Gamification in the age of distraction

This post is sponsored by FunMobility.

Real-time interaction with an audience has become the must-have foundation by which brands and companies market to and understand their consumers’ needs.

Enter gamification. The word gamification – much like the phrase ‘social media’ a few years back – is being lobbed around as the next frontier in web and mobile. Just as nearly every application, website, brand and marketer now includes social media as part of their overall marketing strategy, so too will they consider employing game mechanics to incentivize users in the years ahead.

A recent Gartner report predicts that by 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods, marketing, and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon, and more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application.

Companies and brands need to rethink how they will help their mobile customers search, stream, shop and share. They need to create a new generation of applications that use rich media, user generated content, and location-based services to engage and serve consumers on the go wherever their busy lives might take them.

There is significant opportunity for brands and companies to gamify their services and deliver personalized experiences that lead to true retention, build community, and foster content discovery. FunMobility is a gamification company that uses the FunChat Mobile Engagement Platform to blend chat, multiplayer HTML5 games and virtual currency with a rewards and achievement system into one application called FunChat.

There are gamification zealots and cynics, and the evolution of this new field of customer engagement will be fascinating to watch. There will surely be both poor implementations that have little affect, and “game-changing” deployments that set new standards for how brands, engage, monetize, and ultimately delight their audience and customer base.

This post was written by Daniel Pfeiffer, VP of Marketing at FunMobility, a leading mobile social entertainment company that lets people share, play and connect through their mobile devices. The company’s FunChat Mobile Engagement Platform is an integrated suite of applications and interactive mobile widgets that provide new forms of monetization and distribution, and enable developers and brands to join the conversation with consumers. Companies like FreeAppADay use the FunChat Mobile Engagement Platform to engage more deeply with their users and to monetize their community. FunChat, FunMobility’s free smartphone app, is the first product to seamlessly blend chat and games with popular new features including photo pranks, contests, virtual goods and virtual currency. Visit www.funmobility.com to learn more.