INSEMTIVES » incentives

New IBM Patent Allows Licensees to Incentivize Good Eating Habits (via foodandtechconnect.com)

gtorodelvalle — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:58:18 +0000

If you could plan your diet so that you got paid every time you chose a salad over a burger, would you chose the salad?

IBM “Master Inventor” Michael Paolini believes being rewarded in real time for improving one’s habits is exactly what will affect human behavior and help people become healthier. One of the inventors of a new IBM patent “Providing consumers with incentives for healthy eating habits”, Paolini says the “method, system, and program” was created so that it can be implemented in a variety of ways to accommodate groups with very different needs – be it your health insurance company, your gluten-free diet group, or your employer. But in order for the program to work, use of the system must be voluntary and trust has to first be established.

You can read the whole article at http://www.foodandtechconnect.com/site/2012/01/23/new-ibm-patent-allows-licensees-to-incentivize-good-eating-habits/

gtorodelvalle — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:18:24 +0000

Achivy adds some fun and gamification to your social life. Add Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Gowalla , Flickr, Stackoverflow, Klout and many other applications to your profile to see how many achievements, badges,scores you have and follow your progress. You can keep up with your friends, and see the other people’s achievements and activities – achivies.

Achivy provides you to see your and your friends’:

Achievement “badges”
Achievement levels and scores
Top and recent users for all applications
Progress bars and analytics to see how close you are to complete your tasks that encourages you to earn new badges
Challenge with your friends
You can even have some gifts and join loyalty programmes.

They will be releasing their API (http://achivy.com/c/api) soon

Badgeville turns any website into a social network (via http://gigaom.com)

gtorodelvalle — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:56:52 +0000

Gamification start-up Badgeville is celebrating its one-year anniversary with an ambitious new effort that looks to build a social network out of any website. Badgeville’s Social Fabric technology allows a website to quickly add a host of real-time social features that charts user behavior, updates users on their on-site activities and allows people to follow any piece of content or fellow users.

Kris Duggan, CEO of Badgeville, said that with Social Fabric, social sharing goes up 100 percent, and user generated content increases by 50 percent. Page views also go up 20-30 percent. Websites can start to enjoy some of the engagement that has made Facebook so sticky.

You can read the whole article at http://gigaom.com/2011/09/12/badgeville-turns-any-website-into-a-social-network/

How Online Companies Get You to Share More and Spend More (via wired.com)

gtorodelvalle — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 09:23:38 +0000

Wired.com released in June a very interesting article about how online companies are using game mechanics and psychological and sociological techniques to influence their users. You can find the whole article here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/ff_gamed/

Google News Badges (via googlesystem.blogspot.com)

gtorodelvalle — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 08:33:13 +0000

Google News added a feature that could encourage users to read more: collectible badges. “The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends,” informs Google.

While this feature could encourage users to visit Google News more often, the main purpose is to find people that know a lot of things about certain topics. “Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are,” suggests Google.

Instead of manually adding your favorite topics to your profile, you could add Google News badges. It’s one way to show your expertise and it could be useful if Google plans to integrate Aardvark with Google+ and launch a social Q&A service.

You can read the whole blog entry at http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-news-badges.html

How To Use Facebook To Market Your Brand With Games and Incentives (by Heather Green)

slazaruk — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:40:24 +0000

Social networks can be a valuable tool when it comes to getting your name out there, but while many businesses have a Facebook page it’s surprising how often little to no effort is put into using them effectively. No mater how diligently you answer comments on your wall, there will come a time when your user base will grow bored. Here are a few sure fire ways to keep them interested and coming back.

Incentive Programs

A good starting place for making sure your user base sticks around is to give them a reason to. It’s pretty commonplace to see sweepstakes and giveaways as a way to encourage more people to comment, like, and generally keep interest high. What is less common and far more effective, however, is to make a game out of it. As an example, if you implemented a system where points are given for various actions—ten points for liking a page, maybe twenty for referring another user to like the page, and five points for every comment posted—you’re immediately giving your users something to work towards and a sense of progression not unlike those found in video games.

