I will state now, I am not claiming to be an expert on habits, however – I wanted to share some thoughts on how gamification can help with habit building.
There are several habit or behaviour models out there. My two favourites are Nir Eyal’s Hook model and BJ Fogg’s Behaviour Model.
For the sake of this blog, I am concentrating on the Fogg model, I personally have a better understanding of this one. I am reading Nir’s book at the moment so expect me to expand on this concept soon!
Personal brand, like gamification, it one of those terms that seems to come up more and more these days.
In a nutshell, personal brand is the image of yourself that others see. By this, I don’t mean the clothes you wear or you haircut (though this can be part of it), I mean something deeper and more important in the long term.
Have you ever searched for your name on the internet? If not, head to Google and do it now (then come back!).
Now, answer these questions about the first page of results;
Seeing the news that Badgeville was to gamify social networks got me thinking about the old days. Social networks are nothing new. Back in “the day”, we all used to use forums (and bulletin boards before that) and chat rooms to be social online. Forums tended to focus on specific topics, with chat rooms just a real time free for all. What got me thinking though was realising that a lot of these used to include elements of Gamification, forums especially.
There was this stuff called kudos or Kama. When you said something of interest or that was helpful, users could reward you with these – a bit like when someone likes you on Facebook or +1 ‘s you on Google+. Kama and time served would also very often go towards some sort of rank on the forum. Higher rank and Kama signified a user you could trust and who was useful or interesting on the forums.
Just recently, Klout in their scoring algorithm. This something changed quite a few people’s scores. Some for the better and some for the worse.
Now you see this proves the point I was making in Catching the Klout. Chasing numbers is, in many ways, pointless when it comes to social networking.
Using arbitrary numbers to check what kind of influence or engagement you have, can only be a small part of the over all picture. This is especially true when the numbers can be affected on the whim of developers at Klout.
Google+ is hot property right now. Technology bloggers the world over are writing thousands of words a day about it (myself included).
Sitting in a kind of partway space between the simplicity of Twitter and the do a bit of everything nature of Facebook, it is a technology that is still finding its true place in the social media world.
So far, it seems that where Facebook is for communicating with friends and family and Twitter is for engaging with new audiences and meeting new friends, Google+ is for talking at acquaintances!
