Gamification is a process that can be used to measure both long and short term business innovation objectives. Essentially gamification transforms your goals into a scoring procedure, whereby employees can review their results and compete against each other. The secret to widespread adoption is ensuring that the gamified processes, applications or systems have become a habit for employees. Gamification takes the data-driven techniques that engage gamers and applies these techniques to company tasks in order to add value to your business.

Gamification and Growth Hacking

A vital component of growth hacking is growing a businesses social media following. While this is generally a long and arduous process, gamification can help set short term goals and measure different strategies. Twitter has a variety of metrics available to measure the effectiveness of a tweet and whether your following has improved. Turning these metrics into a scoring method is one way to gamify growth hacking. For example, each like on twitter is worth 1 point, each retweet is worth 5, a new follower is 5 points, a reply is 10 points, and so on. At the end of each week, every twitter user visits twitter analytics, finds the raw data and turns that data into points. You are able to compare your score to other employees scores or to your own past scores.

The scoring system, ie, the score given to each metric would depend on the importance you place on the metric. Most twitter users prefer a re-tweet to a like or a reply to a profile visit but ultimately you're able to rank the metrics how you see fit.

Consequences of Gamification

It seems like such a simple procedure - turning data into a score. Why is it effective? Well it taps into the motivations and desires that exist in all of us for achievement, reward and satisfaction. As much as we may try to hide it at times, one of our main motivators is to be better than the person next to us. This is reflected in survey findings.

A survey conducted by TalentLMS, showed that:

• 89% of those surveyed stated that a point system would boost their engagement.
• 82% are in favour of multiple difficulty levels and explorable content.
• 62% stated that they would be motivated to learn if leaderboards were involved and they had the opportunity to compete with other colleagues.

Despite it's simplicity, gamification works. It allows you to innovate and measure your performance. The only decision left to make is how you'll gamify your current marketing processes.