Most games are played as an excuse to socialize, not to achieve!

Topic-> Behaviour Mechanics
From Foursquare on the iPhone to an online game of Farmville, not to mention the frequent fliers popularized in the Academy Award nominated film, Up in the Air, playing “everyday games” has become nothing short of a pop culture obsession. Driving unprecedented consumer engagement to smart brands like Chase and the US Army, loyalty programs and marketing games are marketing’s best bet for the future of advertising.

It’s easier than you think to bring the power of games to your business. You can start adding game mechanics to your marketing mix in 5 easy steps:

1. What consumer behaviour are you trying to drive? Don’t just think about broad or bottom line objectives (‘more engagement’, ‘greater brand exposure’) when considering ways in which you’d like to effect the behaviour of your consumer base, but instead, focus in on easy-to-achieve activities that will have an overall impact on your bottom line. For example: incentivize the sending of product endorsements to friends. The more specific you can be, the easier it is to build game mechanics around. Some behaviours are best left un-incentivized, however!
2. Assign points to those behaviours. Think about how much value each of the behaviors has to your business and assign points to each action accordingly. Points should be weighed relatively, so if opening a new account is ten times more valuable than clicking on an advertiser’s link, make sure the point system reflects that reality.
3. Create a leaderboard to display points. Just like the Employee of the Month plaques at restaurants, create a socially-networked leaderboard that allows users to feel like they are accomplishing something relative to their friends and peers — A little encouragement goes a long way.
4. Develop challenges and message them. Just like Frequent Flyer promotions, creating simple challenges can have a profound effect on user behaviour once they are connected to your community. Keep your challenges fresh and topical by knowing your players – get a riveting insight on exactly who is playing.
5. Make ‘fun’ your goal! Whether your business is finance or funerary, making fun a principal objective will substantially increase consumer engagement and generate remarkable new revenue opportunities. Generation G – today’s tweens – are driving ‘funnovation’ in every industry.

Harness the power of games to create extraordinary customer engagement with Game-Based Marketing. Gamification is revolutionizing the social web and mobile apps. By leveraging points, levels, badges, challenges, rewards and leaderboards – these innovators are dramatically lowering their customer acquisition costs, increasing engagement and building sustainable, viral communities.

Reference: Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests by Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder 

Techie story of the App player’s quintessential “buttons”

These blogs are part of my future rendezvous with the application player…  [previous node]

<Cloud-Log starting at 2012.02> [emulated from Captain's Log on Starship Enterprise]

If only the video player of the yester-years talked to a remote server, we could see how the press of a play button requested the content to be streamed back. Today the “video” player on the client’s browser can emulate that effect through a GET command.

Since now the things got to get more specialized, the fetch/view builder function on the streaming server need to be sub-divided amongst various view-helper functions and clients (web browsers). Some helpers could build the basic “scene” background; some could fill-in the already saved responses in the field columns of the resource representation.

The record button on the video player, had more specialized functions including creating, deleting, and updating all rolled into one, a function which just bluntly over-wrote everything (at the current position)! For business applications running on the player, we must be more explicit. So we will have at least two buttons on our app player – POST, DELETE (if not three that is – PUT) replacing the Record’s red dot button.

The stop button now must function as a logout button, releasing all the client caches and memory (a good citizen’s charter)!

The most important achievement of a video player’s interface was its simplicity stemming probably from the sequential access (though was implemented with the help of a few more buttons – Forward and Rewind). The app player too will need to bring the same for a randomly accessed data.

More on this in the following post…

Related articles

• Where is my Application “Player”? (vikasjee.wordpress.com)

Where is my Application “Player”?

For the last 20 months or so now, i have been searching for a real “good” but extremely simple application-player for playing all my business applications. I started on a premise that if I have an auto-scalable, performant, interoperable, pervasive infrastructure on clouds, then i should be able to just play my applications on a thin, app-player on my five year old fairly good desktop, a three year old smartphone, and a new, “connected” android tablet, all the same… and, btw, why not on a cloud-connected car?

That triggered my search for the truth, the truth i know is somewhere out there [as they said in X-files]! After lots of discussions, presentations, brainstorming cycles…

<Cloud-Log starting at 2012.01> [emulated from Captain's Log on Starship Enterprise]

Here are some tech questions esp. for those geeks hovering over this post searching for “Food”:

• Do you think a Web server streams an application and a web browser renders it on a client, same as a video streaming server streams bits to a client video player which renders those streaming bits?
• What technologies are required to make this streaming application “fit” for full user interaction?
• Are these nuts and bolts currently available or do we require any more pliers and spanners?
• Do you think we have such a client ”video” player with its minimum play-start-stop buttons interface in a browser? Are we talking of REST providing that player?
• What else can we develop to make the life of an application developer as easy as a video file-uploader?

What do you think?

To the top, front and in action!

“Sarkar ki Duniya” and the great “Survivor”

1. Establish Influence (Your road to Influence)

1. Lie low initially, you may choose to act shy
2. Learn system dynamics
3. Identify non-rules
4. Learn non-verbose rules
5. Become an no-nonsense Advice-Center in all the meetings
6. Start influencing budding leaders
7. Establish your Tools-of-trade

2. Form your own Trust Group

1. Involve personally with the influencers (Get to Know)
2. Act cool but stay smart
3. Exhibit strong principles
4. Form your own group of ministers and delegate level 1 jobs
5. Be strict but adjustable
6. Create an internal, close, small group of buddies (followers?!)

3. Assume the Leadership position

1. Show low interest in a high position
2. Silently lobby and Get yourself elected
3. Assume major responsibilities
4. Manage the Delegates (Level 2)
5. Increase your circle of influence to other influencing minds
6. “Announce” the opposition members
7. Isolate opposition leader(s)
8. [Every act is a game plan now] Plan for team wins and opposition losses
9. Confluence with your team for plans which can act as long term carrots (Green Carrots), later
10. Isolate the strong neutral players (and never allow them to become the third front!)
11. Actually fight out all the battles, however small, for any win against the opposite group [but be prepared to console and quick rebound (resilience) after the failures]

4. Win The End Game!

5. …The real action starts now!

Head: Every Cloud (app) has a silver “design”-ing

There has been lot of hype around cloud computing and its various layers in the past couple of years. The world seems to have settled down now and looking forward to delivering real apps for the cloud!

This multi-part post discusses the “New” cloud design pieces to be considered for creating an optimal cloud application (nee elastic application).

Yes, a cloud application is different from traditional web application (look ma, now web apps are being called traditional!), in that it is completely elastic. <more later> Is the “different” cloud app a misnomer?…

There are various areas which various cloud team members have to look into and thoughtfully consider while creating their optimal cloud application work. Some of these could be special considerations about the

• highly distributed and polyglot persistence, 
• various app performance improvement mechanisms,
  • various latency reducing(?) mechanisms, 
  • Near in-memory (metered) d-caches/distributed data grids, 
  • Edge servers/services,
  • Multi-Cloud balancing/bursting,
  • Sharding,
  • Light/Agile API access (REST based SOA)
• discovering and replacing services dynamically at run-time
• multi cloud resilience
• cloud service app fabric
• auto-provisioning services at runtime
• …

I will need all your support in maturing this blog into a one-stop reference!

Happy indulging!!!