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Levelup is a mobile payments system at its core. It currently has 100,000 users across four cities (Boston, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco) with 600 merchants signed up.

The basic payment structure is that LevelUp provides the merchants with an Android smartphone with a QR code reader and consumers with the LevelUp app that has a personalized QR code that effectively acts as the interface to their wallet

Users tie their debit/credit cards to the QR code in LevelUp's app. The security behind that is what could be considered a triple-blind token system. No actual payment information is being stored on the device (unlike the Google Wallet, for instance) and there are three steps from the phone to the bank to obfuscate where the payment is actually coming from.

Then there are the deals and game mechanics. When merchants sign up, they are prompted to give buyers a credit.

The more times that people pay with LevelUp, the more opportunities for credit to be accumulated (hence, the notion of leveling up to a new offer).

About 45% of users return to pay full price at the merchant and users on average use LevelUp about twice per week. The location system comes in by seeing on a map in the app what merchants close to you are using the service and what kind of deals they have.

"With LevelUp being transactional, we wanted to make it as fundamentally simple as humanely possible," Priebatsch said. "Frankly you should never have to do anything other than just pay with it and good things should happen to you and that should make you want to keep using it."

LevelUp has a certain type of groundswell that other local mobile payments options do not. In that way, LevelUp's closest kindred spirit is more likely to be Dwolla than it is something like Square or Google Wallet

There has been talk of SCVNGR being acquired but it is more likely that the company will eventually make partnerships with other ground-swell mobile payments companies like Dwolla.

What LevelUp and Dwolla have done is created a local ecosystem of merchants willing to use mobile payments in their communities. This is the bottom-up approach and, as of yet, is proving to be as effective than the top-down approach taken by companies like Google and PayPal.

What are the pain points for mobile payments? For the consumer, it is having the app and the ability to tie it to a payments process. LevelUp cuts down on the pain points by having the ability to tie the wallet to a debit/credit card through its triple-blind token system and using QR codes.

According to Priebatsch, QR codes are not necessary to the process. Any interface (like NFC) will do but the QR code is working for now and LevelUp can work with any device that can project a black and white image

This is where Priebatsch starts to get deep into the nature of payments and the notion that money is nothing but a form of information that transfers from one point to another. Priebatsch's grand plan, that translates well to a five to 10 years down the road for the company, is to bring the payments process down to "interchange zero" where the cost of moving that information from Point A to Point B is next to nothing.

Here is the philosophy, according to Priebatsch:

People will eventually make the flow of money more and more efficient, and the cost of transferring information, or money as information, will eventually converge to zero. This concept is something that we describe as "interchange zero". And as money flows frictionless-ly, all sorts of great things happen around that. You get to pay less at the store because the business does not have to pay interchange on top of their prices.

The really fascinating thing with that, is that a new monetization model needs to be found for the payments industry because somebody needs to make the $50 billion dollars a year to actually support the whole thing. And I believe, and I have a game mechanics background, that the way that that money is going to be replaced, as the idea of me paying you to just move money back and forth goes away, the way that people are going to make money on payments is taking the information inherent in payments and applying a series of game mechanics.

To create a series of actions which get consumers to spend more and come back more often. And this help the business make more money off of each transaction. So the payment, as a utility, will be frictionless, and the money will flow to the company, enterprise, person, organization who can add the most value to the transaction."

Crowley also said that serving the needs of merchants alongside users has been instrumental in creating the Foursquare experience. And as any regular Foursquare user knows, beyond the bragging rights you get as “mayor,” an increasing number of businesses offer discounts or other physical rewards, such as t-shirts or branded bottle openers, for users who check in at their location.

“Merchants have been around for the ride from the beginning,” said Crowley, adding that for every three user features his team launches, there’s one new feature created for merchants. Crowley also said there’s a whole subset of people who no longer use Foursquare for the game dynamics and check-ins, but to stay on top of deals and special offers from favorite local businesses.

“I’m a big believer in game mechanics to push people to do new things in real life,” says Crowley.

According to a definition in the Gamification Wiki,"Game Mechanics are constructs of rules and feedback loops intended to produce enjoyable gameplay."

Before you can add gamification to your community, you need to really understand your community.

Recency -- when was the last visit? Frequency -- how often does the member visit? Duration -- how long do members stay on the sight when they visit? Virality -- how often do members share content on the site?  and how much is their sharing amplified through their network? Ratings -- how often do members rate content on the site?

