Guest post written by Kris Duggan
Kris Duggan is CEO and co-founder of Badgeville, a provider of gamification software and services.
In just eight years, Facebook went from concept to one of the world’s largest companies. While it’s by far the largest social network, the company’s rise to its current valuation is directly correlated with how it has become a media powerhouse. Instead of having to pay for content, users are the content. That’s great for Facebook, but where does it leave brands?
While Facebook offers “free” pages to businesses, where they can connect with their fans, the page model never scaled. A new report finds that only 1% of users who “like” pages ever return to those pages, according to market research firm Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Sure, page content may show up in a users’ stream if Facebook’s algorithm determines it relevant to the user and they happen to be watching their stream at the right time, but ultimately Facebook’s entire business model is built around you having to advertise to adequately reach your audience.
That’s not to say Facebook is a bad business; they’re just a media company. In fact, Facebook just announced it’s first-ever event for marketers - a half-day meeting in New York - to discuss innovative advertising opportunities. Facebook’s IPO means the company will soon be forced to focus on quarterly earnings, and its product focus will turn towards ways to make more money. Brands and marketers who foot the bill.
The advertising bill alone for social media is not what should be a great concern. Advertising dollars that were once allocated to traditional media should shift online if that’s where your audience is. The larger concern is that enterprises and brands are focused on sending their brand’s most loyal users to Facebook, and giving up access to their own audience data. Once Facebook sees that users like your brand, its team of data-analyzing Ph.D.s can carefully figure out how to extract the most money out of that information. The kicker is they don’t care if that money comes from you, or your direct competitor.
Brands: It’s Time for a Status Update
As Facebook matures into a public media behemoth, marketers are starting to realize that they need to be careful to define their relationship status with the social network. Brands and online communities are faced with the question of whether to build out their social functionality around Facebook only, or, instead, begin to add social elements to their own experiences that democratize the power of Facebook, on their own terms.
Nearly every business, from Fortune 1000 enterprises to startups, are examining how they can both replicate and improve the social community experience on their own site. These experiences, such as activity streams, notifications and alerts, drive social engagement on any site that isn’t a traditional social network. This keeps users on your site longer, increases total number of registered users, and ultimately provides businesses with valuable audience data that would otherwise be inaccessible via social channels.
Social networking sites like Facebook also provide minimal opportunity and resources to adequately identify your most influential and social advocates. Owning your own social experience, and being able to tap into your community of loyalists, can add great value to your business. As you spend time and valuable resources creating content and campaigns to drive engagement, it’s important to first understand your business objectives and how these translate to real business benefits. Surfacing advocates in your own community, for instance, helps increase your viral marketing to drive traffic back to your site, where you have much more control over that user experience than if they landed on your Facebook page.
To solve this problem, business leaders are now looking for ways to add social experiences to their own branded sites. At the heart of these social experiences is reputation and gamification, highlighting user status for their contributions and engagement to your community. Adding both social experiences and gamification to an online experience is proven time and again to drive behavior and provide real business value. These techniques have increased key business objectives by as much as 250 percent.
Enterprises that neglect the opportunity to build and host their own online community – with engaging game mechanics like behavior management and social incentives – risk wasting valuable customer acquisition dollars as the customer travels to an outside social networking, where they often succumb to distractions and forget about your brand.
Game mechanics in the enterprise: The secret sauce for increasing customer engagement
Today, gamification is far more than a game or a buzzword for businesses. Social media is only as valuable as its ability to meet business goals such as aggregating and understanding social data and user preferences, building an online reputation for stakeholders, listening and engaging to increase loyalty and providing a means for like-minded consumers to engage about your brand and its products.
Gamified communities provide a network of key individuals who carry the most influence about your brand. Unlike the large social networks, identifying these individuals on an internal social network enables enterprises to better reward or promote the insights shared by these key users. Online consumers and employees prefer interactions with like-minded individuals, and recognition for their loyalty that will further incentivize their evangelism of the brand.
While Facebook remains a relevant channel for user acquisition, enterprises rely on their own communities to drive sales, brand advocacy, social sharing and community ideation.
In an era of relevance and consumer engagement, a corporation cannot afford to rely solely on its community to curate conversation. Failing to reward opt-in participation equates to lesser engagement, and ultimately less opportunity to influence customer and employee behaviors.
The future of online enterprise social networks
While the major social networking sites will not lose relevance for their peer-to-peer networking abilities, we expect that all companies, especially the Fortune 1000, will build and utilize their own communities integrated into their brand’s entire online experiences as a more efficient method for retaining customers and encouraging advocacy. Gamification techniques, such as rewarding and recognition, will see rapid adoption within the enterprise as marketers look for new ways to build an active community.
The most innovative of enterprises will be those that understand the need to build an online community as a channel to gain actionable intelligence and drive revenue, thanks to the millions of behaviors that could be occurring on brand-owned sites.
