Engagement is the holy grail of online marketing today and one of the emerging digital trends is the ‘gamification‘ of online platforms. It means the adding of game-like functionality or features to non-game applications.

Everyone likes to play games right? So, give them something fun to do and you’ll keep them longer, and they’re more likely to come back. The key thing is making it goal oriented. One of the biggest examples is FourSquare where you can attain the goal of becoming Mayor of a place.

The approach takes ideas from games and applies them to other areas where the aim is to encourage certain behaviours, such as returning customers. This Google Insights chart shows the rise in interest in the term as shown through search. The graph largely reflects US search, resulting from the more mature online market there.

Ways of gamifying include:

• giving badges for achieving goals (eg. FourSquare)
• showing a progress bar for things like form competions, profile completions eg. LinkedIn
• achievement levels for customer loyalty
• games with virtual rewards
• games with real rewards like entering a draw or getting a discount
• adding small games to entertain and encourage site retention

One of the recent ones created in Ireland was for Tourism Ireland and is a game on  Facebook. You can play it for yourself at IrelandTown. What would be interesting to see is how successful the game is and how the success is being measured. Tourism Ireland seems to be the first national tourism agency to use a game like this to promote their country and it is certainly an innovative strategy to use. By playing the game the user agrees to:

• allow IrelandTown access to the user’s basic publicly shared data
• allow direct emails from IrelandTown
• allow wall updates
• allow IrelandTown access the user’s data

This is valuable data and is most likely well-targeted in that people who play the game will probably already have some interest in Ireland.

But it’s not just a digital marketing trend, gamification is being used in training and various kinds of product design.

In the online context, it’s a little like the incredible popularity of social networks – people like to be social. Like all the best ideas, it’s obvious in hindsight. The online technology and broadband facilitated this growth. Similarly, people like to play games and earn things. Again the technology is there (and accessible) to facilitate. The key thing is tapping in to human behaviour.

Learn more about gamification in Business Week’s CEO Guide to Business Gamification.

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1. Weekly Web Word – Google Sandbox
2. Weekly Web Word: Crowdsourcing
3. Weekly Web Word: QR Code
4. Weekly Web Word – ‘anchor text’