The gamification market starts to grow as new companies use it as a loyalty differential

Gamification platforms have raised over $30 million this year (source: Gabe Zichermann is chair of the Gamification Summit, an entrepreneur, and author of Gamification By Design and Game-Based Marketing).

New business start-ups are using gamification from the start to develop loyalty. One example is flickme.com, which is a new streaming film rental/buying site which is also accessible via Facebook. It assigns a Beta badge for being an early adopter. Completing certain tasks earns one badges and points. There’s a set of leaderboards. 

 
By 2015 70 percent of the Global 2000 will use gamification (Source Gartner Group) spending over $1.6 billion in the U.S.A alone (source M2 Research). 

Gamification is changing loyalty marketing and social engagement

Source: BizReport article by Kirstina Knight

Gamification is helping to rebuild the loyalty space. Gamification makes it simpler for brands to engage and for consumers to earn rewards. This, of course, keeps the consumer coming back.

Here are some of the highlights from the article:

1. Gamification is another form of loyalty … identity is now available on the web because of sites like Facebook and Twitter. 
2. The social graph is a major accelerant to the value of social rewards and behaviour. 
3. Gamification can be about loyalty or engagement. 
4. Finding ways to make social experiences meaningful and exciting is a major trend and it's falling under the umbrella of gamification. 
5. Expect to see even deeper social capabilities. 
6. Right now, Gamification 1.0 is about status, reputation, points, level, achievements--powerful motivating sources of behaviour. The next phase is making those much more social, akin to how social gaming elevated gaming and transformed the industry.

Keynote Marc Benioff conversation with Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google about the digital roadmap

The most exciting part of this keynote dialogue was Marc asking Eric what is going to be beyond the Social Enterprise.

Eric answered by saying that mobile will become our personal advisor so that, with permission, it will use point of presence to suggest choices that are most likely to be of interest at that moment in time. This he believes will be the next paradigm shift based on ‘sensing’ and ‘responding’ using contextual dialogue. Therefore, he passionately believes the next generation of apps will be based around predictive states and artificial agents for meaningful dialogue.

This positioning ought not to be a surprise as Larry Page and Sergey Brin both believe the future will be driven more and more by Artificial Intelligence. It is also in keeping with the web road map:

• Web 3.0 Cloud and Mobile with Social Enterprise leading the way 
• Web 4.0 Artificial Intelligence Complementing Humans 
• Web 5.0 Artificial Intelligence Surpassing Humans 

Eric positioned the future state in line with Web 4.0 and Web 5.0 and articulated that a higher level of platform (presence + predictive + artificial agents) will sit above the Social Enterprise platform. It is no wonder Marc and Eric are on the same stage as they are creating a win-win future state.

Eric believes ‘mobile first’ is the priority for developing apps. No wonder Marc has recently launched the Mobile AppExchange as an accelerator for businesses to go global.

Marc and Eric were both in agreement it is now all about social + mobile + open + local + real-time.

It seems to me solution-sets should be local, national and global – this three tiered framework is now feasible for forward thinking corporates.

One final note, both Marc and Eric are seriously concerned at the lack of new ideas for job creation. New models are needed and are needed fast. 

Dreamforce 2011 Intranets are dead, long live the social enterprise

The Service Cloud will have the richest version of Chatter which is integrated across all channels and touch points. This level of integration means that if one cannot find the knowledge then the use of Chatter will often help solve the problem.

The richness of the Service Cloud is the highest form of the Social Enterprise, which is a blended solution-set of employees, customers, suppliers and partners working together but within whatever restrictions are deemed necessary. So an employee may belong to several groups with each group involving different customers.

The richness of this capability means the intranet as we know it is dead!!

Dreamforce 2011 Salesforce launch touch.salesforce.com

The touch.salesforce.com is yet another big announcement.

Basically this capability drives HTML5. In other words, you can design experiences across all mobile, tablet and PC devices.

This enables HTML5 to be used to develop apps that run natively but within the Cloud.

So touch.salesforce.com (needs a better name) is a platform for front-ends.

So you can design a front-end that orchestrates data from different force.com orgs, database.com, data.com and Heroku.  If this is confusing then read my earlier blogs.

All you need now are good designers that can simulate the different experiences, which are underpinned by the same data and functionality.

Dreamforce 2011 Salesforce launches data.com

Autumn Release

Data.com is a new capability which is an aggregation of Jigsaw data (crowd-sourcing with gamification to drive data quality for customer data) and Dun & Bradstreet data.

Data.com uses external data to provide updates to your customer data for marketing and sales.

Link data.com with the Social CRM announcement of automatically getting customer social data and the combination is awesome.

All we need now is better visualisation of this data ..... big hint for Fractal Maps ....

Link the above to the next generation of loyalty scheme with gamification!!

Dreamforce 2011 Chatter Everywhere

Autumn Release

• Chatter contains the Now presence. This means you know if some is available. You can then use Chatter Chat which is instant messaging. 
• Chatter Connect makes it easier to extend Chatter into other systems so for example there is an API for SharePoint.
• Chatter Groups means you can collaborate around documents and cases. A big feature is that you can have a Chatter Group include customers, in the comfort that they cannot go outside the group's walled garden. One idea is to use customers in a group for peer-to-peer problem solving and ideas generation.
• Chatter will include Face Time for video conferencing and collaboration. Big implications for customer support, problem solving and co-innovation with the customer for new product design.
• Chatter Inline that has a taxonomy filter for rapid drill down.
• Chatter Approvals which supports work flows using smarter collaboration and decisioning.
• Can also have in-line videos with chatter interactions. 
• Extend Chatter to mobile apps for employees and customers alike.
• Collaborate around documents and files. 
• Chatter for collaborative revenue forecasting 
• The above supports crowd-sourcing.
• The above supports sales teams.

