[MUSIC] When I wanted to learn about gamification, I went out to my Twitter expert base, and said who's the best person to teach me? And one name came back. Joey Strawn. Joey, welcome to the social marketing specialization. Would you tell our participants a little bit about yourself and a little about your company, Industrial Strength Marketing. >> Sure, thanks for having me Randy. As you said, my name's Joey Strawn. I have been in the marketing and branding game for about eight to ten years and my focus has been mainly on integrated strategy. So helping businesses use all the channels at their disposal to get a singular message out to their clients and their customers to help with their engagement. Now specifically I'm the integrated marketing director at Industrial Strength Marketing based in Nashville Tennessee. And what we do is we focus on the niche of B to B industrial manufacturers. So distributors, OEMs, logistics, anyone that is really focused on the old standard sales models, we want to help them get their brands messages across using digital channels and digital means. And give them a full spectrum integrated solution to really help their bottom lines. >> Fantastic. When a lot of people hear the word gamification they think it's just games. Can you tell us a little bit about what is gamification? >> Sure, and I'm glad that you asked, because that's a huge misconception nowadays. Gamification, the definition I like to use, is the process of understanding and integrating game mechanics and design techniques. So things like point scoring, two-way communications, feedback, rules, things like that, to build those into your site, your community, your service offerings, content, your marketing campaigns in order to specifically drive participant engagement and help. So we want to make people involved in what we're doing. Now this really requires a huge paradigm shift for a lot of brands. And I wanna state that up front because when we're talking about this, we're not talking about customers anymore. We're talking about players. And we want to build systems in a way where we can help our players be more involved and a huge part of what gamification is, is based in what it isn't. And a lot of people have misconstrued ideas about what it is, so let me start off by saying what it is not. It's not slapping badges on useless crap. It's not creating games based on your company's products or your mascot. Like the old Domino's Noid, Super Nintendo game. It's not giving meaningless points for arbitrary actions and it's definitely not a silver bullet for bad strategy. It's not inherently going to fix something that is flawed. >> So why are games so motivating to us as individuals, why do we do it? >> We love games. Games are built into our societies, they're built into our culture. One of my favorite quotes about this is by a guy named Gabe Zichermann, who basically coined the term gamification. And he says, games are the only force in the known universe that can get people to take actions against their own self-interest In a predictable way without using force. So, when you think about it, think of football, that's the example that I like to use. Because football is, we're taking a human being, we're giving them 100 yards to run With the skin of a dead animal against 11 people who desperately, with physical impairment, want to stop him. And it is one of the most exciting and fun and enjoyable things that we have in society nowadays. And the ideas of understanding why that is is all because we put rules and rewards and systems in place that will help move them in that way. It's an exciting, exciting theory. And if you want to get extremely technical about it, it's based off of an idea called flow. The idea of flow is that mental state of operation in which the person performing the activity is completely and fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, involvement, and enjoyment, in the process of that activity. So, think about when you read a great book, or you watch a great movie, or you're playing a video game and you're like man, I've been doing this for five hours and it felt like ten minutes. That's the whole idea of flow and it's that perfect balance between challenge and ability. And allowing people to be in that perfect zone that pushes them to be their best self. >> So using your football analogy essentially when they get a first down they get a reward or when they go over the goal line they get a much bigger reward. Are there ways to differentiate rewards for the different levels of behavior that we want to have for our organization? >> Definitely and just like you said it's completely an incremental process. The idea that we like to use in gamification is that we need to build in intrinsic motivations. So it's something that I want to make you want to do. The acronym that we use is SAPS. S-A-P-S and that stands for Status, Access, Power and Stuff. So I'll kinda take you through what each one of those means. Status are rewards in it benefits a person in how they relate to others. Think of leaderboards, personal badges, bagging rights, if you want to think of it that way. Those personal levels that you build up in a game where like oh, I'm level seven and you're only level six. That's what an intrinsic motivator is, when it comes to status. On the flip side of that, access, that's the a in sSAPS, is all about giving players access to things that they would not have otherwise outside of playing the game. A special dinner with the CEO of a company or a celebrity spokesperson for the top 5% of players. Or an early head start on a new offering or an exclusive contest that only a certain percentage of players get to even take part in to win a prize that everybody wants. So moving from the A to the P and that's power. Everybody loves power. This is a huge one. Power rewards give players a little bit or a lot of control over other players in the game. So think of serving as a moderator or a host for an event or a forum. Getting the right to name a new level or a badge or something that other players are gonna have to use. Or the ability to act as a mentor to newer players in the game and give them resources and help them along and kinda position themselves as that powerful friend. And then the last S in SAPS is by far the weakest. But it is still a motivator, is stuff. Everybody loves free stuff, money, hats, koozies, monogrammed baseballs. Whatever you can think of. These are the physical things that we get for playing a game. Now, before we go any further though, let me add this disclaimer. Stuff is by far the weakest element in the SAPS system. It is a motivator, but study after study after study have shown that as soon as we get If the thing that we're playing for we'll stop playing. A lot of companies use that as their sole means because it is the easiest. It's easy to give somebody money, it's easy to give somebody a gift card, but it is not going to intrinsically motivate them to continue playing after they're granted that prize. >> That is really good that you said that because as we're gonna see, we're gonna show the participants some best of breed examples in Social IMC. And the important thing is that all the best ones use the S-A-P and don't give away the free stuff. I see that with a lot of companies. They start with free stuff and then they work themselves into a corner, cuz when the free stuff's gone, so are the people. And so that's a really good example. I really appreciate you taking us through some of the limitations of that. Can you tell me a little bit about, can gamification be used internally in my company to motivate my staff as well as externally, and how does that work? >> You bet. There's a lot of different ways that companies can use that. There's mainly two ways that companies approach gamification. They can augment their products or services using the SAP system that we've talked about, or they can actually use it internally to enhance systems that seem wrote or that people don't like to do, like accounting systems. Target has used a great example of gamifying their checkout progress for speed and accuracy. So you gamify an internal system for outward benefits for your clients. And you can think of it, extra bonuses for employees that are involved in your games, implementing achievement levels for professional development. So the more conferences that you go to, you can level up within the company. There are a lot of different ways, but mainly the outward effects are what we're going for to basically enhance the brand experience with all of our players. >> Well first off I want to thank you for giving us this great overview of gamification and how it works and the S-A-P-S way of doing it. And we will be seeing you in our very next video where you'll give us some best of breed examples of gamification at work. Thank you so much, Joey, for this great insight. >> Thanks for having me, Randy. [MUSIC]
