We talked about gamification before and the idea that you have been gamed even if you didn’t realize it. But I want to discuss how you are using it yourself.
I managed a virtual trade show for my company last week and spent a good part of the day managing our booth. Now I started to observe a couple things that I hadn’t seen before. The first was the fact that a lot of people would come in to the booth and leave immediately. I had not even finished the sentence ‘Hi so and so, how are you?’ and they were gone. The second thing I saw was a lot of people asking to exchange v cards (the online version of business card exchange).
Now I realize that neither of these is really groundbreaking or profound in any manner but it had me wondering why the actions people were taking were so different than what I was accustomed to.
So I started snooping around the show and discovered the prize center. Now the prize center in past shows I have participating in was comprised of gifts that sponsors would donate and people would put their names in for a chance to win. In this show, the only chance for you to have a chance is if you accumulated points. And you had to have over 500 of them!
How do you get points?
Well, you visit booths and exchange v cards of course!
Now, I tossed out the question some time ago about whether you should scan badges at trade-shows regardless of engagement with your booth. It’s kind of the same thing except the show organizer’s disabled my control. The participants are being encouraged to get ‘scanned’ for a chance at an iPad. They don’t have interest in my company or connecting with me. They are simply performing the actions to get to a prize.
Gamification when used in this manner hurts us.
You may say no, it actually worked because now I have more leads due to the fact that people were entering the booth all day. And I would have to argue that these ‘leads’ are not genuine. These people all were planning on attending the show regardless – the point system was announced only after you entered. Do I have the opportunity to introduce my company to these people, educate and nurture them? Sure but it’s not going to be easy. And telling my sales team that the show yielded 1000s of leads doesn’t really help my credibility especially when they start calling and hearing things like ‘where are you calling from? Ive never heard of your company’. Ouch!
Like anything, there is a time and a place. I like what the show organizers were thinking when they built this idea, but it didnt do anything but make their show look really engaging. Picture the stats now: 85% of registrants visit a booth, 90% download a piece of content, 90% exchange v cards. Who wouldn’t want to sign up with them?
It’s not genuine. Using gamification for engagement is what we should be focused on. I love the idea of ‘playing’ with our audience. I don’t love the idea of gaming them.
I love this! I have struggled with this as well. It does not help me out at all to encourage attendants to rush from one booth to another just to accrue points or stamps or what have you. And here is what really frustrates me- these interlopers often interrupt valuable conversations I do manage to have with potential customers just to barge in and get their stamp. I would prefer to have a few meaningful conversations than hundreds of empty exchanges. I don’t feel that I need to bribe people to interact with me and my company. This really isn’t doing any favours to the people displaying at these events. I believe it sells the whole event short and makes it about freebies rather than a chance to explore new opportunities.
@RebeccaTodd We started controlling who got a stamp which is something you can do in a live show, not so much in a virtual one. So we would ask people to fill out a questionnaire in exchange for a stamp and from there we were able to launch conversations. I totally get what the show is doing in these situations, I just wonder how much the vendors are benefiting…
I posted this article to Facebook, but as I know you don’t play there (hah!), here was a very thoughtful comment I received from Simon McWaters
Yep, an instance of the general problem of mistaking measures of productivity for the actual desired result. You see the same thing in every industry: telemarketers monitored for number of calls per hour, programmers tracked by number of lines of code written and so on. This is in turn a symptom of McMBA graduate management who have been taught that ‘best practice’ requires measurable outcomes in order to meaningfully analyse improvement over time, but apply the idea mindlessly – without considering whether the thing being measured is a real reflection of performance, or whether it covers the whole spectrum of performance; they just know they have to measure *something*. I’ve never had a problem with KPIs per se, but the fact that I could see that some people were ‘gaming’ the system – and being rewarded for doing so – when their behaviour was actively destructive to any sensible notion of the interests of the business has made me very jaded. As with all things, the devil is in the details of the implementation.
@RebeccaTodd Simon McWaters As ai was reading this, I was going to refute that a telemarketer making x calls per hour is a worthy ‘game’ (I played this one for a year when I was in that type of role and it encouraged productivity) but then you mentioned that when this idea is applied ‘mindlessly’ then we lose something. Sure I want 100s 1000s of people in my booth but that is not a good measurement. It’s almost like generating leads without looking at whether they turn into dollars. I know budgets are starting to lighten up, or rather untighten themselves, but we still care about return. These shows need to start thinking about how vendors can get a return and that doesnt mean inundating us with leads, it means those leads get somewhere in our pipeline.Gamification could help, but it needs to be more thoughtful than this.
I hate how everything is getting gamified these days. I do feel as if some companies are just “gaming” their customers. Plus it takes the fun out of gaming.
I hate how everything is getting gamified these days. I do feel as if some companies are just “gaming” their customers. Plus it takes the fun out of gaming.
the future of games will be mobile gaming! I really belive that! thanks for the post and keep up the good work!