Dreamforce 2011 Database.com is social and solves data sensitivities

Winter Release

database.com truly becomes the first cloud social database offering at scale.  By social it means it is open and includes all media types and mobile. The big media companies are already using database.com for social video services.

Along with this release is DRO Data Residency Option which enables data to be picked up through any source including legacy systems such as SharePoint and Lotus Notes. It includes handling data that needs to remain stored within the corporate firewalls.

This is a big change and should drive cloud integration with the world of legacy whilst driving innovation for high end social enterprise solutions.

Dreamforce 2011 CRM to enrich the customer data with their social data

New Winter Release

The standard CRM customer data will be updated in real time with their social data from targeted social networks including:

• Facebook
• Twitter 
• LinkedIn 

These updates are based on real time streaming and includes pictures. 

The implications are huge ..... 

Dreamforce 2011: Three steps to deliver social enterprise

Source: Marc Benioff keynote

Step 1:    Create a social customer profile - this includes external data from social networks

Step 2:    Create an employee social network

• Collaborate 
• Connect and sell
• Service and engage 
• Automate and extend 

Step 3:     Create a customer social network and a product social network

• Social marketing
• Listen and analyse 
• Product and partners 

The customer experience starts with knowing who they are and what they like. 

Social Enterprise is about the NOW transformation that delights customers in a new way. 

Social engagement led to the Arabic Spring using social networking as the catalyst for change.

Marc believes we have now started the Enterprise Spring as social networking will become the catalyst for changing the value of brands for better or for worse. 

Dreamforce 2011: Marc Benioff keynote launches social enterprise as a true paradigm shift

Marc Benioff announced today a fundamental shift for Salesforce as its Autumn Release (probably in October) will put the company in the way it operates as fully immersive into Social Enterprise. Today's announcements are designed to engage the corporate leadership in a way that will fundamentally change their strategies and it is already happening!

The list of corporate leaders that have adopted this approach already is truly impressive.

Lord Rothermere, DMGT stated that since adopting social enterprise he has seen more innovation in the past few months compared to the previous 12 years.

Another corporate leader for the UK was Angela Ahrendts, the CEO of Burberry. She met Marc in May of this year and was so inspired about the social enterprise that she has already launched Burberry World.

Other impressive stories came from Toyota that has branded the term Toyota Friend which is a new concept Marc calls Product Social Networks. Coco Cola has also adopted this approach by using their vending machines to become smart by interacting with the customer and using gamification as a rewards system.

My passion is artificial agents and using them to advance Product Social Networks is a pure natural fit. Any product could then have a dialogue with customers.

It was amazing to listening to Groupon, who integrated social enterprise into their offering from the outset leading to their spectacular growth.

Dreamforce is about business and the vast majority of people are from the business side.

Microsoft, Oracle and SAP now feel like dinosaurs in comparison as their community are the tech heads. I do wish Steve Ballmer reads this as I did try and get him to focus on business people and not technology some years ago!!

Today, there were so many new product announcements that it is the equivalent of a 10 year cycle for traditional software products. It has only taken Salesforce 10 months to deliver thus cycle compared to 10 years!!

Well done to Marc Benioff and his team as they are truly going to lead the transformation of the enterprise, which is happening faster than most people realise.

Social Enterprise is agnostic in terms of age, gender, race, status etc. This is really about transparency (knowledge economy) versus non transparency (industrial economy). The outcome is inevitable!

Dreamforce 2011 Beyond CRM - The Corporate Priorities for Legacy Apps to become Social

Source: Ron Huddleston, VP ISVs and Channel Partners

A survey with corporates that have over 1,000 employees found that beyond CRM the following are the targets for re-purposing legacy applications to the Cloud to gained the benefits of Social Enterprise:

1. Invoice Management 61%
2. Supply Chain Management 54%
3. Workforce Management 36%
4. Learning Management 34%
5. Project Management 33%

Dreamforce 2011 George Hu says Social Enterprise is driving transformation

Source: George Hu, EVP Platform, Marketing and Operations
George expects every session at Dreamforce will cover Social Enterprise and the way it will transform business.

The Social Enterprise is about look at things from the perspective of the customer. The solution-set is about integrating all the interactions and transactions around the customer need and value creation and extending this capability into the customers social network.

This is why employee engagement is big because the Social Enterprise needs to get all employees joined-up to listen, understand and respond to the customer.

By focusing upon the customer means engagement at the social network level.

Social Enterprise is now being positioned as the way to change everything.

Salesforce partners are encouraged to repurpose their apps with social networking.

Dreamforce Insights 2011: Higher Education Trends

This article covers some of the highlights for Higher Education made by Dave Thomas, Radian6, Director of Community and Social Strategy.

1. 98% of students  in the USA use a digital device and spend 101.93 minutes a day on Facebook. 
2. Students are the brand ambassadors and therefore social media measurements are key. 
3. Four Square the gamification market leader is being used for student orientation with the campus facilities and services. 
4. Social Graphics is becoming more widely used to rate the value of contributions of an individual within a social network. 
5. Students need to be encouraged of how best to use social media as many are naive in terms of long term implications. 
6. Emerging practice to develop a social media play book, which provides guides for stakeholders including how to deal with bad situations. 
7. Learning, education and empowering is the cyclical process that can be driven by social media measurements. 
8. Use social media to not 'reinvent the wheel'.
9. Build student life cycle which includes life time events. 
10. The Mayo Clinic is a good example of using social media and getting the balance right with confidential dialogue. 

Much of the above applies to business!