Community Goals

What goals are you trying to accomplish with the community?  Can you measure them?  Do you have any elements of gamification incorporated into your community today? Does your community platform support gamification elements?  Can you track your measures in your community system?

Measures of Engagement for a Community

Do you have an open or closed community?  Is your community a professional, social, support, informational, hybrid or something else community?  How do you want members to use the community?  How many members do you have and how many do you add in a typical week or month?  What is the typical member profile?  How engaged are your community members?  How do you measure engagement?  What motivates your members to join, participate and stay engaged in the community?  Do you have robust member profiles?  Are member profiles searchable?  Can members 'friend' or message other members?  Do you have a way for members to add their Twitter or Facebook accounts to their profiles?  How  easy is it for members to share content on other sites?

Suggestions for Community Gamification

Robust profile system [self-expression, status, achievement]-

I also want members to receive recognition for their achievements by earning badges that can be displayed on their profiles and announced via their social networks.  As a community manager, I want to be able to create different types of badges including limited edition or special occasion badges.

Point system [competition, achievement, reward, status] -

I definitely want to keep track of points, but I want to be able to customize the calculation of the points.  I don't know what the ideal point values would be, but I know that I would want to experiment with rewarding members for recent visits, the frequency and duration of their visits, their sharing of content on the site or in their social networks, creating content, participating in discussions or rating content.

Leaderboards [reward, status, achievement, recognition, competition] -

Customization is also important in the leaderboards.  I want to have multiple leaderboard; for example, I may want a weekly, monthly and all-time versions of the leaderboard that I will post in different parts of the community site to recognize leaders who are currently contributing the most to the community experience and to others who have been long time contributors.

Badges [status, achievement, reward, recognition, competition, self-expression]

First of all, the member profile system needs to be robust with the option to upload a picture and have free form bio descriptive fields.  Most importantly, I should be able to link my profile to my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles and possibly use single-sign-on use those services.  The profiles should also keep a history of a user's activity, badges and points.  Another requirement for the profile system is that members should be able to create virtual friendships or groups within the community site.

Content ratings have been around for awhile, and they are an important part of increasing engagement.  I would push the envelop further by making it easier for users to share their content ratings and to search for content based on the rating.

Content rating [altruism, self-expression] -

Content sharing [altruism, self-expression] -

Members must be able to easily share content they like within their social networks, via bookmarking sites and by email.

Challenges [competition, reward, achievement]

As a phase 2 implementation, I would also want to add some custom challenges to my community to drive additional engagement.  I am not sure what form these would take, but I would start thinking about how to incorporate challenges while implementing the other elements noted above.

We think there’s a new category called behavior management. Individual things such as analytics, social, gamification, private label social networks. It’s all scratching this issue. We focus on how to turn it all into a platform that allows any type of company, anyone with an audience, to use these techniques for user behavior.

The new behavior platform will potentially pit Badgeville against some enterprise social networking tools like Chatter, Yammer and others. But Duggan said it’s also working to integrate with those services so the behavior platform can incorporate actions on these channels into its larger reputation and rank system.

The company, which launched a year ago, raised $12 million in July.

The second half of the NFC conundrum is that there are a lot of hands reaching for the supposed pile of money that NFC payments will enable. Look at Google's announcement of the Wallet product. Or the ISIS partnership between Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T. Google is partnering with Mastercard, CitiBank, Sprint, FirstData, Verifone, VivoTech (the NFC partner), Hypercom, Ingenico and NXP (another NFC partner). All of these large companies are going to want a slice of the pie. Where does that leave the retailers? You know, the ones that are actually trying to make money with good and services? Sadly, on the outside of the circle. The carriers are the biggest culprits, wanting to take as much as 50% of transaction revenue because it is "going over their pipes." The financial services companies will be happy taking their normal rates in the 1.75% to 3% range as long as there is a promise that more people will pay electronically (read: sans cash). Between retailers, partners and infrastructure, NFC has years to go before it will be viable for all parties involved.

What will happen in this time frame? Think about the so-called "4G" technology WiMax. The technology is already becoming antiquated with LTE and all the major carriers are working on the next version after that. Sprint is keeping a hybrid of WiMax and LTE going forward but overall it is a tech that died before it even matured. NFC may be the same. What if there are massive leaps in quantum teleportation in the next several years? Does NFC become the WiMax of the payment world?

