One of the highlights of this year’s SXSWi conference was watching Mashable’s Pete Cashmore interview Dennis Crowley, the 30-something cofounder of a killer app that just happened to put geo-location on the map. I’ve been watching Foursquare with interest since it first launched at SXSWi two years ago, checking into my regular hotspots and lording theoretical mayorships over confused neighborhood baristas while wondering … will this thing eventually catch on?
It has. Despite the privacy and safety concerns inherent in telling the world (or at least your friends) exactly where you are (and aren’t) at given point in time, more than 6 million people are checking into Foursquare right now. What, you might ask, are they getting in return? Um … a “Crunked” badge? A virtual “mayorship” of their airport terminal (at least until the guy behind them nabs the crown)? The occasional special or coupon? On the surface, not much.
Which just means you have to look deeper.
While its users are occupied unlocking ever-sillier, harder-to-earn badges (I’m Crunked on a Boat!), Foursquare’s clever engineers have been busy writing the code behind human motivation. It’s not money. It’s not even fame. It’s what Charlie Sheen likes to call #WINNING. Parents know the best way to help kids knock out a tedious task is to make a game of it (a game they can WIN). Coaches know their athletes will deliver their best performance only if there’s someone else to beat. We’re human, and competition is baked into our DNA.
Which is why, when you think about it, game mechanics makes so much sense for unlocking employee engagement and driving loyalty, productivity and retention in the workplace.
At FH, we recently helped a client roll out virtual badges on its internal social collaboration platform. Similar to Foursquare, employee participants are awarded virtual badges, displayed on their online profile, for demonstrating desired behaviors (ranging from content contribution to subject matter expertise). And though most of them had never even heard of Foursquare, when the badges launched, employees instinctively got it. They gobbled that first batch of beta badges right up and clamored for more (the team obliged by sending them to an internal crowdsourcing space to dream up and vote on their favorites). And in that three-month beta timeframe, employee participation on the platform spiked more than 300 percent … exactly the kind of behavior shift we were hoping to incent. Just a start, but a pretty interesting one we’ll continue to explore.
What might a little “gamification” of the workday unlock at your organization?
