you are linking to and whether you have included keywords in the links.

Press Release Grader is an instructive tool in another sense: it teaches the user how to optimize content. Many of the same principles apply to all Web-based publishing. It’s also likely that this tool will improve as Hubspot gets feedback from users. There are search engine optimization tools that do the same thing, Hubspot and Optify are two notable providers.

Press releases are not dead. They are still a valuable way to get the word out and build inbound links. So, as long as you are going to use them, you should take a few minutes to check them over with a tool like Press Release Grader.

Here’s a taste from the review:

Today building an online brand is something anyone can do. In fact, even if you are not online, your brand is being created for you by the search engines and by other people who are. The tools that social media superstar Chris Brogan has used to create one of the most successful online brands ever are available to everyone, and most of them are free. In this new media ecosystem, some business strategies that used to work will now lead to extinction. We can’t expect old business models – like pushing ads out to thousands of subscribers – to have the desired effect on new channels like mobile phones. [Read more...]

Joel speaks from experience and, imo, he is right on target. Would love your comments. Let me know what you think.

Along with Social Media Club Seattle, Kenji and crew are one more reason the social media scene in Seattle is gaining a lot of momentum. If you are in Seattle, definitely check out these websites and follow Kenji on Twitter.

Seattle Social Media Profiles Interview with Mark McLaren

Our next Social Media Marketing Event will be on May 11, 2010: “Explode the WordPress Learning Curve: An Evening with the Experts”

I’m very excited to be part of this WordPress Seminar in Seattle line-up! You’ll get lots of vital information, distilled, organized and ready to be put to use. My 20-minute segment will focus on the five most important things you can do to optimize your WordPress website or blog for search engines.

Read more and get tickets for this upcoming evening of social media learning and networking: WordPress Social Media Seminar in Seattle (click for more information). Tuesday, May 11, 6 PM to 9 PM at Bellevue College, Bellevue (Seattle) Washington.

If you haven’t checked out WordPress yet, I encourage you to go to WordPress.com and create a free blog. It takes about 10 minutes, maybe less.

McBuzz offers a collection of free WordPress tutorials. The downside of all the recent upgrades of WordPress is that many of these tutorials are done using version 2.3 or 2.5. The new version’s interface is quite a bit different from either of these. Time for some new WordPress tutorials!

In January, partner Wayne Bishop and I will begin offering our Intro seminars on Social Media for business marketing, communications and collaboration again. We always manage to talk about WordPress as part of our introduction to blogging in our Introducing Web 2.0 seminar. Please let me know what other kinds of topics you would like to see covered.

I’m also planning to offer a seminar devoted exclusively to Blogging as part of Web 2.0 – based on the same material in my recent Blogging 101 presentation.

And, if you would like to check out a state-of-the-art social-networking-for-business website, I encourage you to look at – and join – Biznik. Basic membership is free. The founders rock, and the network is awesome.