Best Using the Point System

Once you have a system like this put in place, it’s important that when an eventual winner, or winners of this game are chosen, no one feels cheated or like their time was wasted. The best way to do this is to foster a sense of community, and make your users feel like they are working together rather than against one another. A good example of a way to implement this is to keep a grand point total as well as an individual point total, and give incentives to the entire community at various points. When the grand total reaches one hundred thousand points lets say, everyone gets a coupon code for five percent off at your or maybe a partner retailer. This increases sales, makes everyone feel like they have won, and keeps interest in your page extremely high.

Source:

jeffbullas.com by Heather Green
Image by Master Isolated Images

Games Startups! What You Need To Know To Succeed In The Competitive Social Games Market (via: socialtimes.com)

slazaruk — Tue, 31 May 2011 12:53:50 +0000

“Without question, the social gaming market is the newly hot space in the game industry. Some of the leading developers have emerged as companies only in the last few years and in that time have managed to gather tens of millions of both dollars and users from these games. With these outstanding numbers and increasing sociality of games not only on the web, but on mobile and console platforms as well, it seems like a very attractive market to enter. However, for all its potential, it’s a place that many independent developers and traditional game publishers are having difficulty being successful in. The reason for this is because these games are overwhelmingly financed by microtransactions of virtual goods, and knowing how to inspire users to pay you for virtual goods is something that’s not easy to master.

This article will attempt to shed light on these economics within the social games market, what kind of opportunity exists for new entrants, and provide strategies that independent developers with limited resources can use to make a successful entry into the market. This article is one of a two part series that will focus on strategies independent developers can use to be successful. The next will focus on strategies for publishers to enter the space.”

Read the full article, including:

The Social Games Market at a Glance
Keys to making your games a success

at: socialtimes.com

RewardJS, get prizes solving bugs

gtorodelvalle — Thu, 12 May 2011 07:13:29 +0000

RewardJS is not a JavaScript library. It’s an incentive program to thank JavaScript developers for contributing to open source libraries, for fun or for profit. To kick things off, in the month of May, you have a chance to earn an iPad 2, a MacBook Air, or an all-expense-paid trip to the next jQuery Conference. And those are just three of the prizes, there’s a different prize every day and every week. There’s no limit to the amount you can win. See the Rules for full details.

How it works

Fix a bug. Get a prize.

Daily prizes ($50-400 each) to the developer that closes the most bugs each day, Mon-Fri
Weekly prizes ($750-1250 each) to the developer that closes the most bugs each week, Mon-Sat
Monthly grand prize ($2000-3000) to the developer that closes the most bugs in the 4-week campaign.

You can find all the information at http://rewardjs.com/

CrowdTwist, powering loyalty everywhere

gtorodelvalle — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:23:44 +0000

CrowdTwist powers loyalty everywhere. Their next generation loyalty platform allows users to earn points for any activity they do online, both on your site and wherever else your brand lives (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube). Users compete against themselves and others to prove dedication to your brand and move closer to earning unique rewards, prize packages and discounts, all the while driving significantly more engagement, brand interaction and revenue. CrowdTwist’s loyalty software is able to unify your disparate online presence into a singular, revenue-driving platform.

The Internet is a vast landscape and your audience spends their time in many different places. CrowdTwist’s activity engine intelligently tracks consumer interactions with your brand both on and off your website (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, iTunes, Ticketmaster, Amazon, etc.) like consuming, creating & sharing content, commenting, playing games, purchasing, etc. This system encourages increased engagement while driving rich data into their Control Center.

Proprietary CrowdTwist software and algorithms manage activity priority and point values to keep users coming back again and again to earn points. User levels and badges are awarded based on their number of points and evolving engagement activities. These points can then be used for real world rewards and discounts, not just a virtual good.

