Stealing From Video Game Developers

Video games can teach e-commerce merchants many lessons. Video game developers can teach even more valuable lessons. This Curagami post shares five tips online merchants should steal today including:

• Create Great Products
• Develop Community and then Listen, Learn, and Change
• Give customers chances to collaborate
• Forge badges, banners, and other rewards
• Define how rewards are earned but don’t forget serendipity and surprise

With such great marketing is there any wonder why Blizzard Entertainment has more than thirty million Overwatch players? Doomfist is a new brilliantly named Overwatch character and gamers are talking about little else this summer. Doomfist is more important than Game of Thrones to gamers. 

Stealing the community, gamification, and engagement tips from video game developers will help any online merchant move from "website" to "platform" and from "us" and "them" to we: http://www.curagami.com/e-commerce-lessons-doomfist/ 

Ecommerce is changing fast. This Scenttrail Marketing post shares and explains 30 "must master" to win ecommerce strategies and tatics.

Does your website have game? It is going to because gamification and games are how you win hearts, minds and loyalty over time online.

Ecommerce Is A Mobile & Social Game
The more I do this, web marketing, the more game-like everything feels. Mobile and social are acting like huge pythons squeezing content into a game. Content shock is the other trend impacting your content marketing.

In 2003 your content could be factual and visually boring and it would work. Not so much anymore. Today you must think of your content like pieces on a chess board. How can you achieve your goals by developing relationships between your content, your customers and advocates?

Mobile and social make ecommerce a game too as WaNeLo.com demonstrates. WaNeLo.com is a "clean slate" built to mashup massive amounts of content that already exists, make creating "YOUR WaNeLo.com Store" fun (you swipe through content) and collect a nice fee for being the first retailer to get the many changes to online commerce brought to you by a smart phone near you (and most of the time people are within 10' of their smart phones at all times).

We began the conversation about how to make an online store a game a few weeks ago on G+ (https://plus.google.com/+MartinWSmith/posts/RdjAjWoJTHw ).

This @HaikuDeck shares how to make content more game-like. Here are a few easy ways merchants can begin to create gamification:

* Create an Ambassadors Program to identify your 1% Contributors and 9% Supporters.
* Provide a public profile for Ambassadors (if they choose) with a good URL (cool.com/ambassadors/marty for example).
* Curate great Ambassador content first to OTHER Ambassadors and next, and this should be a smaller set, to the public via your site.

* Begin to track key Ambassador functionality such as social shares, links and likes.
* Create feedback loops for Ambassador actions (200 Likes, 100 links and 3,000 social shares to date or yesterday or last week).

* Steal LinkedIn's famous, "Your profile is 80% complete" Call-To-Action (CTA).

Might seem strange to talk about adding gamification to ecommerce NOW when the holiday tsunami is only days away, but most ecommerce teams have their plans made up. While social media means any plan must respond to what is happening now, most ecommerce teams are working a quarter ahead.

Successful gamification isn't easy, but rewards are huge. Instead of invading Russia in the winter we suggest merchants begin building foundation by creating an Ambassador Program. Ambassadors, those fans, friends and supporters willing to help, become critical when you want to turn gamfication ON (and you will).

By mashing eBay's Pitman with Motif's Walia we see the functional, social and mobile future of online retailing, ecommerce and mobile / social shopping.

Stop Using Stock
Stop Using Stock & Increase Ecommerce Conversion In 2014
If your #ecommerce  website uses #stockphotography  and you want to make more money in 2014 then stop. This post has ideas for weaning off of stock such as:

* Use @HaikuDeck (http://www.haikudeck.com) to mine creative commons. 
* Ask customers / visitors to share their photos.
* Tell the story of your products (another great plase for UGC User Generated Contests).
*  Embed a photographer (hire a photographer to live in your company for a few days, week or a month). 
* Ask your employees to hellp bet many of them take pictures when I was Director Marketing at Atlantic BT there where three or four GREAT photographers.
* Shoot a lot of video (videos tell great visual stories and are also a great place for UGC see my Scoop on Vidrack http://sco.lt/8ePWtN . 

Why Etsy.com Is Crowdfunded Gamification
When I saw the staggering difference between Etsy.com's pagespread (pages in Google) vs. Red Envelope, one of my favorite gift sites from back in the day, something very DIFFERENT was going on. 

Etsy.com 19,000,000 pages in Google. 
RedEnvelope 31,000 pages in Google. 

At first I thought the power of Etsty.com was in its User Generated Platform approach. Some of the power is in the framework, but another key driver is the soft gamification they employ to focus spotlights on some artists and product categories. 

Etsy.com requires email marketing since 19,000,000 pages means finding anything without curation is nearly impossible. Instead of straight curation based on a known competitive rule set Etsy.com gamifies much like a Vegas slot machine. 

Vegas slot machines use serendipitous condition. We pattern creating humans believe we create a pattern when we pull the single arm of these "bandits", but there is not Stimulus-Reward response. 

Randomizing "winning" means addiction is easy, quick and complete. Etsy.com randomizes their curation so each artist is sure their moment in the sun is around the next corner. One more pull of the single arm will surely produce a winning response. 

The risk of this gamification is the algorithm doesn't find content fast enough to put off an artist's desire to stop game play. The good news is Etsy.com's engine is the ONLY reinforcement. 

When an artist creates an Etsy.com site they drive social traffic to it and some of that traffic, since it is highly segmented and qualified, will convert creating the first round of reinforcement with no cost to Etsy.com other than the quickly depreciating community code. 

The gap between initial acceptance, use of an artist's social net to create their first conversions and the point when an artist stops game play is when Etsy.com's algorithm must rescue the content. With so much game play (19M pages), Etsy.com knows an artist's lifecycle probably within minutes of the change from phase to phase. 

So YES Etsy is gamified crowdfunding since the platform makes a tremendous return on the first conversions, those that come from the artist's push to their social net, and cost of new artist acquisition is reduced by scale and existing artist advocacy (something that is also mathematically predictable). 

  

The video game industry is worth more than $100bn worldwide, so it's no surprise that businesses are using gamification to try to boost sales.