Quick Pitch: Badgeville is a social rewards and analytics platform designed to increase, maintain and influence loyalty for online publishers.
Genius Idea: Applications and web services that reward users through activity-based bonuses like badges and reputation tokens are very trendy right now. These game mechanics encourage repeat behavior, inspire user engagement and reward loyalty.
Badgeville was built to be a plug-and-play solution for publishers wishing to add these social rewards to their services without the heavy lifting.
Badgeville is a just-add-water way to reward your app users or site visitors for their actions. Publishers can define the user behaviors they want to reward and attach points, badges, trophies, levels, status and other forms of reputation to these behaviors.
 |
| Badgeville :) |
Should a user “unlock” an achievement, those tokens can be shared to
Facebook and
Twitter, and users can earn more points in the process. Publishers can also highlight user behaviors through real-time activity streams, leaderboards or friends graphs that rank users against their friends. There’s also a Badgeville API for deeper site or app integration.
Obviously, the idea is to use Badgeville’s platform to motivate users to take additional actions and spread the word about products or services as they level up or earn elevated status. As a user, these additional elements may turn an otherwise stale experience into a competitive sport. So users can prove their ultimate fan status for a blog, website or application they love and get digital rewards in the process. Who doesn’t appreciate a little recognition from time to time?
Badgeville is fresh on the scene but has $250,000 in seed funding and a client list that includes SlideShare, Comcast Sports and Philly.com. We find the idea to be promising, but we also see the potential for badges, reputation and rewards to lose their luster once they become commonplace.
Online designer fashion retailer Bluefly has partnered with social rewards startup
Badgeville to add social gaming into its website experience.
Bluefly will be rewarding customers for onsite shopping behaviors including watching videos, reading blog posts, writing reviews or creating wishlists. The idea is to turn shoppers into Bluefly-engaged fashion gamers.
“Players” will earn badges, based on their behaviors, that highlight their various fashion credentials. The more badges earned, and the higher quality, the better chance the Bluefly shopper will have at unlocking tangible rewards that come in the form of early access to products, badge-holder specials and discounts.
“At Bluefly, our customers are highly engaged in the world of fashion. They are voting on celebrity styles; they are talking with each other on our site to discuss outfits. Our goal is to look for innovative ways to foster that passion and to create opportunities for interaction,” says Bluefly CEO Melissa Payner. “The partnership with Badgeville is a great addition to our site because social games incentivize our customers for their interactions — interactions which we see as a key component of growing and strengthening the Bluefly community.”
While its unknown how shoppers will react to the new system, Bluefly, if successful in converting its customers into more engaged shoppers, has an opportunity to be a trendsetter among its fashion retail competitors.
The deal is also a win for Badgeville; the young startup already has competitors such as
Bunchball in the white label social gaming space. This particular partnership should help Badgeville stand out and attract more top-tier clientele.
Both Bluefly and Badgeville are mum on whether money exchanged hands as the partnership was formed.
References:
1) Mashable
In the blog I try to demystify what keeps you addicted to these games.
