Gamification - Richard Baxter at SearchLove London 2011

Richard Baxter is the founder of SEOgadget, a London-based search marketing agency.

Richard's presentation discussed how you can apply gamification techniques to a community-style website to get more users, activity and traffic. The presentation featured a number of great examples of both good and bad gamification, along with tips on how these websites could have generated better results.

Key takeaways from this presentation:

• Speed camera lottery – very interesting test in Sweden – those who drove under the speed limit can win the money from fines of those who exceeded the speed limit
• GetGlue.com – checkin based platform (Like 4Sq) but checkin to things not places
• GetGlue make money through using it as an advertising platform and using the social media data
• Point systems are great for incetivising users to engage within a community
• Incentives for users help communities to grow
• Stackoverflow – is a community with a point-based system for developers
• Building a leaderboard gives users something to aim for – people want to rank over competitors
• SlideShare and LinkedIn both encourage users to improve their profile when it's incomplete
• Badges are good incentives + this works for 4Sq
• Start a community with a great product – bad products = fail
• IMOK – check-in based platform for children that lets parents know that they're ok
• IMOK provides incentives to children for checking in - which can be exchanged for rewards
• People are motivated by status
• codeacadamy – learn how to code and get badges, levels etc
• Use gamification to increase signups on your websites
• Building Q&A will lead to additional long-tail traffic
• Learn how to motivate and reward your users for performing the actions that are important to your business
• Look for gamification api's

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