You can find all the information at http://www.crowdtwist.com/

engage, a Web-based goal setting, monitoring and appraisal application (via KillerStartups.com)

gtorodelvalle — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 10:23:36 +0000

Engage is a new web-hosted tool that makes it very easy to monitor the performance of teams, and motivate them to do their best when things are not really going as expected. Any manager will be able to clearly define what must be done by each and every member of the team, and feedback can be served in a timely (and open) way. The performance of every team member can be reviewed and rated, both when it comes to individual goals and in the grand scheme of things.

getupp, location-based GTD via social “shame on you” incentives

gtorodelvalle — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 08:59:18 +0000

getupp is a location-based commitment service. Commit to activities that require your presence at a specific location at a certain time, for example, going to the gym after work or being home on time for dinner. getupp verifies and shares whether you keep or break such commitments. Open the getupp iPhone app at the right location at the right time, and your commitment is completed. But if you fail to show up, your commitment is broken, and your failure is automatically shared with your friends on Facebook.

You can find all the information at http://www.getupp.com/

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Points: Topguest Hooks Up With Instagram (via techcrunch.com)

gtorodelvalle — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 16:53:34 +0000

Everyone loves loyalty points. But it’s often a pain to get them because different companies all have their own programs that require you to remember numbers. Topguest’s goal is to unify that experience by letting you earn points simply by checking-in on social networks like Foursquare and Facebook. And now they’re adding a new layer to the mix: Instagram photos.

Yes, beginning today when the integration goes fully live, you’ll be able to earn reward points at venues around the world simply by taking a picture and sharing it on Instagram. This may mean hotel points, air miles, or other benefits at the over 10,000 places Topguest currently works with. All you have to do is link up Topguest to your Instagram account (via their new API) and make sure your picture is geotagged at the venue.

You can read the whole blog entry at http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/27/topguest-instagram/

GoalFinch, because monetary incentives always work… ;-)

gtorodelvalle — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 16:47:05 +0000

Goalfinch is a goal setting tool built on a principle that economists have known for centuries: incentives matter. If there’s a goal you want to accomplish, you have the best chance of succeeding when there are incentives in place to reward you for getting it done. Goalfinch helps you create incentives to accomplish your goals.

You start by defining a goal, picking a deadline (all good, measurable goals have deadlines), and inviting some of your Facebook friends to verify whether or not you accomplish your goal. Then you make a financial contribution to Goalfinch. This money is “on the line” until you either reach or fail to reach the goal. It’s an additional incentive to motivate you to go out and get it done.

When you reach your goal, your friends should sign in to Goalfinch and confirm that you have succeeded. By default, Goalfinch won’t count your goal as successful until all the friends you invited come to the site and do this. If you succeed before the deadline, congratulations! Goalfinch will send your contribution back to you. If you fail, however, Goalfinch will donate the money to a charitable or non-profit organization (you can select one while defining your goal).

You also have the option to distribute your contribution proportionally: For each friend that confirms you’ve completed your goal, we’ll return a portion of your money to you, up to the full amount. For example, if you invite three friends to verify your goal but only two of them confirm that you complete it, you’ll get two thirds of your money back. The rest will be donated.

You can find all the information at http://goalfinch.com

EmmaActive, crowdsourcing product tagging in images (via killerstartups.com)

gtorodelvalle — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:21:57 +0000

EmmaActive is a new platform that rewards people who take the time to identify and tag products on photographs. This system is open to just any person who is willing to give it a try, and both site owners and advertisers are greatly benefited by it. The former make money whenever people tag a product on any photo displayed on their sites, whereas advertisers are getting a higher-quality of inbound traffic (IE, people who are keener on buying anything than those who are surfing the Web aimlessly).

The real strength of this image advertising platform is how it lets people who visit a site looking for specific products buy them directly by merely clicking on the tags that are featured.

