Gamification-Does itreally motivate your audience to engage, achieve goals and become a more active contributor within your community?

Based on our most recent implementation of gamification at Cisco Live San Diego 2015 last month, the answer to this question is an astounding YES.

Let's take a quick step back. What exactly is gamification? Gamification can be defined in a number of ways but I like to define it as the application of online game mechanics in a non-game setting to motivate users to engage, achieve goals and build loyalty through the use of intrinsic (and extrinsic) rewards and recognition.

One of our most recent applications of gamification at Cisco was applied to our largest yearly customer event -Cisco Live (San Diego) and this time we targeted the DevNet Zone, also known as our Developer program.

What were our goals in implementing gamification at the event?

• Register new members to the DevNet Community and DevNet site
• Increase participation within the self-paced learning labs, classroom sessions, hackathon, theater talks and demo pods
• Create specific missions and capture activities completed by each player within the DevNet Community
• Recognize and reward top participants via an onsite live leaderboard by showcasing virtual achievements/badges earned and awarding winners/leaders with onsite tangible prizes

We made sure we could track the success of our gamification project. The numbers speak loud and clear.

1. Gamification drives engagement.
2. Gamification motivates users to change behaviors, develop their skills, achieve goals and thus drive innovation.

It was fascinating to watch attendees within the DevNet Zone glued to their seats during learning labs, stay up all night to complete the Hackathon event (of course the$10,000 first place prize didn't hurt either!), constantly check the onsite live leaderboard to see where they stood in the competition.  It quickly became clear that our DevNet audience is not only highly passionate and competitive about coding, etc. , they are also highly motivated on an emotional level to achieve personal goals when recognized publicly for their skills, expertise and achievements.

Results:

Registrations & Activity: