As a brand, retailer or publisher you are constantly looking for ways to identify people who are advocates of yours. Having found these loyalists, you can encourage them to carry on the behaviors that you find valuable, while also attracting and converting new advocates. 

If this sounds like a job for Gamification, you’re right. And the Gamification features built into the Pluck platform provide you with many ways to identify and motivate your most influential advocates.

The exact user interactions that are important to you may vary depending on the nature of your business.  But, if we look at one business model, that of an internet retailer, you will get a sense of how this same philosophy could be applied to any site’s community. 

As an internet retailer you are ultimately in the business of selling products.  It stands to reason that it would be important to identify people who currently help drive new product sales, in order to help encourage them to continue doing what they are doing. 

Let’s review a couple types of interactions people may have with your website that could drive new product sales or attract new customers, and how Pluck Gamification features can help:

1. You want to identify and reward anyone who leaves compelling content on your site that other users find useful and may ultimately sway their decision to purchase.  Examples: Comments, Reviews, Videos, Photos, Blog Posts, Forum Posts.

How Pluck Can Help: Using Pluck’s Gamification features, you can reward users who provide quality content that other users find helpful.  Our robust reputation system lets you write simple rules that award the author/owner of a piece of content with points triggered by built-in actions of anyone clicking “thumbs-up”, “like” or “found helpful” on that content. You can also trigger the awarding of badges by these same rules and actions. 

This is a departure from the typical practice of assigning points to the person who rates the contributed content.   By rewarding the person who is exhibiting the behavior that is most important to your business you will be encouraging more users to submit quality content. 

2. You want to identify and reward anyone who shares a piece of content –whether written by them or not - from your site out to one or more social network sites (ie: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Tumblr, etc.), especially when it results in a new customer clicking on that shared link to come back to your site.

How Pluck Can Help: Pluck’s Gamification supports something we call Share Trackbacks. This feature lets you write reward rules that are triggered when someone comes to your site because of shared content.   The rewards rule can award points and badges to the person who originally shared out the content that resulted in a new customer coming to the site via that trackback URL. 

Again, this rewards the behavior you are most interested in encouraging and tracking.  While it is likely still important to award points for any share activity, capturing the shares that result in new traffic/users to your site are the ones that have real value. 

These two examples show what we  refer to as “owner-attribution” rewards, where you  reward the author or owner of the content being acted on rather than the person doing the action at the time of the reward.  This does not mean that rewarding users for direct actions should not also be done, as Pluck provides many built-in actions that can award points and badges.  And Pluck provides the ability to create your own custom event triggers which award points and badges, and then initiate those events as you see fit, allowing for a multitude of Gamification possibilities.

Assigning points and badges is a great start, but to really get some adoption you will want to publish and promote a Pluck Leaderboard, and call attention to these points and badges either visually or through a promotion or campaign.  You can also consider linking points and leaderboards to real rewards like discounts and products to help further motivate users. 

If you take a holistic approach to your Gamification implementation, where you both gather and track the information that is important to your business, but also reward, incentivize, and promote influential community members, you will find much more success all-around. 

If you are interested in exploring how Pluck’s Gamification features can help your business, please contact your Pluck Account Director to setup a consultation or drop us a line. 

In my next post I’ll talk about how to tie Reviews and Comments into your order flow and identify which content ends up being the tipping-point for conversion.