Maturation Of Direct Carrier Billing The "I do not see myself buying a fridge with this" line comes mostly from the direct carrier folks. Direct carrier billing is the perfect area for micro-payments and payments that stem from ease of use. Think of parking. If you could pay for your parking on the street with your phone, would that convenience be worth an extra couple of cents on the dollar to you? The direct to carrier ecosystem has evolved to the point where it actually makes sense for offline and online use. Zong (acquired by eBay for PayPal integration), PaymentOne and Boku are the leaders in this space. PaymentOne has processed $5 billion in mobile payments and lets users pay with their phone numbers, validating transactions via text. Zong allows that capability as well. Payment One's "One Care" features, announced last week at CTIA, makes direct to carrier billing safe and secure. Transparency is important in mobile commerce because consumers do not really trust their phones to handle their money quite yet. The most important aspect of direct to carrier billing now is that the revenue mechanism has been flipped. It used to be that merchants only got some 40% or less of payments while the carriers and partners took the rest. Even with high margin transactions, that is unacceptable. Today, direct to carrier billing provides the merchants with more than 80% of the revenue, sometimes nearly 95%.

The Dongle World: Smartphones As Credit Card Readers Square, VeriSign and Intuit are pushing hard into the dongle department. Jumio is doing the same thing, just without the dongle. There is not much to be said about the dongle world that we have not already touched on at ReadWriteWeb outside of the notion that it is bringing easy credit card readers to the mobile masses.

The dongle competitors are not worried about what is happening in the ecosytem because it does not really touch their core business. For instance, PayPal does not see NFC or dongles infringing on its business in any way, shape or form. As Laura Chambers, PayPal's head of mobile, said in a recent interview, "we are not worried about much in the ways of competition. There is a lot of white space in the industry for horizontal movement."

What Is PayPal Really Doing? In the interview with Chambers, the first question I asked was, "Why does it seem like PayPal has become a "me too" operator in mobile payments?" It is a fair question, even if Chambers balked to acknowledge that PayPal has been in "me too" mode for the last year or so. PayPal has ignored the dongle movement and NFC is not on its radar as a technology it feels it needs to integrate. "What is the difference between a tap versus a swipe?" Chambers asked. "We are working with what works in the current infrastructure ... We have sat down with consumers and merchants to work with them on what they want." PayPal is growing sideways because there is not a ton of room right now to grow vertically. PayPal will get into NFC solutions when the time is appropriate. Its strategy now is to create as much flexibility for consumers as possible through its mobile wallet program. PayPal's stance is data driven - the company can track when and what consumers buy from mobile phones and tablets. Hence, PayPal is focusing on the shopping end of the spectrum, as opposed to a pure payments play. "60% of people buy more and spend more on mobile," Chambers said. "But, we see that people are not really buying different things on mobile ... the No. 1 driver of growth in mobile payments is boredom." That fits in well with what PayPal sees as "couch commerce." They released a study recently saying that mobile shopping is going to boom this holiday season. As such, PayPal is ready to deploy an end-to-end solution for merchants and consumers to reward loyalty and provide deals and offers along with digital receipts. PayPal believes that it has a lot of room to grow in mobile through these types of horizontal movements. We are also seeing this on a non-mobile front with eBay partnering with Facebook and the Open Graph API and the new X.Commerce initiative that consolidates the PayPal, Zong, Magento, RedLaser and Milo technologies. The company is calling it an "open commerce ecosystem."

Future Of Mobile Payments This article is the first in a series of the trends in mobile payments that ReadWriteWeb will be working on in the next several months. There are a lot of questions and the answers are just beginning to emerge. Who are the winners in the space? Are retail shops in danger of "becoming expensive fronts for online shopping," as Chambers said in the interview? Does NFC really have potential to disrupt offline payments or is it just cool technology? These questions and more are what we will be tackling in the months to come.

"What we wanted to focus on was removing the mechanics of the transaction and building the relationship between the merchant and customer," said Megan Quinn, director of products at Square, which occupies space at the Chronicle building at Fifth and Mission streets.

But, of course, Square isn't the only company working hard to crack the nut of mobile payments - and they all face considerable challenges.

Google, Visa, MasterCard, VeriFone, eBay's PayPal division and a joint venture among AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are attacking the problem in various ways. In most cases, those businesses are going a different direction than Square, employing near field communications (NFC) technology that allows people to tap their phone near a terminal to make a payment.

Done right, mobile payments can accelerate the monetary exchange, while streamlining the issuance, acceptance and storage of receipts, coupons and loyalty cards. Down the road - once consumer and retail use reaches critical mass - the hope is that people will be able to leave their wallets at home altogether.

