written by Achintya Gupta
How to gamify thought leadership for B2B branding?
In my previous blog I had talked about how internal company culture can support companies B2B branding efforts such as thought leadership and creating internal brands. There I had also talked about the key role of employees in creating thought leader positioning of the company and without the help of its people, a B2B services brand will be helpless in communicating it’s thought leadership and field expertise.
However, creating such thought leadership practices are easier said than done and many marketing and brand manager struggle in getting their employees to have an active presence on thought leadership channels like research blogs, conferences, webinars, research papers, guest articles and lectures etc. If you are one such person, this blog post is for you.
In this blog post I will focus on how some simple principles of game mechanics can be used to motivate people in your company to help you in your thought leadership and how we plan to do it in Kuliza. Now I don’t think a lot about gamification but 2 people at Kuliza, @ksarda & @diarmaidb do, and I would like to thank them for helping me structure this. This initiative is part of my continued effort at Kuliza to integrate culture into marketing and provide a joint branding effort.
Why ‘gamify’ thoughtleadership?
For one, gamification of processes is an excellent way of positively reinforcing people and motivating them in a fun, non corporate way. They get a reason to be active and to move up. Secondly, if you ask people to take out time to document their research, participate or speak at meetups etc, these things might appear as a hassle to them. You gamify the process, attach level and tasks on the ladder and give them the full picture of where they can reach – they will see more value in these initiatives. Thirdly, gamification attaches reputation and recognition to performance and contribution. This helps you know, who are the key thought leaders in the company, who are the most enthusiastic people, who are the best bloggers, frequent speakers etc. Finally, gamification helps us break a large process into pieces (levels) and focus on one piece at a time. For e.g. at Kuliza we recognized more than 10 channels for communicating thoughtleadership (see diagram below) but helping everybody in all 10 would be a difficult task. By gamifying this process, we know what is each person’s maturity and hence where should be the focus.
How to gamify thoughtleadership? Here are some of our thoughts:
a) Build the arena:
Define the objectives that you want to achieve through thoughtleadership. In our case, since we are incepting these practices for the first time, we have kept a focus on various channels, where we want to establish presence. Hence we identified around 10 channels.
b) Level’em up!
Attach these objectives on the thought leadership ladder. It is important to decide the total number of levels on the ladder.Having too many would make the game look difficult to win and having too less will make crossing each level too tough. Also the easier objectives need to be attached to the lower levels of the ladder than the difficult ones. At Kuliza, we also took care that the initial stages not only have easier objectives but also can be completed faster. (finally something valuable was achieved from the hours that went into playing super mario)
3) ‘Points’ to be noted
One you know the objectives of each level, you need to associate points achieved upon completion of a task (or a microtask) and here the creative bug can lead the way. For example, in our game, each level is divided into tasks. The players (employees) get points for doing task (like participating in meetups, forums at lower level to writing case studies, reports, guest columns at higher levels). To complete a level you need to achieve a total number of points and a minimum number of points for each task.
Finally there are booster points for producing content of extraordinary quality, moving fast on the ladder, etc and badges/ rewards for achievements like clearing a level, being the first to clear a level among other, being rank one consistently in a quarter etc.
4) Rules of the game:
Finally you need to think of the loopholes in the game and come up with set of simple rules to be fair and just to all, and keep the motivation level up. Like, everybody starts from zero, even if here might already be active on 5 of the 10 channels. Only quality content is counted and goes up on the channels and nobody should write just for the sake of moving up the ladder.
What comes up is an awesome (but simple) picture of this wonderful game!
However there are certain issues we need to fix and we know this game is not perfect as of now. It lacks challenges in between levels, which are a key part of game mechanics; we need to refine tasks at higher level , think a bit more on booster points. All said, but one thing is sure, this is going to be fun! Once again, comments and feedback are welcome on our ideas.
Image source microtask and iadfw
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Wow. I think you just solved one of the biggest problems B2Bs have. I know so many companies that need to decentralize their thought leadership programs. Yours is the first system I’ve seen to really help motivate that change. Well done and thank you.
Hey David, Glad you liked the post. I would love more of your comments / suggestions on the culture design.
[...] Gamifying thoughtleadership | kuliza How to gamify thought leadership for B2B branding? In my previous blog I had talked about how internal company culture can support companies B2B branding efforts such as thought leadership and creating internal brands. [...]