Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rajat Paharia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamification Leader Bunchball (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me what the big data aspect of this is?

Rajat Paharia: Gamification wouldn’t exist without big data. Gamification is completely based on statistics – statistics about users and the things they are doing. In context to the book I mentioned earlier, Loyalty 3.0, Loyalty 1.0 was about loyalty programs. These programs had one data stream coming in, which was purchase data from your customers, and then one constituent that was being served, which was your customers.

What happened is that almost everything we are doing is being mediated by technology. We all turned into walking data generators, whether it is our entertainment life, community life, work life, or finance life. Everything we are doing is throwing off data, and all that data can now be used as a raw material for the next-generation loyalty program. It is not just about the purchases you make, it is about every single thing you do. That data is not only generated by your customers, but also by your partners and employees. Big data is an interesting term. I would say it is not so much the overall volume of data, but the volume per individual that we are now generating that has become interesting. Combine that data with the latest understanding of what motivates people and then add gamification, which at the end of the day is a data-driven motivational technique from video games. All together, you have this really powerful engine for driving engagement, motivation, participation, and true loyalty.

People often ask why this comes from the world of video games. It makes perfect sense. From “Pong” in the 1970s to “Call of Duty” now, video game designers have always live in this world, where they had every single piece of user activity data. They know every single thing you have done. With that abundance of data, those guys have honed and refined those techniques over the past 40 years, have taken that data, and are using it to motivate better performance in their games. Fast forward to today, in the real world. We are now living in a world that is generating just as much data as any video game does. If you are a business trying to figure out how to take that data and use it to motivate better performance, where would you look? You would look to the world of video games, where they have had 40 years of experience doing this. That is where and why that stuff came out of the world of video games, because those guys have figured it out. They have lived in the future for the past 30 or 40 years, and the world is just now catching up. You have all this data you are collecting, and one way of changing behavior is showing it to people.

The other thing is to give people goals around it and to reward them creating milestones and giving them a community to compete, collaborate, and share with, giving them fast feedback when they are doing good or bad things. That is what gamification is. It is about taking all that data and using it to motivate better performance. On the flip side, these systems generate their own set of data. I now have a big list of my users and point numbers next to their names that indicate how engaged and valuable they are, what the things are they have done, what the content is they have consumed, at what times they are consuming it, etc. I have all this data about their activities that I can now use to do all sorts of interesting things.

SM: Who do you think has presented one of the best examples of gamified business applications?

RP: The SAP community network. This is a semi-neutral view of the world. They had a customer–partner–employee community for 10 years now. It started in 2003. For nine years they had a contributor-reputation program. They have been doing this for a long time with a reputation lens on gamification, using it to motivate better quantity of contribution, quality of contribution, and to enable their participants to build a meaningful reputation in the SAP community that could have a direct career impact. If you are on the leader board of one of their products, people who are looking for an expert are going to come to you. Those guys have been an amazing pioneer in using these techniques and community for a giant B2B community site.

SM: What else do you see as an interesting example?

RP: EpicMix built a mobile application for skiing and snowboarding. They have this mobile app that uses the GPS from the phone and tracks all your statistics while you are skiing – how fast you are going down the runs, which ones you have done, if you have done every single run on the mountain during the course of the day, etc. All this data that has always been there and that wasn’t easily captured now can be captured in a very automated and scalable way, enabling people to have goals. It is not just about skiing down the hill, it is about “Can I ski down those hills?” or “Can I beat the times of all my friends?” They have done all this stuff that is incredibly good. This is not a customer of ours, but it is very cool, and it adds a whole other layer to people’s skiing and snowboarding day.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rajat Paharia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamification Leader Bunchball
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