Interview by Remy Raitt

We chat to John Gevisser, the CEO of Gamma Fly, a gamification software developer and consultancy, to find out why marketers are toying with gamification, and why social media platforms provide the perfect playground.

How does gamification change behaviour?

Gamification design uses game design techniques to change behaviours. This usually happens through appealing to the immediate, the fun, the self-motivational, or peer incentives. The reward cycle in gamification is much shorter than in traditional motivations.

How does gamification get results?

By matching up the participants and behaviors with the vast variety of game mechanics; the way and degree to which behavior is changed can be tailored to specific situations.

How do you think gamification will grow in the realms of social media?

‘Social’ being the central pillar of social media leads to the idea of sharing being the central behaviour. The quality of this sharing is the thing that will become more and more important as the space gets even more highly saturated. Reputational systems, rewards and incentives is the way to deal and manipulate the quality of the sharing.

How will this affect content marketing?

In two ways: The first is that the reputation of the source of the marketing message needs to be understood and leveraged. The second is to offer reputational rewards to those who participate. Both of these require awareness and understanding of the community where the messages are presented.

And specifically social marketing?

The reputation of an individual is a fluid thing, and a positive message can turn negative if attached to the wrong reputation.

The reputation of an organisation or group hinges on how open and comfortable it is deemed to be by others.

It is vital to understand that the marketer can never own the community, but should strive to be its champion or protector.

Why is social media an ideal platform for gamification?

Gamification has many mechanics and techniques that apply in this scenario. Not all techniques ally equally though. The one advantage that social media gives is that it has rich data about the participants and how they connect, which allows clearer choices to be made.

How does the use of it on social media assist in data collection?

The most obvious way would be to incentivise people to share their network information (friends etc.) This not only aids the viral marketing, but also allows the classification and identification of people. The most easily available data is second degree information: who are the friends of my friends? Who of my friends also use product X?

And data individualisation?

Here again the secondary inferences that can be extracted from the social media streams become the obvious targets. This also includes reputation (the collective opinion of others) and interests.

Anything else you would like to share?

Leaderboards and badges are touted as what gamification is about. This is simply one mechanic out of a vast library of tools that can be used. The use of leaderboards in particular is dangerous if not done correctly or with the right participants. A highly competitive sales environment will have sales people clamouring for top spot. A programme that encourages emotional support among peers is going to crash and burn if a leaderboard is attached to it. Gamma Fly have developed Mesh, a social graph which maps the dyadic relationship between actors and objects in a given programme - this allows us to apply gamification designs on top of this data, with fundamental dynamic analysis and results.

For more information, visit gammafly.com.