ItsDevelopmental - content + technology + people

Game mechanics, content and building user engagement

This week's connectinghr chat - #chrchat - prompted this post. In the chat I raised the issue of using game mechanics in developing learning apps. More of that later in the post.

Game mechanics - the techniques that are used in games to help participants progress through the game and to get fully immersed and engaged with it - can be usefully applied to increase user engagement with content - that could be a learning app or it could be B2B content.

Essentially we are talking about the psychology of user behaviour and understanding how certain elements within gaming lead to behaviour change ie doing something different. Gaming is very good at achieving behaviour change, motivating us to do the next thing and take the next step.

It is also worth noting - and this is a point Richard Sedley made at last year's Design for Persuasion Conference - that anyone who chooses to play a game plays freely - as opposed to a task they have been told to do, for example. Playing a game against your will simply does not work - you have got to want to do it. You either want to play or you do not. And implicit in this is that participation will be enjoyable. Yes, gaming is fun.

Richard expands on this point here:

In terms of learning apps, his final point is very important - intranet users may see taking online training as a chore. Put a gaming interface on it and that chore suddenly seems like something fun that they will enter in to freely.

On a separate point, I think fun is hugely overlooked when it comes to publishing content - be it an app, an article etc. In B2B publishing, for example, the really fun stuff can be rare. Why? Because most of the time readers and users are seen as being serious not people who also had a sense of humour. 

Back to the mechanics. Here are some . . .

Points/rewards - you are rewarded for achieving certain goals. Central to this is the idea of collecting and completeness. Gain a certain number of points and you get a reward. Notice how Linkedin uses completeness for profiles eg your profile is 95% complete. Once your profile is 100% complete you should attract more eyeballs to your profile. The psychology of collecting is also discussed by Richard in the Audioboo above.

Levels - players strive to get to the next level to get rewards. Progress is rewarded so we are motivated to continue. This affects their profile.

Profile/status - once players accumulate points their profile/status changes to reflect their achievements. This is clear for others to see. Location services such as Foursquare have this at its heart - collect badges and gain a different status.

For a more complete list check out this list of game mechanics at Gamification - it is an excellent resource. 

Game mechanics have an important and powerful part to play in engaging users. The challenge is to adopt some of the psychology behind the techniques in game mechanics.

Final point about learning within the enterprise - this is not about turning training content into games (although Richard Sedley provided a great example of how his agency developed a games interface for training content on an intranet which hugely increased engagement), this is about thinking through how game mechanics can be used to design and deliver engaging content. Especially exciting is developing content for mobile as the interface requires a whole new approach to how to use content.

I'll end with this fantastic slide deck from interaction and game designer Amy Jo Kim - there are lots of great examples - really inspiring ideas and real world examples of how to motivate users to do what you want them to do.

Putting the Fun in Functional

View more presentations from Amy Kim.

The King's Speech and the spoken word

I saw The King's Speech last night and was bowled over by it - it's a film about King George the VI overcoming a stammer to deliver a memorable speech which took Britain in to World War Two.

It's a great story - king needs help and finds it from an unlikely place - an eccentric speech therapist - and just in time to deliver the speech that inspired the nation.

But why was making a speech such a big deal? Obviously he was king and a war was about to break out, but it is the significance of the medium - the radio - as the most immediate and most widely (geographically) broadcast  medium that mattered. The king had to put into spoken word what the country as a whole was feeling and thinking and he had to galvanise the country into action. The nation was gathered around radios to hear what he had to say.

I enjoyed being reminded of the power of the spoken word, something I tend to forget when tweeting or reading blogs.  

Thinking about it, I consume far more written words than I do video or audio content. Maybe that will change . . .

Content marketing - the new game in town for journalists?

I enjoy following Joe Pulizzi's blog over at Junta42. Joe's focus is content markting - how organisations can use content to engage with their users and attract new followers and fans.

The concepts are pretty straightforward, especially if you are a journalist or have worked in the publishing industry.

You provide relevant, timely content in an engaging format and you use that to start engaging with users be it through social media or other channels.

The aim is to provide useful information to users - to keep them better informed - it is not about selling to them - ads are for that.

What underpins this content is marketing automation that helps identify who the users are and what content of yours they are interested in. The content will be related to products or services you provide.

Yesterday's post by Joe focussed on why organisations would create a news service. You can see the logic - refreshed, timely and relevant content for users.(Note, the use of news in the broadest sense - interesting info that is 'news' to a user)

It is what will attract people and help bring them back time after time. And such a content service is the domain of journalists. Or rather journalists have the skills to do this kind of work as they do it day in day out.

