Publicity Mobile Blog

Musings on the digital/social ecosystem, updates on our mobile app Publicity and lessons learned from building our start-up. http://appstore.com/publicity

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Publicity for Merchants how-to

Welcome.

What is Publicity for Merchants?

Publicity for Merchants is the sister app to the customer facing app Publicity, and is designed just for venue managers and staff. Use Publicity for Merchants to tell people a bit more about your venue, and show people what's going on right now.

How do I get Publicity for Merchants?

Publicity for Merchants is available for free on the Apple App Store, and coming soon to Android. 

www.appstore.com/publicityformerchants

When you register for an account you need to select the venue you want to manage and we will contact you to verify your details. You will then be free to use Publicity for Merchants to share live updates with customers nearby.

How do I create / edit my profile?

Select 'Edit Profile' from the main screen. From here you can:

Update phone and email contact details

Add a profile picture

Add up to 6 other photos of your venue to your gallery

Add a short description to tell people about your venue

Please note that the information under ‘Public Profile’ can be viewed by your customers, and the information under ‘Private Information' can only be viewed by the Publicity team and used to contact you with any questions related to your account.

How do I share live updates?

Select 'Update Status' from the main screen. Here you can share live updates with your followers and people looking for places to go out nearby. This includes:

Status - tell people what’s going on right now!

Photo - show people what’s going on right now!

Live data - use our cool sliders to say how busy it is and what the atmosphere is like right now!

Link your Twitter account to share your live update. Facebook integration coming soon.

How do I share my log in details with colleagues?

Your Publicity for Merchants log in details are unique to your venue, but can used by multiple people at the same time. If you want to share your log in details with other members of staff you're welcome to do so, but please ensure that they comply with our T&Cs when using the app.

I have high-res press photos I want to upload to my gallery, how can I do this?

We recognise many venues will have invested in high-res photos to be used in your marketing and online/social presence. You can upload these to Publicity in one of two ways:

Transfer these to your iPhone (via email, Air Drop, cable etc.), and select ‘Use existing photo’ when uploading to your gallery

Email the photo(s) you would like uploading to [email protected] and we will upload these for you

I have some feedback or great ideas for Publicity, how do I tell you?

Awesome! We want to work closely with venue owners and staff to build a service that helps you promote and run your venues. If you have any thoughts, rants, ideas, feedback, or just want to say hello, please drop us an email at [email protected].

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Competition time for #lbw15. Check-in to a #lbw15 venue on Publicity today and include a photo for your chance to win a £50 bar tab

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London Cocktail Week Competition

To celebrate the awesome London Wine Week we’re offering a £50 bar tab to Publicity members for:

The most cocktails in a photo

The best cocktail selfie

The best bartender action shot

For a chance of winning, simply check-in to a London Cocktail Week venue on Publicity with a photo and comment, include #LCW2014, and share on Facebook and/or Twitter. Easy! We will announce the winners on Twitter on Sunday 12th October

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Watch out!

Have you heard? Apple have made a watch. Yay! But what does this mean? Below are some thoughts on what impact this could have on the senses we use to communicate and interact with each other.

Opinion may be divided. The mainstream will love it and will be queuing overnight to get their hands on one. Designers will debate the UI and features, conclude that Apple have missed an opportunity and they would have done it differently, and then buy one anyway. And technologists will barrate Apple for continuing to expand their closed empire. But one thing is for sure, like it or not, this is big news (if not wholly unexpected).  This is much more than a new product line. It’s not just a new, smaller device to tweet from and measure how far you’ve run; this is a device that is intimately connected to you and becomes a part of your body, integral to the way you communicate and live your life. You will wear it when you sleep, when you work out, even use it to pay for things (let’s overlook the fact that it needs to be paired with an iPhone for now...). Without a doubt we will see the emergence of a plethora of the next killer apps and services that make use of the features enabled through HeakthKit, HomeKit etc. Some of these will be gimmicky, some of these will address very real problems we have, and some of these will create whole new business, even industries. This is great, but the thing that I find really interesting about watch is the possibility to create a whole new way to communicate with each through different senses. For as long as the human has been on the planet, we have found ways to assign meaning to gestures, pictures and sounds; and common alphabets have allowed us to create languages and communicate through written and spoken word. The telephone and the internet has not fundamentally changed how we communicate between each other, but it has made location, distance and time less relevant. We have seen recently the emergence of images as a primary communication tool. Instagram and Snapchat provide platforms for people have entire conversations without words, with their friends and people they will never meet. The front facing camera and the selfie craze has led to people using images to share their emotions and feelings rather than just pictures of objects they see, and even when we do use our key pads to communicate over email and message; emojis are proving increasingly popular as an engaging and playful way to interact with each other. And this brings me on to the Apple watch. In true Apple style they have invented a word that will no doubt become common place over the next decade; ‘taptic’ (presumably derived from haptic: communication through touch). In doing so, have they created a whole new way to communicate digitally through touch? Haptic interactions by definition require physical presence and interaction; the confident shake of a hand, the reassuring pat on the shoulder or the tender embrace of a loved one. They are all very personal, intimate, haptic interactions. But will ‘taptic’ create a new way to communicate through the sense of touch? On Tuesday we saw a demonstration of communication between two devices sending a ‘tap’, drawing shapes, sending emojis and even sharing a heartbeat. As a watch (or other wearable), becomes a primary form factor for communications between humans, will we see touch emerge as a mainstream sensory interaction? Will gestures and touches replace the written word? Will digital haptic interactions get close to the same intimacy as physical ones? And if now sight, sound and touch have been successfully digitised, what’s next? Taste or smell? These are big questions, and I’m sure the more visible impact from watch in the short term will be wearable based games or services that leads the creation of the next Zynga or King, but I believe Apple’s vision for watch is to do more than just enable the next generation of apps and services, it is to enable a new way for us to interact digitally with each other. 

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#publicity #retreat #countryside #mac

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Calling all London Food & Drink Bloggers

We are looking to feature a number of food & drink bloggers in our new going out app for London, Publicity. Publicity is a platform for people to share photos and reviews for places to eat and drink in real-time. We have over 3,000 venues in London and over 1,000 reviews already, and growing every day! 

So if you’re the person that likes to Instagram, Tweet, Tumblr or blog about new places you visit, then Publicity is for you. A dedicated app JUST for going out; no hotels or hairdressers, just pubs, bars, restaurants and clubs. People can check out reviews for places nearby, and follow you to find out the latest places you are hanging out. You can also link your Facebook and Twitter with Publicity to instantly share you photos and reviews across social networks. 

In return for checking-in and posting reviews, we will promote you to our user base and grow your following on Publicity and other social networks. We will also be hosting regular blogger events to connect you with other like minded people from around the industry.

If you're interested in being part of our blogger program, please email us on [email protected] and we'll follow up with more details. You can download Publicity on iPhone here www.appstore.com/publicity.

Ben

Co-founder & Director, Publicity 

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I know what you did this summer

We’ve been a tad quiet of late on the blog, but with a new release in the App Store this week (www.appstore.com/publicity) now is a perfect time to give an update on what’s been going on behind the scenes this summer. Along with the standard summer festivals, weddings, stag dos etc. our Solution Architect Dan has had a baby (congratulations Dan & Kelly). But just because we haven’t had a new app store release for a couple of months doesn’t mean we haven’t been working hard! In addition to some UI tweaks, our latest version includes much improved social media posting so that check-in photos and reviews can be shared across social networks. You can read more about our take on the social media ecosystem in a blog post from earlier this year http://www.blog.publicitymobile.com/post/71744358017/a-take-on-the-social-media-ecosystem, and this has very much guided our product roadmap. In addition to the new features in this latest version, we have been doing LOADS behind the scenes. Ever since we went live we have been trying to make Publicity faster, and we think we’ve nearly cracked it. The performance challenges we have had have been largely due to our database activity. The first hurdle to improve this was to upgrade the data access frameworks, putting our 22 database projects into a framework that is a lot more flexible. Now we have done this, we can really get cracking on improving performance. We think the answer to our performance will be a paging solution to fetch sets of data rather than all at once - think the way Twitter shows you just want you need on the first screen and as you scroll down older data is loaded. This is exactly the type of solution we are implementing for Publicity, so how have we gone about this? ** Warning. The following may get technical ** With a fairly typical client-server architecture, our client sends a request to the server with a ‘key’.  The key could be a username, location ID, review etc. Our service is hosted on Google’s App Engine cloud platform, and as a (bootstrapped) start-up we need to keep our database reads to a minimum to keep the costs of running our service manageable and therefore use dedicated cache. This means that for values stored in the cache (e.g. if someone had searched for that venue recently), we can retrieve the value much quicker and eliminate the need for a database read. With our previous design, the server would look to see if each key in a request is stored in the cache. This is fine for loading one record, but when loading more than one key, the logic would first search for the first key, and then the second, and cycle through until data for all keys in the request from the client had been completed. The result of this is a lot of decision points to load venue data; throw in reviews, photos, summary data etc. and this can take a while. We have to balance putting too much data in the cache because as well as it having size limits (see later notes), it also means that the data isn’t necessarily up to date (as the data isn’t read from the database, only the memory), and our proposition is built around real-time data. With our more flexible data access frameworks we have been able to redesign the database logic to pass all keys in a single request, so if we are going to load over 50 venues, we don’t load each one individually, rather we ask for them all at once. This means we make just one call to the database, collate the results and return them to the client, and the result is improved performance. So this sounds obvious right? Well the challenge has been finding the right values to put in the cache. GAE’s cache works by assigning a unique value to each item in the cache, so for a venue record for example, we have to store them each individually. To pass multiple venues in the same request, we needed code to extract the collated values and store/check them against the cache. This gets complicated when one venue is in the cache and one isn’t etc. We first discovered the complexity of this when we tried to introduce new functionality to run campaigns. We initially built this feature for London Wine Week, and it allows us to display a pre-confgured home screen advert and link to a customised search view with venues participating in the campaign. We will be using the same feature for London Cocktail Week in October and are looking for new opportunities to use it for other events, venues and brands to deliver targeted campaigns in London. We tested this fully in our test environment and it worked fine, but our test environment didn’t have the same number of venues as our production environment, and when we deployed this code into production we found that the data was too big for the cache and it brought our service down. I should note that we were able to roll back to the previous version of server code and get the service back up within two hours, and it’s been our only outage since we launched, however it did teach us a few valuable lessons; namely to have a pre-prod environment which simulates that of the production environment as closely as possible, and not to deploy new code on a Friday afternoon when your heaviest use is over the weekend :-). So if you’re thinking this all sounds pretty complicated, well you’re right, but the benefit is that it has allowed us to implement a paging solution to improve performance by adding in partitioning into how we cache our data, with two caches linked with different keys. This means that we can load historic data in batches, so rather than saying "give me all the data on The Rose & Crown", we can apply partitioning logic in the cache and say ‘give me all the data from Wednesday’, then, ‘give me all the data from Tuesday’ and so on. Hopefully this will hugely improve the performance of the app, allowing the user to get into the app quickly and access the most relevant data (nearest and most recent), and load the rest in the background We’re testing this at the moment and will hopefully have it live by the end of August and we expect to see a massive improvement in performance, so keep an eye out for an update.

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Loving the work of @maxiborge as ever. @ldnwineweek next week. Get your #wristbands

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Lessons Learnt (Part 5) - What do you want to be when you grow up?

Most people (and products) don't know what they want to be when they grow up

I'm sure when Mark Zuckerberg conceived (or stole depending on which story you believe) the idea for Facebook, he didn't think it would turn into a market place, an app platform, a shopping platform, a gaming platform etc. but he did have a vision about connecting people and sharing, and Facebook's products have evolved as they have grown. 

The initial vision for Publicity, and the problem we thought we wanted to solve is actually pretty different to our proposition is today. We thought it was about pubs and bars communicating local and contextually relevant information to potential customers nearby - I'm going out in this area, what is nearby? What we actually have become is more of a social community of consumers sharing information about places to go out that is local and relevant to their context (going out drinking/partying). I'm not actually sure when this happened, and it wasn't a conscious thing. Additions to the app like the activity feed, user profile page and following users were all things that we added along the way, and our Merchant app got de-prioritised.

That's not to say the Merchant proposition isn't important to us and absolutely is high on the radar, but we also need to prioritise this with other new features. Being a bootstrapped start up is challenging, but what it does force you to do is have a lazer focus on where you are spending your development effort. When you prioritise a feature, when something drops off your roadmap, when you get feedback from users you end up moving in slightly different directions until you end up somewhere different to where you thought you would get to when you set off.

Eric Reis in The Lean Starting up calls this pivoting, a conscious decision to change course if your strategy isn't working rather than persevering with something that is not working. Whilst I fully agree with this principle, I actually think that the evolution of a product is less of a conscious decision to pivot, and a more opportunistic, sub-conscious decision to dart around in response to feedback, competitor activity, immediate opportunities, business strategy and other forces within your environment.

It's important to have a vision and an idea of the problem you want to solve, but don't be concerned if you don't know all the answers or exactly where you want to get to. Stay open minded to external influences and feedback, and dart around to discover the right path to take and where it will lead you to.

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Marketing cards have arrived for @ldnwineweek #wine #london #festival #elvinodidflow 02-08 June

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Lessons Learnt (Part 4) - Keep your friends close, keep your users closer

Keep your friends close, keep your users closer

  With any consumer facing product/service, it is important to get feedback from users during the development process and allow this to shape and guide your roadmap and business plan. With Publicity, we initially piloted the app within our friendship groups with somewhat disappointing results. Quite simply, many of our friends were not as excited about our project as we were, and a lot didn't really use the app. This was disheartening at times and we kept on asking ourselves was there something wrong with the product, what could be improved, and even was this a credible proposition that justified the time we were spending on this. But we persevered and once we moved into a soft-launch and saw the app being used by other consumers we started to receive more positive and constructive feedback.

Things we learnt about piloting with our friends:

Don’t necessarily expect them to share your excitement: You might have been working on developing your product/service for months if not years. Late nights, stress, scraping around for cash, highs and lows and you finally get it into the hands of your friends, don’t just expect them to be bowled over with excitement.  It's your baby, but to them its just another app that they will compare against apps that they use every day. Even though they are your friends, whatever you offer still needs to provide them with utility and designing a product that relies on people to use it because they are your mates is flawed.

They might not be representative of your target users: At first glance our friends appear to be representative of our target audience; 20 somethings, live in London, own iPhones etc. But actually what our pilot helped us understand is within this segment we need to address a further sub-set of users. There are net contributors and consumers of information online, and we recognised that many of our friends were very much consumers of information, and that our real target users were the people that use the internet to create and share content with friends and followers. We started following active bloggers and tweeters on the London Food & Drink scene to get a better idea for the target users we wanted to attract and how the way they think and interact with our product is different.

They are more likely to tell you what you want to hear than what you need to hear: Your friends have seen how hard you have worked and don't want to hurt your feelings, so when you ask them what they think about your product they are more likely to say "looks great, I'm really impressed" but then never actually use it. Whilst this may boost your ego, it doesn't provide any actionable insight. Look for data driven insights into user behavior, and don't be afraid to ask for feedback from users you don't know - it will be more valuable than what you get from your friends. Tools like Survey Monkey are great for asking questions to your users that your friends may answer with a politically correct or ego-inflating half-truth.

People who don’t use something can be as useful as those who do: You have worked for months, even years developing your product. You think its great, world changing in fact. And then people, even your best mates don't use it - it doesn't change their lives. Dust yourself off and focus on why it doesn't change their lives. What is the problem you are trying to solve? Do you friends have that problem? If your product doesn't solve it, why not? Focus on why people aren't using your app and use data driven analysis to provide actionable insight. Maybe its too slow, maybe it takes too long to register? Use surveys to find out what it would take to get people using it as you intended. And then refine your proposition based on these insights

Quite simply there is no better feedback for a start-up than getting to real, target users and observing how they use your product. Don’t discount the value that your friends can provide for early stage products, especially if you need to iron out deployment issues, bugs and improve performance, but don’t spend too long ‘perfecting’ your product based on feedback you get from your friends. Keep them close, but keep your users closer.

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Lessons Learnt (Part 3) - So what?

You always need a "so what"

Building consumer products you always need to be able to articulate a clear "so what” as to the benefits and why the consumer should use it. Publicity relies purely on user generated content and differs from sites like View London, Time Out, Bar Chick, Design My Night etc. who employ journalists to create content for them (and some allow user generated content as a side point, but it isn't their main purpose). There will always be people who want to share; bloggers, tweeters, reviewers etc. and the great thing about the internet is it gives people a platform to create and share content, but this is not enough for a successful service and we recognise the need to create compelling “so-whats” as to the utility offered to people who create content (check-in, rate or review) on Publicity. 

Examples of how this has influenced our product roadmap include:

Contextual: “share you check-ins and reviews with people looking to go out to pubs, bars and clubs"

Local: “share your check-ins and reviews with people looking for places nearby"

Community: "share your check-ins and reviews with people who follow you on Publicity"

Social: “share your check-ins and reviews with Facebook friends and Twitter followers”

Combining these 4 points we can come up with a “so what” for check-in that is - “Check-in to share live updates and photos from places you visit with your friends, followers and people looking for places to go out nearby”.

We will maintain a relentless focus on the “so what” as we develop our merchant proposition to allow venues to provide their own updates and information.

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Lessons Learnt (Part 2) - Measure what matters

Don’t ignore negative feedback, and measure what matters not what makes you look better

When you set up a new business it’s very easy to be dismissive of negative feedback - “oh well they don’t understand mobile design”, or “that person must be stupid, everyone else can find the menu there”. In traditional enterprise technology systems (my background), you don’t have to worry so much about user feedback because people are mandated to use systems as part of their daily job, and you have the luxury of providing training material to support this. Consumer facing systems, especially mobile apps need to be simple to use and provide clear utility to the user, especially as they don’t HAVE to use your app. A few examples of where we have listened to people’s feedback (even if we didn’t want to at times) and incorporated into the product are listed below:

The app is too slow

We redesigned many of the pages to have a 3 tab view (e.g. Ratings, Activity, Reviews on the venue page), and architected the web calls in a way that loaded available data as quickly as possible on the first view and loaded the rest in the background 

We architected the web calls to load sets of data rather than all at a time (e.g. 5 x 10 nearest venues rather than all 50)

We played about with optimising our GAE replication datastore, dedicated instances and cache

It takes too long to register

We observed the time it took our friends to go through the registration process, and also noted the % of registrations to downloads, so concluded we needed to streamline our registration process

We removed all of the non-mandatory information from registration to allow the user to get into the app asap, and then added a profile page where they could  go in and update their profile at a later date

I don’t see the point of checking-in

We realised that we needed to be able to create a clearly differentiated check-in proposition from other apps (Facebook, Foursquare etc.)

Publicity is all about providing contextual information for people going out to pubs, bars and clubs (not hotels, restaurants, cafes or museums), so we thought about what you want to know about in real-time and included this in our check in flow (our real-time sliders and the inclusion of photos and comments)

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Lessons Learnt (Part 1) - Identify your MVP

We went into pilot with Publicity in September with approximately 50 of our friends. During this time we tested and developed the app, whilst starting to populate our database of venues and reviews. We went live into the App Store in December as a ‘soft’ launch, and have released 5 app updates since then. With our 6th update now live we are ready to launch Publicity publicly (try saying that 5 times quickly…) and I want to use this as an opportunity to reflect on a few things we have learnt over the last 6 months or so.

This week we will share a lesson learnt every day, starting with:

Identify your minimum viable product, get people using this and be clear about what your learning objectives are for this phase

Many technology projects are obsessed with defining and measuring the value they create with qualitative measures such as NPV, payback etc. They are also generally answerable to ‘The Business’ who have a goal in mind of what they want to achieve and find it hard to accept delivering an inferior product to real customers. The result of this is that teams spend a long term perfecting a product and getting it ready for customers, rather than testing and learning from the way real people use early iterations of it. Eric Reis’ book ‘The Lean Startup’ is a great book and I believe many enterprise projects can learn from his lean principles vs the traditional approach of defining requirements up front and progressing through stage gates. Don’t confuse lean with agile though. Agile is a methodology to deliver requirements in rapid, iterative sprints; whereas lean is about really challenging yourselves on which of these requirements are the minimum you need to deliver something to a user that allows you to observe their behavior and refine your proposition and business model.

  When adopting lean it is very important that you set clear objectives for what you want to learn. You may not have all features you want available, so from what you do have what do you want to measure and observe, and how will this influence decisions you make around future features. This is something we have relentlessly challenged ourselves on with Publicity, to strip back all the ‘nice to haves’ and identify what the minimum we need to learn from is. Some of these have been small tweaks or visual updates, others have been more fundamental to our business model. One such example is our merchant app; originally we planned to launch a consumer app and merchant app in parallel (merchant app to allow a bar to manage their profile and provide updates). Upon challenging ourselves on lean principles, we decided the most important hypothesis to test is would consumers use an app to find nearby venues, read reviews from other people and check-in to provide their own. To test this hypothesis the minimum viable product (MVP) was only a consumer app, so we launched first with this and once we have refined the consumer proposition will introduce our merchant proposition (starting with the MVP).

One word of caution though…your users won’t know what an MVP is, nor will they care. Keep your initial pilot small and limited to people who will be more willing to accept a sub-standard product and constant updates, and only go live publicly when you are confident that your product is stable and provides sufficient utility to an every day user to justify them not deleting it immediately. A tough balance to strike!

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Planning the next #publicity release with Co-Founder and Product Manager @woogene and (nobody is really sure what he does) @bensmith84

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PRESS RELEASE: Publicity - the new going out app for London

14/05/2014

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

- Drinking and partying has never been easier with Publicity, your essential going out app - 

Publicity Mobile Limited today announced the launch of a new bar discovery app available free for iPhone. Publicity allows you to discover nearby pubs, bars and clubs, read reviews and see real-time updates and photos from people there right now. Publicity already has over 3,000 pubs, bars and clubs listed in London, with over 1,000 customer reviews.

All information is user-generated and you can share your real-time updates and reviews with friends and people looking for places to go out nearby. Follow your friends and industry experts to see where they are going and get new ideas for where to hang out.

Publicity has a clever check-in feature allowing you to quickly say what the bar is like right now by sliding a scale for Busyness, Atmosphere, Clientele and Queue, and including a photo and comment. When searching for somewhere to go out, Publicity allows you to filter nearby venues to find what you’re looking for whether it’s cocktails, brunch, a beer garden or somewhere showing the game. You can then check the venue page for more information and updates on what it’s like right now.

Publicity is live in London and will launch in other major cities in the UK later in 2014. You can add new venues yourself using the ‘Add Venue’ option in the menu, and report any venues that close or change names. Publicity is available on iPhone, with an Android version to come later in the year. 

- ENDS -

For more details about Publicity please contact Ben Smith on [email protected] or 07739 363264.

www.publicitymobile.com

www.blog.publicitymobile.com

Twitter  @publicitymobile 

Facebook  /publicitymobile 

Instagram  @publicitymobile 

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Playing the game

Social, Mobile, Cloud, Big Data, Analytics. Now we have a new buzz word. Gamification (although strictly speaking not really a word). Just like the other examples, Gamification is here to stay. But unlike the other examples, Gamification does not make use of any innovative or proprietary technologies; just an understanding of human behavior and what motivates us.

Most products and services are designed around function and efficiency. Games however have the sole focus of pleasing the ‘human’ in the system. Gamification as a business strategy applies Game Mechanics to something that isn't usually considered game-like. The goal is to make that platform, product or service more engaging by adding a gaming edge to it.

What is a game?

To create a game experience 3 things must be present:

The ability to succeed and beat the game (things that aren't achievable aren't much fun)

A call to action that is properly timed and relevant to the behavior you are trying to encourage

A motivation to respond to the call to action

To understand what motivates someone to respond to a call to action, we need to consider their personae:

Achievers: It’s all about public status and rank. They collect achievements and symbols that represent them, and display them proudly.

Explorers: Are motivated by a sense of discovery. They love uncovering the new, unique and unseen.

Socialisers: Prolific Facebookers, tweeters, instagrammers. They love to give kudos, share, comment and vote.

Killers: The most competitive of the bunch. They thrive on competition with other players, like quick action, frequent chances to win and like winning big.

The mechanics of games

There are many different types of game mechanics that explain why people play games. Think of the computer games, arcade games, even board games you may have played when you were younger. Progressing to the next level, seeing your name on a leaderboard, earning coins or extra lives, passing a check point to earn another 30 seconds of playing time; these are all examples of Game Mechanics that create engaging experiences that we crave and become addicted to.

Below are some examples of Game Mechanics. This is by no means a complete list but just a few of examples where the mechanics can be easily related to non-game examples.

Achievements: A virtual or physical representation of having accomplished something. Achievements are a way to give players a way to brag about what they've done indirectly as well as add challenge and character to a game.

Status: The rank or level of a player. Players are often motivated by trying to reach a higher level or status. 

Community Collaboration: The game dynamic wherein an entire community is rallied to work together to solve a riddle, a problem or a challenge. Immensely viral and very fun.

Levels: Levels are a system, or "ramp", by which players are rewarded with an increasing value for an accumulation of points. Often features or abilities are unlocked as players progress to higher levels.

  How brands are using Game Mechanics

Brands spend millions of pounds on marketing to build loyalty, or even just awareness. Gamification is the application of Game Mechanics to a brand, product or service to attempt to go beyond loyalty and build a similar level of addiction and craving that is more commonly found in games. Below are a few examples:

BA Flightpath: Gamifies your travel history and presnts in an infographic, timeline, pins on a map of places you have visited and awards ‘passport badges’ for a certain number of trips and cities visited.

Mechanics used:

Achievements

Status

QuizUp: Quiz game that allows you to challenge your friends and random users. Introduces an element of competition between users, tracks the history of your performance and awards badges for achieving certain milestones and levels.

Mechanics used:

Achievements

Status

Levels

UP by Jawbone: A monitoring service to understand how you sleep, move and eat. Allows you to set daily challenges and goals for your health and routine.

Mechanics used:

Achievements

Nike+: Integrated app and monitoring hardware to track your activity and workouts, set personal goals, challenge friends, discover new running routes and share your successes.

Mechanics used:

Achievements

Status

Community Collaboration

Foursquare: Location based social network that awards points and badges for check-ins at specific locations and ones with certain tags. Points are awarded for certain activities, and Foursquare selects ‘Superusers’ for their helpful contributions to the community. Superusers get additional admin privileges and help maintain the database of venues.

Mechanics used:

Achievements

Status

Community Collaboration

Levels

All of these examples reward users who perform a physical activity (catching a flight, answering a question, sleeping, running) with a digital reward. As the lines between our physical and digital selves are becoming increasingly blurred, Gamification offers a way to drive physical actions by gamifying the experience using digital technologies.

As alluded to in the introduction, there is very little clever tech in these examples. What is clever is the way the brand has taken the data available on a user and other users in the community, and applied Game Mechanics to make a user’s engagement feel more like a game and less like the consumption of a product or service.