EmmaActive means that no more will anybody have to look for the best spot to buy anything they saw and liked when browsing the Web. This service turns every image that is tagged into something that can be purchased. And since people are being rewarded for taking their time to tag products, everything comes full circle.

New paper “Badges in Social Media: A Social Psychological Perspective”

gtorodelvalle — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 20:30:52 +0000

Representing achievements as badges or trophies is a standard practice in online gaming. Awarding badges has also become a key ingredient in “gamifying” online social media experiences. Social systems such as Foursquare, StackOverflow, and Wikipedia have popularized badges as a way of engaging and motivating users. In this paper the authors deconstruct badges and present five social psychological functions for badges in social media contexts: goal setting, instruction, reputation, status/affirmation, and group identification. They argue that future research should further explore these five functions and their application in specific contexts.

You can get the paper at http://research.yahoo.com/node/3469

“7 Ways to Increase User Participation”

chofer — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 07:46:16 +0000

Readwriteweb.com suggests 7 ways to increase user participation, namely:

Provide social logins

Make boards/forums easy spottable

Display avatars everywhere

Show that you care

Recent activity should be emphasized

Do member polls

Reward top contributors

Game-based economy

chofer — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:24:50 +0000

Fortune Tech reports that companies are slowly realizing that traditional incentive mechanics used in games, to keep players playing the games, are an efficient way to generate business.

The article presents example of gamification approaches. Examples which show that it is possible to combine incentive mechanisms from games into win-win situations for both, the consumer and the company.

Handbook of Collective Intelligence

chofer — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:00:10 +0000

The Handbook of Collective Intelligence, hosted by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, gives the reader quick insight into the field of collective intelligence.

The handbook explains the term collective intelligence and why studying collective intelligence is important nowadays.Furthermore, it gives examples of collective intelligence in different environments as for instance: business organizations, computer science/A.I. and biology. The handbook deals with measuring collective intelligence and associated influence factors and more interesting, it lists several factors which either facilitate collective intelligence (e.g. diversity, incentives for contribution) or inhibit it (e.g. self-interest and the free-rider problem, implementation issues).

IActionable.com, game mechanics as a service

gtorodelvalle — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:47:42 +0000

Game Mechanics – there are many ways to do it wrong. Adding points and achievements to your site doesn’t have to be a grind. IActionable makes it easy to get your reputation system up to speed quickly and easily.

Game Mechanics are a means of rewarding users. They aren’t a great fit for everyone. Here are some of the characteristics the people behind IActionable have found that are a natural fit for accelerated growth through game mechanics:

You have a community or are social where users are aware of each other.
There are many ways a user can interact with your application or with each other.
Ideally your users visit repeatedly; generally once a week or more.

Here are some of the basic building blocks they work with:

Points: Do something good, get a few points. Do something great – get a lot of points. Do something bad? Lose points. It’s a concept we are all familiar with. Provide users with immediate feedback by adjusting their points – but be careful – it’s a powerful tool and you can easily find your users doing exactly what you reward them for. When used properly points can provide context within a site so user’s can quickly identify members who have been around for a while and are experienced members of the community.
Achievements: Achievements are milestones or goals that, once accomplished, rewards users visibly, letting them and everyone else that they’ve “unlocked” that achievement. While points are great for smaller tasks, achievements are good for grander accomplishments and are seen as a source of pride for users. They usually appear in a list of “locked” and “unlocked” achievements. This provides an easy way for users to see what they can do to unlock more achievements and helps educate them about the possibilities your application offers.

All these capabilities are exposed by means of a REST API.

You can find all the information at the IActionable website at http://iactionable.com/.