But there's a chicken and egg paradox: Customers won't start using mobile payments in great numbers until they're accepted in great numbers, and retailers don't have a huge incentive to roll these systems out until customers are clamoring to pay this way.

There are only about 150,000 retailers nationwide that accept payments over MasterCard's NFC-based Paypass readers. Google's Wallet payment app works with this system, and industry rumors suggest the next iPhone might as well.

Square, which has so far focused on small merchants has about 20,000 that accept Card Case.

Another big challenge is human inertia. To get people to download apps, key in credit card numbers and transform a habit they're very comfortable with, mobile payments will have to represent more than a little improvement over what they do today.

"You have to offer them a compelling reason to do it," said David Mangini, an IBM executive focused on mobile payments. "At a very, very minimum ... it has to be just as convenient, just as broadly accepted and just as safe."

One of the big knocks on basic NFC payments is that tapping a phone near a reader doesn't represent a whopping improvement over swiping a card. In addition, merchants have little to gain by replacing one expensive payment infrastructure with another, some observers say.

"It doesn't upset the status quo," said Nick Holland, senior analyst at Yankee Group. "It doesn't really change the original business model and it all goes through the same rails."

Receipts, deals Google argues that its NFC-based Wallet app is a big step forward for a few reasons. A single tap replaces not just the payment, but also the exchange of receipts, coupons and loyalty points.

On top of that, Google believes it's tying together the on- and off-line retail worlds, by allowing consumers to move the deals they spot on the Web into the Wallet app, where they can redeem them in the real world. Google Wallet also advertises nearby deals when users open up the app.

"For the consumer, it's really about tap, pay and save," said Osama Bedier, vice president of payments at Google. "On the merchant side, it's about closing the loop on that advertising."

This is a critical goal for Google, too, as it experiences slowing growth in online advertising - 93 percent of commerce still occurs offline, according to Forrester Research

For its part, Square steers around the limitations of NFC - as well as the various roadblocks of wireless carriers and credit processing networks - by leveraging the powers of the Internet to process payments. The credit card information is stored online, in Square's secure cloud, not on the device itself.

Square, which started by providing small attachments that allow merchants to swipe credit cards using mobile devices, acts as the merchant of record for its customers. This allows the businesses to quickly start accepting credit cards without going through the usual drawn out and expensive process of applying for a merchant account. But it also clearly puts more risk onto Square's shoulders.

Square turned on the hands-free feature on its Card Case app, which takes advantage of the so-called geofencing capabilities in the latest version of Apple's mobile software, in an upgrade to the app in November. The feature is only available on Apple devices to date

Quinn said "automatic tabs" represents an obvious improvement over traditional payments and it's quickly driving user growth (though the company doesn't disclose user numbers).

In addition, retailers have seen revenue leap as much as 20 percent since integrating the app. It drives traffic by highlighting nearby establishments, and the ease of payment encourages customer loyalty, the company says. Tips also tend to go up.

Is it safe? But the question that has dogged Square - and indeed hangs over much of the mobile payment space - is security.

Early last year, VeriFone CEO Douglas Bergeron blasted Square - its attention-grabbing young competitor - for what he called serious security flaws. In an online video, he argued that any bad actor could use the Square dongle and an easy-to-create app to skim credit card numbers.

Square CEO Jack Dorsey, also the co-founder of Twitter, defended the company's security practices in a letter. He also highlighted the inherent insecurity of credit cards, noting that any sketchy waiter is equally free to steal your information.

Meanwhile, Quinn argued that Card Case is actually more secure than credit cards because it only works if you're in the location and your face matches the picture that pops up on the merchant's screen.

The radio technology behind NFC has taken some security lumps, too.

Late last month, a security researcher at a Washington, D.C., conference used a wireless reader she bought on eBay to highlight some weaknesses of radio frequency identification, Forbes reported. She pulled the critical data from an RFID-enabled credit card through a volunteer's clothing, encoded that data onto a blank card and put it to use onstage.

Holland said that any new form of payment inevitably creates new forms of fraud. The challenge will be to educate consumers and merchants about how to minimize the risks.

"Clearly, having a device always with you and connected is a very inviting target for criminals," he said. "Any safe is only as strong as the key."

