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…
Cool, they’re good stats. Looks like it definitely made a positive difference.
The raffle idea is a very good although I would add a condition that you have to have contributed i.e. Liked, added content, commented etc.
Perhaps, at some point more smaller prizes in the different categories as I think we have people that contribute to a certain area i.e. most of my content will be in the SharePoint Business area.
I guess I would say that the you should judge the content based on where there is an existing lack of engagement i.e. if you were lacking in Dev content, run a competition around best Blog post in the Dev category…
Quick Stats (unnoficial, official coming tonight)
Before Competition:
231 Members
82 Blog Posts
25 Discussions
Post Competition
333 Members
122 Blog Posts
55 Discussions.Â
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? Â Any other ideas are really appreciated.Â
More news coming tonight!Â
Thanks Mark for both replies. Absolutely this is all (Gamification AND Community Management) an emergent activity.Â
You guys are doing great and it is definitely working! Agree that what happens here equally applies in the SharePoint/Yammer/Social Business works with our businesses and clients.
Keep going and anyway I can help let me know… 🙂
One other note — If we can trial methods and find winning formulas – nearly all of these techniques could be adopted back into the organisation using SharePoint / Yammer. Maybe we need to score each campaign…
Hi AntÂ
Thanks again for your efforts! Vlad has the statistics which I am sure he will post later, but we were aiming to get to 320’ish members in this campaign and now we are at 351 – which is a bertie bonus!Â
However, I am very much in the camp of trying to get an active community, so would rather have 50 active members rather than 26,000 inactive ones. (On the LinkedIn group I run – we have 26,000 members but 99% are inactive). Quite a lot read the newsletter, but many don’t contribute in the groups more than a handful of times. I don’t know why, but I think it’s down to the amount of mail that LinkedIn sends.Â
This is partly the reason why we wanted to set this network up. We need better methods, better tools to get our daily dose of SharePoint. If we can make it fun then brilliant.Â
We are still learning what works and what doesn’t (only week 4). We assumed the Raffle prize would go well and the other comp would be the one to struggle. In the end I think only a few entered the Raffle, but more than expected were reading and contributing. Strange.Â
In the future, we need more competition formats. Ideas appreciated!
Your winning contribution has dropped away – (I think) because the Leaderboard is weekly. We have no idea abut the algorithms used but I am guessing its Likes, comments, views in that week.Â
Anyway, whatever we do in future games we need to keep statistics to measure each one and find better ways to recognise leaders. For the latter we are thinking some new badges.