Clearly, providing content for a company might not sit well for some journalists, but I reckon the oppportunity to bring engaging, useful content to a site that helps drive business is an exciting one.

Seems this is one area that journalists could move in to. The skills look like they would transfer easily. I also think that, as content marketing is concerned with all content output from an organisation - sales, marketing, PR - then journalists have a real opportunity to shape how content is created as a whole in order that it is as engaging and relevant as possible.

The flip side of developments in content marketing is that companies are now getting more spohisticated at generating original and useful content. This presents a challenge in the B2B space where the content has to help users do their job.

My final point, and one I am very interested in is how well publishers actually market their own content. My feeling is not particularly well, but more of that later . . .

Related post

• How good are journalists at marketing their content?

 

As psychology and technology move closer together . . .

This is an area I'm becoming increasingly interested in - why we do things and act in certain ways online.

The Positively Media blog at Psychology Today looks like an interesting read. In particular I like the article on techno-cultural trends for 2011.

In it, Pamela Rutledge argues that this year will be the year tools will take a back seat to human experience ie the focus will be on understanding how we use tools.

A couple of trends stood out for me:

Shifting Psychology = Shifting Power
2011 will bring a psychological shift in individuals and groups. Social media, social networks, and mobile technologies have caused a fundamental change in the core assumptions about how the world works. People are more publicly expressive and vocal.  The hurdles for producing and publishing are almost nonexistent, defining new norms of participation, content production, and message facilitation. Expectations of having voice don't exist in a vacuum. If you speak, you want to be heard. This will redefine relationships at all levels of society: between business and consumers, governments and people, teachers and students, and social and cultural groups.

This redefining of relationships will be really important for anyone who produces content. As content becomes a prompt, a start of a conversation so our expectations of how we engage around the content will change.

The Old Spice and Tippex adverts last year were a good example of how relationships are changing. Both used narrative to enable the brands to start a story and let users finish it.

Aesthetics Matter 
2011 will place new premiums on aesthetics in physical and technological environments.  Usability won't just be about function. It will become more broadly defined to include the qualitative sensory foundation of user-experience. Aesthetics and design will finally make the leap from luxuries to necessities, driving improvements in productivity, innovation, and general well being.

Designing for mobile and apps has changed the game for user experience - efficient, fast interactions through apps means the user has higher expectations from web sites. This should see greater focus on design and UX.

Psychological Content Ownership
Ownership isn't just physical property rights. Psychologically, ownership comes from a different type of investment: emotional.  Interaction comes from motivation and emotion manifested as behavior. The act of engaging creates ownership.  Whether it's forwarding a joke, making a mashup, or creating a mixed media novel for mobile devices, each step of participation puts skin in the game. Each act of participation is an act of individual agency and creates empowerment.

If engagement does leave us with a sense of ownership (it certainly leaves us with a sense of connection) then anyone working on content needs to understand how to engage with users - looking at it from this perspective you can see how time consuming it can become to effectively engage with your readers, customers, potential customers. I think this has very interesting implications for the job design of anyone who creates content.



/blog/positively-media

My article on marketing from behind a paywall

Delighted to see my article on marketing from behind a paywall on The Media Briefing. Really enjoyed writing it - got lots more related posts I now want to write.

Live webcast: Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales talking in Bristol

Embedded the #newsrw Twitter stream into a blog post using Hootsuite

Trying out the Hootsuite 'embed' column feature, which I hadn't noticed before . . .

Video: Hacks and hackers at RBI

Great to see my colleagues at XpertHR get the honours. Better still the fact RBI hosted the event and is now looking to provide data journalism training for journalists.

 

 

Hacks and Hackers at RBI from John Thompson on Vimeo.

About time to include an about page

Chris Lake at Econsultancy has listed 25 reasons why he'd leave a website in 10 seconds. It's a good list.

Reason 22 (No About page)stood out for me because it has always seemed to me that people and brands either do not have these pages or have very poor ones.

As Lake says: I often visit a website simply to find out more information about the company, and whenever the About page is missing I ever so slightly lose the will to live.

From my experience, these pages present businesses with problems - usually to do with the marketing messages that need to be included. Brands do have problems articulating what they do concisely and without using jargon. My rule of thumb for this is to say it out loud and to someone else - not a colleague. If it sounds OK then it will work.

Yes, these pages are important. They are where you tell the world who you are, what you do and how you do it. If you are in business - or on the web for that matter, I am not sure why you would not do that.

'Interact with people where they are'

And put your content where people are congregating, says Dan Farber, editor in chief CBSnew.com.

It is something we know but I thought it was well put in this video. This interview is one of a series on the future of content, marketing and business put together by Brian Solis. Well worth a look.