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Badgeville launches Dynamic Game Engine and Widget Studio

Badgeville makes marketing through gamification even easier with the release of its Dynamic Game Engine and Widget Studio.
Written by Robin Harris, Contributor

In an era where rewarding customer involvement has exploded to a whole new level through social media, companies are starving to get their hands on solutions that they can leverage to take advantage of social gaming and it's popularity. Back in December I wrote about Moxsie.com's use of Badgeville as their weapon of choice for building customer incentive through a Facebook badge program in an effort to involve their fans in the buying process.

Badgeville won the Audience Choice Award when it launched at the Tech Crunch Disrupt last September and the demand for their social reward system has gone nowhere but up. Industry leading brands like Island Def Jam (Universal Music), The Active Network, Bluefly.com and more have signed on with Badgeville to harness the viral power of gamification to help reach user-driven objectives, turning it into profit.

Dynamic Game Engine and Widget Studio

There are two objectives that most companies are now trying to figure out in social media. First, how do we include our customers and potential customers in our marketing/PR strategy by making them feel like our extended marketing and PR team? Second, how do we retain them as brand evangelists by staying connected with them and keeping the relationship alive and fun? Now that gamification has reached a new level of popularity thanks the rampant success of some of Zynga's ideas, Badgeville has introduced a way for companies that aren't Zynga, to take advantage of the social network gaming craze.

According to the official press release:

"Badgeville’s new Dynamic Game Engine revolutionizes the gamification industry with support for advanced business rules to trigger rewards including time-based mechanics, activity missions, and integrated game mechanics across a network of web sites, mobile, and virtually any digital property. This gives brands the ability to create a consistent rewards experience across their web, mobile, and social programs, optimizing the ROI on game mechanics designed to drive and track user behavior."

Need to make sure you reach people outside of Facebook or Twitter through your other web properties? This is where the Widget Studio comes in. You can integrate easily with your other websites or mobile user experience no problem. It features lightweight, configurable widgets to help drum up the competition and involvement including leader boards, live activity streams, showcases, and more.

Badgeville has become one of the most popular SaaS companies in the social space in such a short amount of time and fortunately for them, it has always been part of the plan according to CEO Kris Duggan. "Our vision for building Badgeville is to offer the most powerful, lightweight Software-as-a-Service Platform to reward, influence and measure user behavior. Now with a growing team of thought leaders in game design, engineering, and social media, this vision has become a reality.”

According to Gartner Research, gamified initiatives and their integration into the consumer goods marketing mix will be become as important as Facebook itself. They've found that more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application by 2014.

For you social media and marketing professionals out there (particularly those in a consumer space), have you considered gamification as an option or opportunity? If you've used a service like this before, were the results what you expected? I'd love to hear from you.

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