Shopkick Brings Real-World Incentives to the Check-in Game (via ReadWriteWeb.com)

gtorodelvalle — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:12:24 +0000

You can find the whole ReadWriteWeb.com’s entry here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/shopkick_brings_real-world_incentives_to_the_check.php

Bolder, its time for some good

gtorodelvalle — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:57:18 +0000

I found today a very interesting startup called Bolder whose business is to engage customers to do good actions by being rewarded by external companies. You can find all the information at the startup’s website: http://actbolder.com/

Brightkite Gets Down To Badges (via TechCrunch.com)

gtorodelvalle — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 07:27:16 +0000

It seems that, although there are many opponents to the badge-oriented mechanism to involve users, considering it non-sense (see the comments on the TechCrunch’s blog entry), badges are an effective mechanism to get users participating. The point seems to be adding value to the “simple” fact of badge gathering.

You can read the whole article at http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/20/brightkite-badges/

Masdar/MIT Post‐Doctoral Research Fellowship: Incentive Mechanisms in Social Computing

gtorodelvalle — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 07:02:32 +0000

Applications are invited for the position of “Post-doctoral Research Fellow” as part of a joint research project between the Masdar Institute of Science& Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project’s Principal Investigators are:

Dr. Iyad Rahwan, Masdar Institute& MIT (www.mit.edu/~irahwan)
Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland, MIT (http://web.media.mit.edu/~sandy)

The successful candidate will work on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project. The project , titled “Influencing Collective Human Behavior Using Distributed Intelligent Systems,” aims to help people use resources more efficiently. The project will have (1) a theoretical component focusing on game-theoretic and incentive mechanism design issues, and (2) an empirical component to test these techniques in behavioral experiments using lab experiments and real deployment through mobile computing and sensor technologies.

For further details, please see: http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/20100529_postdoc_advert.pdf

The surprising truth about what motivates us

gtorodelvalle — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 07:25:23 +0000

I found this very interesting video by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA, http://thersa.org) adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at this organization which illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.

Enjoy!

Dunnit! – an incentivized iPhone to-Do list

omorozova — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:27:18 +0000

Dunnit! is a To Do list application, which lets people create lists of tasks and then tick them off as the tasks are completed.
The application looks like a game: It lets users win achievements the more they use this app and it lets them compete against their friends and colleagues to see who’s more productive. Twitter integration lets them boast to the wider world too.
Read more about it at http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/36229/Dunnit-an-iPhone-To-Do-list-app-with-game-like-achievements

MalariaControl.net as a multilayered motivational space

mzamarian — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:23:00 +0000

In this article recently appeared on FirstMonday, Viola Krebs illustrates the motives behind the willingness of a large community of individuals to volunteer computing power to help solve a medical research problem. What I find mighty interesting for our endeavors is:
a) the literature review section of the paper (it looks like we are doing a good job in tracking the relevant literature even though we apply it to a different domain!)
b) the methodological section in which they present a fine method for discriminating Implicit and Explicit motivation mechanisms.
You can read the whole paper here:

firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2783/2452

Social Media Addicition

omorozova — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:28:48 +0000

There are more than 400.000 results on Google for „social media addiction“. It is about people who have more than 10.000 friends on Facebook, for whom tweeting is a way to share their opinions and who can’t enjoy the news if they don’t post them on Facebook, Foursquare, or on other Social Applications. Some fun videos about it are posted on YouTube, e.g. this one.
The interesting analysis of social behavior incentives was made by Robert Scoble on his Scobleizer-Blog. Robert Scobler grew up in Silicon Valley , works at Rackspace, builds a community for people fanatical about the Internet called Building43 and is best known for his Blog at http://scobleizer.com.
He analyzed incentive systems of Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare and pointed out 9 principles how to make your own application addictive:

1. Serve your users’ narcissism. Daniel Carnegie has already said that the sweetest word in all languages is your name. It is one of incentives exploited by Twitter. Anytime someone uses your @name in a Tweet you see it.

2. Measure behavior and report it. Foursquare gives points every time the person checks in. You are also shown when someone of your friends or people from your area check in. Foursquare reports how big a loser you are because there are 34 people from your area who’ve checked in more than you this week.

