On the back back of me being super-happy winning a Kindle Fire for the ‘best’ content, I though a post/discussion on gamification would be very apt.
Mark and Vlad (and the sponsor) did a great job of encouraging new content and participation with the competition. But did it work?
I guess the guys have some stats about content / members / participation (likes and comments) during the competition time which would be very interesting to see, but my question to them is did it deliver the benefits they wanted? (Did they have a Why?).
In addition to this, what about us the community, did the competition work for us? It did for me, I won a prize and had some great discussions, to be honest I am suprised that it was a discussion that one, I thought my ‘Knowledge Kaizen’ post would be ‘my’ leading piece of content, but I guess from an audience perspective (you guys) that wasn’t quite as interesting.
But what about Qamar his blog post was awesome and I think it was very tight by the end, but is he [more] motivated to generate more content and participate more? I don’t know.
And what about the rest of the community, over 300 people are members, but did the leaderboard show that, im not sure it did, were people encouraged or discouraged by the leaderboard? If you weren’t in the top 5 (the visible bit) then I suspect it didn’t motivate you.
The addition of a random prize is a good call as that moves the focus away from the leaderboard and ‘just’ towards participation.
Will the same amount of buzz happen next competition time, who knows?
For me the key question is whether this activity had the desired effect and moreso whether it is sustainable. You changed my behaviour over the last week or so, but will that continue?
SideNote: Interestingly, my ‘winning’ piece of content has overnight gone from top content to #10 in Discussions and not appearing in any other leaderboards…Weird or just more engagement on other content this morning now Easter is over for most people????
It would be great to hear what you guys think and also how you think this maps to SharePoint Change Management and User Adoption.
Discuss…
Quick Stats (unnoficial, official coming tonight)
Before Competition:
231 Members
82 Blog Posts
25 Discussions
Post Competition
333 Members
122 Blog Posts
55 Discussions.
Will give a more detailed analysis on what we expected vs what we got when I get home tonight :), but the response from the community has been amazing, a lot of new quality content on the website and I honestly believe that rewarding people who are active in the community is a good idea.
As Mark said, please tell us the format that you want for the next competition (coming real soon). Did you like the Raffle idea (I am sure Nico did :P), do you want us to judge by top content or by top member, top blog post? Any other ideas are really appreciated.
More news coming tonight!