"Look, this is engineered for a constrained environment," Piper emphasized. "But because of that, [these devices] are actually extremely efficient at doing things like conserving battery, and using very low bandwidth. So [MQTT] is actually a fairly sensible protocol for both the machine-to-machine (M2M) space that we're addressing with the Eclipse announcement, and also the mobile explosion as well. All these devices need to be connected."

"It's not as such about replacing the Web; it's about enabling devices to talk to the Web," says Piper. "And these devices are unlikely to have user interfaces; they're really about just collecting data."

IBM's model (like all IBM models through history) is layered and given a mnemonic. There are three classes of devices: intelligence, interconnect, and instrumentation. Unlike Microsoft's model, which argues that intelligence can be driven completely to the edge at the device level, IBM maintains intelligence at the core, maybe even in the cloud. Instrumentation, on the other hand, doesn't need to be all that intelligent. In fact, it can be essentially autonomic. But it can still communicate, and MQTT would be its protocol.

"When you look at the wire trace of an HTTP packet, you end up with a lot of stuff in the headers which you don't see as a user," he tells RWW. "HTTP was designed for getting documents to a user interface. And it's been kind of bent and twisted into being used for inter-application and server-side communication, and that's fine when you have the bandwidth. But if you just want to send, 'The temperature is ___,' and then send 61.7, 60,7, 61.7, every five seconds, you really don't want to be doing a full HTTP post to send that information to an endpoint. So [MQTT] is asynchronous push; it's not request/response, which is what HTTP is."

Current networks of devices, such as Cisco routers, utilize small packets of health and status data that some literally call "weather reports." They're sent at specific intervals, and when they don't arrive on time, servers conclude something may be wrong. Such "weather reports" have been said to constitute a majority of the actual messages sent between routers and other devices at the lower levels of the Internet.

Badgeville aspires to democratize the Foursquare experience beyond retail by enabling publishers and other segments to build their own game mechanics and incentives platforms.

Publishers who use Badgeville can set up an account, offer defined rewards and track visitor behavior with realtime analytics. Badgeville works for any company that has a community on its site: anyone from gaming to education, to retail and more can use the service to reward people for checking into a site, taking tests or simply browsing through products. Virtually anything can correspond to a badge reward.

“It’s not about pageviews anymore.” Publishers can award badges for the behavior of their choice, such as leaving a comment or becoming a fan of the site on Facebook. Readers can also compare their results to friends’ on social networks like Facebook.”

Social intelligence: Connected brands are social brands, and if they are smart, social for them means to be “socially intelligent.”

Social intelligence, in the most wide-ranging definition, is the capacity to “get along with people in general, social technique or ease in society, knowledge of social matters, susceptibility to stimuli from other members of a group, as well as insight into the temporary moods or underlying personality traits of strangers.” Applied to brands, social intelligence can be interpreted as the art of detecting the most subtle cue in understanding an individual’s behavior, and the ability to not only receive constant feedback but to convert it into changed behavior.

Ethical electronics

Tantalum

Besides the direct environmental impact of mining the Earth, there is a more immediate threat. You’ve no doubt heard about conflict diamonds or ‘blood diamonds‘, which are diamonds mined in a war zone and sold to finance an insurgency, invading army’s war efforts or a warlord’s activity. Well, your mobile phone contains a similarly valuable commodity that’s been at the center of controversy in recent times

Tantalum is one of the best superconductors on Earth, and it’s used to coat capacitors to obtain more power from less energy. This basically means that laptops and mobile phones don’t need batteries that are larger than the device itself – so this is one of the chief reasons why you can slip your iPhone in your pocket rather than carting it around in a wheelbarrow. In central African countries such as The Democratic Republic of Congo,the mining of the mineral coltan – from which tantalum is extracted – it has often been argued fuels wars and encourages child slavery. And these arguments are well-founded.

However, the majority of tantalum production shifted to Australia, and Western Australia became the world’s largest source of mined tantalum concentrates. The mine closed in late 2008, and has only recently reopened.

In 2010, major concerns were raised as to the availability of tantalum and the effect this would have on the supply chain. “The impact, the real concern, is actually obtaining the metal,” said Dennis Zogbi, CEO of Paumanok Publications, which researches the component industry and the tantalum markets. If the stockpile of tantalum ever runs out, this could be disastrous for the electronics industry.

Tantalum minerals are also mined in Canada, China, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, and mass reserves were found in Venezuela in 2009, and in Columbia a year later.

Bloomberg reported a couple of weeks ago that the first conflict-free tantalum has recently been certified by The Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition and Global e- Sustainability Coalition (EICC/GeSI), an initiative backed by companies such as Apple and Intel.