3. Add status for behaviors. Show how many times the person has checked in, what his achievements at this app are, etc.

4. Make multiple status reports. Foursquare reports how much status each person earned, but it also tells who is the mayor in some area. That is two ways you can see status, and get addicted.

5. Make undesired behavior seem lame. “Why is everyone finally putting their photos into Twitter? Because if you don’t have your photo in Twitter the icon it puts there looks, well, lame. So, Twitter is putting a subtle enticement to all of its users to upload a photo”.

6. Make it easy to share success with others. Information about your mayorship or changes in your status can be shared also per mail, per tweets, they are shown on your wall and on the main page on Facebook

7. Make an API for studying behavior. Developers love to build apps to study data and report that.

8. Make it easy to join in other users. Facebook makes it very easy to tag your friends in a photo. If your friends aren’t in the system it makes it easy to invite them.

9. Give people more “hooks” to addict their friends.”Facebook, for instance, asks you what your relationship status is, and what your political persuasion is. Why does it ask you those? So you’ll force your friends to join!!!”

The fun theory

omorozova — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:38:30 +0000

Have a look at the thefuntheory.com. The Website is dedicated to the thought that fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better.

Making the glass recycling, taking stairs instead of elevator or throwing rubbish fun to do, increases the amount of participants enourmously (see the videos on thefunttheory.com).

Giving people some fun in return motivates them for doing the right thing such as hand washing or red light respecting.

Mozilla’s “Blog of metrics”

omorozova — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:44:29 +0000

We were inspired by the Mozilla’s “Blog of metrics”. And we want to share some information about it here.
The Blog is focused on collecting, analyzing, and sharing various metrics about Mozilla’s products and enlightens the quantitative aspects of marketing and strategy. The Blog aims at improving of Mozilla’s performance on the Web.
The world of Mozilla includes many Firefox related feedback mechanisms. Crash reporting, Bugzilla and spreadfirefox.com represent some of them. Furthermore, the Mozilla team carries out the surveys about updates of Flash Player, updates of Firefox, as well as about Firefox uninstalling. The received feedbacks help Mozilla’s team to improve the Firefox and to contribute to its adoption.
The metrics help to investigate what incentives motivate the user to participate in the surveys, what design of the feedback forms provokes the most feedback, or what prevents the users from upgrading the Firefox. The upgrading of Firefox and reporting about crash on the Web pages help the Mozilla team to improve the Firefox technology. When the user updates Firefox, he receives the better version of the Web browser. The same evidence functions for the Flash update. Many sites can’t be downloaded appropriately if the users don’t have Flash or have non-updated version of Flash that doesn’t work properly.
By giving feedback about crashed sites, the user helps unconsciously to improve the Firefox. So the users contribute to the development of their Web browser and thus get the profit of their contribution later by Web surfing with the new and more powerful versions of Firefox.
The same model functions by INSEMTIVES: The project aims at developing the technology that motivates the users to solve the tasks for the creation of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web will make the Web the better place, where the user can faster find the needed information and enjoy the using of the better product.

We find the survey results of Mozilla’s team about the participatory design quite interesting for our project. Here are some of them:
1) The implementation of the pop-up in the middle of the window with the offer to take part in 5 minutes survey (instead of having the feedback button at the bottom of the screen) increased the amount of participants enormously. Moreover (and that is really important!!!), only one or two people out of 700 total comments said something negative about the pop-up itself. http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/08/18/cats-love-firefox-support/
2) The Mozilla team runs the tests where they investigate what color of Firefox download button causes more clicks. With a 1% lift the winning color was green and 1% translates to nearly 2 million downloads annually that is, 2 million more potential Firefox users. Such optimization testings are run quite often by Mozilla team and the colors are optimized according to the survey results.
http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/06/19/firefox-is-green/