Sunday, 26 January 2014

Gamification Apps: A blessing for attendee engagement at events

“If you think of the reality of sitting in the audience at an event, you pick up your phone and the event organizer has about 10 seconds to capture your attention before you’re distracted by Candy Crush”( says Aaron Price, co-founder of Livecube), as event planner, what would you do? 

Price’s answer is —— Livecube! This is a new event app using gamification to incentive attendees to stay focused and optimize their engagement in the event. Livecube.Co was founded in New York in 2013, the app they launched has already successfully practiced by some fortune 10 and fortune 50 companies. It has been a hot topic during GSummit, the event focusing on gamification held in San Francisco. Well, how does the app work?

Livecube provides a platform on which event organizers can create schedules and lists of speakers of the event. The list of prizes for being engaged to the event, such as cash rewards, gift card, or free parking tickets also can be found in the content. The prizes could be creative like an opportunity to participant a one-on-one session with C.E.O or any products offered by the sponsors. The app has a built-in Twitter-box so that attendees can easily get into the network by logging in Twitter and participate within the app without distraction of other tweets. Attendees will use this app on their mobile phone or tablet to check in within a period of time before each session to gain points, also by posting tweets or photos of event, answering or reposting others’ tweets to get points. Clicking on and checking any of the sponsors’ logo within the app will earn additional points. For speakers and event organizers, they can observe the event by checking activities of different sessions. It helps them to know the most popular session, and view clearly the discussion under a particular session. After the event, there would be more event-related missions on the app for getting higher points to win the prize which could be check every day the event and view more sponsors. It allows better close-event-games than just end the event and lose involvement day by day.   

Since event app is no longer a novelty recently (there are similar apps like Slido, EventMobi, SpotMe), event organizers are seeking for more suitable app for themselves. Concerning this, Livecube can be tailored for different companies for their own system. The fact that it blends game mechanism to the app not only optimize the engagement of attendees before-during-after the event, also provides more sponsorship chances between the event organizers and sponsors regarding to the revenue. It is a good example to witness the practice of newly trend of gamification in the event industry.

In the beginning of this year, event technology company QuickMobile released a white paper which predicted that Mobile Event Apps will transform the engagement spectrum. Gamificataion was highlighted as a main trend of mobile event apps. Gamification transplants the key concepts of game mechanics and game dynamics to non-game applications. It has been used to the areas of behavioral economics, community management, customer loyalty programs and game design. 

As newly introduced to event industry, Gamification offers the solution of catching and maintaining attendees’ attention. Game mechanics include challenges, gifts and charity, leaderboards, levels, points, and virtual goods and spaces, which turn an ordinary activity into a game. In an event, activities that incorporate game mechanics show the traits of challenging, fun, and satisfying. Game dynamics includes achievement, altruism, competition, rewards, self-expression, and status, which are the factors that drive attendees to participate in the game. Such activities with excitement and passion give attendees the experience of game player. They feel fully involved as they are competing or associating with other attendees. In this way, gamification can help event planners achieve couple of objectives. First, it motivates people to participate and improves attendance, especially at the low period as early mornings or at the end of the day. Second, it improves networking, attendees are encouraged to visit certain booths, connect with certain people, create and share content, attend key sessions, etc. Third, interact through social media, attendees’ attention is maintained as well as the number of tweets and social media hits during the event is increased. Overall, attendees can have more fun and better experience of the event.


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