Indium

Then there’s Indium, a rare chemical element you may or may not have heard of. Zinc ores are the primary source of indium, which – when isolated – is then used in liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and touchscreens.

China is a leading producer of indium, whilst Canada and Bolivia are also large producers. And Cornwall, England, was also found to hold significant indium deposits earlier this year too, something which could prove massively beneficial to the UK economy

Last year, 85% of all indium was devoted to making indium tin oxide for use in LCD products, and the demand is predicted to grow at 15% a year over the next few years

A UN report published last month found that there are virtually no recycling initiatives in place for indium, and Thomas Graedel, one of the report’s eight authors, warned that a failure to re-use metals such as Indium doesn’t bode well for the future

“If we do not have these materials readily available at reasonable prices, a lot of modern technology simply cannot happen. We don’t think immediate shortages are likely but we are absolutely unable to make predictions based on the very limited geological exploration currently conducted.

The case for recycling

Your old mobile phone has circuit boards, batteries and an LCD screen – these all contain harmful materials that, when dumped in landfill sites, eventually break down and leak into the environment.

Over time, the likes of lead, cadmium and mercury pollution can be hazardous to the environment and to our health. It was for this reason that, in 2006, California became the first US state to make it mandatory for all mobile phone retailers to establish a collection and recycling program for mobile phones. The law also prevents residents from disposing of old mobile phones.

It’s very difficult to reclaim tantalum once it has been transposed onto an electronic component. For this reason, it’s important that you choose how you dispose of old devices carefully. Some organizations will promise to ‘safely’ recycle your handset, but this is very vague and may not mean the components are being reused. Given the amount of effort and strife that may have gone into producing it, you should ensure that it is actually reused. But this is something governments and industries need to help consumers achiev

The UN report analyzed the recycling rates of 60 metals, and 34 of these have recycling rates of less than 1%. Among the least-recycled metals were tellurium and gallium – which are used in solar cells – and lithium, a key element in your phone and laptop batteries.

Despite the best efforts of environmentalists, governments, businesses and consumers, there could be another ‘small’ obstacle to contend with if we’re to protect the Earth’s natural resources. And that is China

As reported recently in National Geographic, China supplies 97% of the world’s so-called rare earth elements, elements we all rely on for all our high-tech gadgetry, including mobile phones and laptops. And in 2010, China gave a hint of what the future may hold for the rest of us, when it stopped shipments of rare earth elements to Japan for a month following a diplomatic dispute. This had a big impact on the price of rare earths on global markets. China is expected to reduce its rare earth exports to help protect the country’s own rapidly growing industries. Indeed, it’s worth noting that almost two-thirds of rare earth metals produced in China are already consumed ‘in-house’, so to speak.

If China does decide to cut back on its exports, global prices will sky rocket. Dysprosium, for example, is used in hard-drives and it now sells for over $200 a pound (roughly half a kilo), but the disturbing thing is that the price was only about $7 eight years ago

It’s thought that the global demand for many rare earth metals could exceed the supply as soon as the end of this year.

So how serious is this? Well, China has almost half of the planet’s rare earth reserves. The US holds about 13%, whilst Russia, Australia and Canada also has some stockpiles, so we’re not quite at the critical stage yet. But the writing is very much on the wall for many industries, not just electronics.

2. Social Media Enhances It

4. Early Starters Have Proven It

3. Gamification Vendors Enable It

Badgeville, BigDoor and Bunchball all offer SaaS platforms with mechanics, accessible consumer tracking and data, and the ability to easily iterate a gamification strategy as needed.

When consumers can share achievements like badges and trophies with their social networks, it enhances the innate human motivations that games have used for generations to keep people engaged (i.e. the desire for status, access, power, etc.)

Recent gamification efforts from brands like Chiquita, HP and Sephora have succeeded, increasing confidence that, if applied correctly, the right gamification strategy can work.

How exactly does gamification help increase engagement?

Involvement: Gamification can foster participation by increasing site returns, new visitors and registrations through reward systems and incentivized word-of-mouth efforts.

Interaction: Marketers need visitors to spend time with their content and brand in order to foster engagement.

Intimacy: Consumers are able to connect with a brand more intimately when they’re interacting in real-time versus visiting a static brand website.

Influence: Word-of-mouth marketing has taken off recently, and companies have realized it can have a significant effect on brand visibility.