Disruptive Thought of the Day #3 Gamified Community – Who Wins?

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…