Badgeville jumped onto the scene when they won “Audience Choice” at TechCrunch last fall. Within two quarters they’re captured 50 clients for their “white label” social rewards, loyalty and analytics platform. As the name suggests, the Badgeville concept is similar to Farmville. The big difference is badgeville is an entertaining online version of a frequent-flyer program and Farmville is an entertaining online version of crack. And unlike Foursquare, you don’t have to physically go to Starbucks four times a day (more crack anyone?); you just have to visit your websites you frequent regularly anyway. And for anyone like me whose crack comes in the form of online shopping, you might as well be hooked on Badgeville too. So, enough about crack, here’s my rundown of Badgeville:
For the Users
Badgeville brings a new level of entertainment and engagement for website visitors and ecommerce customers. Through gamification, Badgeville combines elements of social games like Farmville with a rewards and loyalty program. Instead of tending to a digital flock of sheep, your regular actions within websites earn your points, awards or rewards. This can be for buying products, commenting, watching videos, filling out surveys and much more. With Facebook and Twitter integration, liking, sharing or Tweeting can equal rewards. This can earn you virtual currency, discounts, premium content to just bragging rights through trophies and badges. The leaderboard widget showcases the biggest fans and lists your friends on the site. The best part of all this is you don’t have to run around in a video game or real life, you just have to do what you normally do when using a website. You now just get rewarded for it, along with an incentive for doing more while you’re there. Participating is nice and easy too: visitors just have to login with Facebook connect or create a regular account through the website.
For the Website
Badgeville is perfect for any ecommerce, news or social website, or any fuelled by user-generated content. Its white label functionality means that its widgets and API integrate to your site’s design and doesn’t eat up any of your precious on-page real estate and
branding. You can pick through a range rewards and goals for your visitors and how, where or when they can achieve them. Badgeville provides real-time analytics. While this is a regular feature of many applications, they bring their own unique advantages. If you’re find pages or functions on your site lacking the traffic they need, you can incentivize them through Badgeville. By adding rewards of your choice to the needed areas, with a bonus for sharing, you’re looking at a quick and easy on-page SEO/SMO option. For an online shop releasing new additions, a few rewards or discounts will spread your message through participants’ networks. The leaderboard widget showcases your top fans, letting them serve as brand ambassadors to your other visitors. It also lists your visitor’s friends, giving them a chance to compete over and share your brand.
For both the Badgeville participant and hosting website, everything is in real-time. If you’re using Badgeville, you get live activity streams, leaderboards and friend graphs. If you’re the host, you get more than just analytics, but the ability to influence your analytics in real-time and set marketing goals, all through the Badgeville platform. Online retailer BlueFly is a big name on board, with 50 under their belt as of March 30th. SlideShare also plans to integrate Badgeville, which is great for online marketeers like me who find themselves there more often than not. For more, head over to Badgeville.
Follow me:
