Marketing 2.0:
Gaming, Widgets, Blogging, RSS, Podcasts and More
By Sandy Carter
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Focus on Participation with Serious Gaming
A shift in demographics has pushed a post-dot-com generation to seek an online experience with an emphasis on entertainment. Serious gaming is a new way to capture the channel for education and enablement. With the number of people growing up with gaming as part of their heritage, gaming can be a familiar way to teach new concepts.
Who is this gaming generation? According to the Entertainment Software Association, the average game player is 33 years old. Forty-seven percent of all gamers fall in the 18-49 age range. Twenty-four percent are more than 50 years old. The average age of MBA students varies by school, but they are generally in their late twenties for a full-time program and late thirties for an executive MBA program. There are already more Gen X and Gen Ys, where the primary thrust of the gaming generation exists, than there are baby boomers.
Author's John Beck and Mitchell Wade wrote a book called The Kids Are Alright: How the Garner Industry is Changing the Workplace about how gamers are impacted by games. A few leading-edge companies are using games for training. In the government market, we see examples, including training for military and first responders. Healthcare examples include Remission, a game designed to teach kids about cancer and simulators that teach surgeons how to perform a particular procedure. And one of my favorite places to eat ice cream, Cold Stone Creamery, has a retail service game to teach the retail fundamentals.
How does gaming translate to training? In Figure 10.11, we see why gaming matters.
According to The Kids Are Alright: How the Garner Industry is Changing the Workplace, to succeed in training gamers, one must create a curriculum which
- Aggressively ignores any hint of formal instruction
- Leans heavily on trial-and-error (after all, failure is nearly free, you just push "play again")
- Includes lots of learning from peers but virtually none from authority figures
- Is consumed in very small bits, exactly when the learner wants, which is usually just before the skill is needed
- Allows for people to take risks in a safe environment
- Allows for players to achieve a skill or talent that is not only meaningful but also perceived as having value
So gaming and marketing intersect in that marketing needs to enable and train the channel and ecosystem. Your channel and ecosystem is most valuable when they are knowledgeable and excited about your products and services. Serious gaming enables universities, partners, and your own sales team to learn the portfolio in an innovative yet valuable way. The unique platform facilitates the presentation of complicated material in a way that is engaging.
Before you start with a serious gaming effort, make sure you define your objectives. Are you going to use the game for teaching 101 fundamentals? Will an interactive learning-lab experience be included? From my experience, our complementing lab was a best bet for the success of our gaming solution. Also, you are probably currently doing traditional types of training. Make sure your gaming efforts are complementary to and incorporated within existing and institutional curricula. We also found the institutional groups helpful and, in fact, found gaming was most effective in conjunction with face-to-face classroom debriefs.
In addition, define your initial target audience. Will you target MBA, Executive MBA, or undergraduate business and information systems customers? Will you first go to partners and your ecosystem or to universities? Make sure you think through your planning in this area. Because serious gaming is new, read through, digest, and play the Innov8 game that is featured in my case study for IBM in Chapter 17, "Innovation, Engagement, and Business Results: Adidas Group, ConAgra Foods, and Tellabs." For a sneak peek, see Figure 10.12!
Top Five Lessons Learned for Serious Gaming
Serious gaming is an opportunity to teach, drive interest, and "show," not just tell your potential customers about your products. The focus here is new, so explore the following tips for serious gaming, but know that these will evolve with the market:
- Determine your demographics: Does gaming fit your target audience? There is a generational divide that challenges marketers today. Selecting the right way to educate will be a combination of new techniques such as gaming with continued focus on traditional training like classroom and online. Gaming is for one of the segments of our society that likes to learn via activity.
- Pick core areas to focus on with your gaming training: There are more natural areas to focus a gaming scenario. Make sure you are planning the areas of your business that work well in this Marketing 2.0 technique.
- Spend time on the teachable moments: Think through your scenarios as teachable moments. For IBM's game, we spent more time in the scenarios and keypoints that gamers would have to grasp than on the actual development of the game. Leverage the teachable moments and the way to learn in bite-size chunks.
- Take the gaming concept to the limit: Have a protagonist, hero, or heroine, and have the game in a competitive mode. Don't skip the cast, the story, and the theatrics. Have fun!
- Work with universities to understand how to train: They add so much value to the thought process of your channel education plan.
Focus on Sharing with Widgets and Wikis
A widget is a mini-Web application that can be put onto a Web page, desktop, blog, or social profile that streams information in a more consumable fashion, usually containing some visual information. It is a dynamic, customizable, and convenient innovative medium. There are many possibilities for desktop widgets to assist a user in his area of work by delivering relevant, filtered information right on the user's desktop. A valuable widget is to present the most relevant information that someone uses daily. According to Niall Kennedy, "The Google gadget ecosystem received 960 million page views last week, a 36 percent jump from just one month ago." For some examples, see Figure 10.13.
For a widget to be successful, it cannot just be an advertising mechanism; it needs to be a vessel to deliver your brand promise. For example, Shervin Pishevar, cofounder and CEO of Social Gaming Network (SGN) and board member of Free Webs, shares an example of Acura. Acura is commonly regarded among the autorati as having the best navigation systems on the market. It's developed the Acura RDX Traffic widget that delivers real-time traffic flow (and ebb) to a user's computer. It's a highly useful application, and because of Acura's positioning, it reaps more benefits from this widget than its competitors would. Shervin presents another great widget example from Amsterdam. The Rijksmuseum has developed a widget that is updated daily with a new picture from the world-famous museum's impressive collection. An icon on the picture spins it when clicked, revealing the piece's title, artist, date, some historical background, and a link back to the museum's Web site. Currently, the widget is just a desktop widget, but the fresh content it delivers each day would make it appealing to site owners and citizen publishers if it is ever available in that format.
With widgets, you need to ensure that you get it to your audience's desktop, and you need to ensure it stays there. To get the widget to someone's desktop means that the person has to want it there. Going to an already existing community to further inscribe your brand loyalty is a great way to leverage and use widgets. There are many examples of leveraging demand generation to get someone to use a widget. Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research: Social Computing, gives an example of Sony leveraging prizes for a widget, in this case, Rock You's vampire application. He writes, "Sony didn't beat the three million existing users with heavy advertising over the head, instead it offered value by giving away prizes and tied in a movie that already existed."
Getting the widget on the desktop is one thing, but then it was to provide value and be continuously updated with CNN-like tidbits of relevant and valued information. One of the things I learned doing our Smart SOA (trademarked) widget was to leverage a specialized firm that had experience with widgets. They provided me a great-looking widget (see Figure 10.13), and I provided the great content that I wanted to get out to my widget users.
Other uses for widgets that energize your market and channel include the following:
- Customer support mechanism: A widget can be designed in a manner so that the end user can ask a question or report an SOA problem, and the appropriate parties with the company can see that inquiry and respond accordingly, for example, putting a consultant in touch with the client or answering the question directly, and so on. Today, support chat rooms and e-mail question forms are often utilized, but this requires additional human effort to locate the appropriate division or person within a company to resolve the issue.
- Document approval processes: Often a presentation deck or other document needs to be reviewed, updated, and approved by various people located in various parts of the world. Today, Web applications, e-mail, and Lotus Notes® databases are leveraged to try to provide an approval hierarchy, but often the communication of key feedback and so on is lost or misconstrued along the way. The concept of a widget providing real-time information via RSS feeds can be leveraged to ensure everyone has access to the latest document of interest; additionally, the appropriate persons can provide feedback (written or verbal) that can then be tracked alongside that item's entry in the widget. Upon approval, the item and its feedback records are stored in a more permanent location (because most widgets are not designed as a long-term document reference repository).
The real beauty of widgets is that they narrow your scope of information and bring it to you rather than the other way around. It is so easy to become overwhelmed by all of the information out there. Strange as it might sound, sometimes going to a Web site is too much work. For example, take the blogs on my RSS feed. There's no way that I will go out and visit each of them once a day. I don't have that kind of time. However, if I take a quick look at my RSS widget, I can not only see the titles of any updated postings, but I can also read a selection from that posting, and then I decide if it is worth it for me to visit that Web page.
Companies should work with widgets to cut through the clutter of the marketplace and energize their channels.
