Looking to add a game to your communications mix? Steve Brenner, CEO of St. Louis-based Next-POV, quarterbacks the ongoing development of Siemens Industry’s Plantville game. Creating a game as a communications tool can be a challenge for a company that traditionally is product focused (like Siemens Industry) and not marketing focused, says Brenner. Yet Plantville is changing Siemens’ culture and has been a boon internally. Here are three tips from Brenner on how to approach gamification for your organization:
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Set your game’s objectives: Are you trying to entertain and attract an audience, or share knowledge? The game itself is only a means to an end, says Brenner. The ultimate goal of Plantville is to generate sales leads.
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Allow access: Give the development team freedom to gather information about your organization. “We spent three months getting into the heads of plant managers,” says Brenner.
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Don’t scrimp on measurement: Besides basic Web site analytics, Siemens gathers metrics on the decisions that players make as they go through the game. If a number of players order a particular Siemens product for the plant, Siemens can concentrate on marketing that product in the real world.
PR News subscribers can read more about Siemens Industry's Plantville, a gaming hit in the B2B space, in the case study: "Siemens Industry's Online Platform Plantville Proves That Some Games Really Can Be Played at the Office."
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