Merit Badges For The Corporate Intranet To Incentivize Adoption

I've been thinking about the badges that a few social sites are using as incentives to their user communities - specifically foursquare and, more recently, Blip.  So many people I talk to are looking for ways to encourage adoption of their enterprise intranets, knowledge bases, and collaborative workspaces.  Plugging in a suite of profile badges, easily customized for each organization's desired behaviors, would be a fun, low-overhead way to achieve that.

To be clear - I'm not talking about the icons, often referred to as badges, that are placed on a web page to link to social media services.  I mean the icons that you earn for different behaviors and activities when you're a member of the site.

Examples of Foursquare's badges:

 
  Blip's badges:

  
 

I'm most familiar with Blip's badges, and the way they work maps really well to an enterprise portal (I'm thinking SharePoint).  Basically, in the Blip scenario:

• You earn badges automatically for behaviors on the site, such as blipping a certain number of songs, or earning a certain number of props (i.e. positive ratings)
• Each badge has several levels, so that once you earn it there is incentive to continue the behavior and reach the next level.
• Every time you earn a new badge or level, it's posted on your profile, and you receive an email notification, with links to publish the good news to your status on the more popular social networking sites.

On a SharePoint intranet, there are plenty of trackable activities for which badges could be earned automatically.  For example, you could earn them for a specified number of:

• Documents, images, slides or other files contributed
• Wiki pages created or edited
• Slides re-used
• Announcements entered or news pages created
• Discussion threads started / responded
• Ratings given (SP 2010)
• Comments added
• Profile fields filled out / edited
• Tasks completed

It would be important to be able to configure the levels and the names for each badge.  So for an organization where knowledge management is the focus, you'd be able to name a badge something inspirational, like "Knowledge Hero," and then key it off the number of documents contributed to a repository.  For an organization that values keeping the company up to date on internal news and activities, a "Level One Newsmaker" could earn that cred by entering an announcment every day for five days in a row.

It might also be good to have a few administrator-controlled badges that companies could award manually for certain desired activities, such as "Employee of the Month."

Let me anticipate a few issues and concerns:

• What about quality? - employees will just post anything in order to earn their badge, filling up the system with documents or items of questionable value.  It's true this would be possible, but if you've got a system that leverages ratings, tagging, and information management policies (i.e. expiration after a certain date), the highest-quality content will be surfaced and preserved, and you've still increased adoption.
• What about alert fatigue? - employees are already receiving too many emails; do we really want to send another one every time they earn a new badge or level?   It would be a requirement that employees could subscribe/unsubscribe from these notifications at will, just as they can opt in or out from other alerts in the system.  But my own experience with this kind of email ("You've just earned a new badge!") is that it's a little  good-news pick-me-up, often unexpected, that motivates me to continue the behavior.
• What does it cost? - we want to encourage adoption, but we don't have any budget for it.  If this profile plug-in were developed by a third-party vendor, it would need to be offered at a price point that corporations can swallow for a "fun" add-on - like in the under-$500 range.  But if the social networking sites can offer it for free, maybe this is possible?

Please drop me a comment if you know of other examples of merit badges in use, either on public social sites or in the enterprise!  I'd also like to hear whether your organization would use this kind of gadget to drive adoption of your intranet, and what the concerns would be.

p.s. if you're as nauseated as I am by my use of the word "incentivize" in the title of this post, did you know that the word has been around since 1970?  I would have thought it was 1990s jargon, but its Nixon-era provenance makes me respect it a little more than I had previously.

UPDATE 9/15/11 - NewsGator's product adds this capability to SharePoint 2010:

 

Comments

[Ole Kassow]

Hi Sadalit, your use of incentivize is excused. It beats "incentify" any day.

Using badges to drive adoption is a great idea, which I really think would work well. There is a strong trend that Web 2.0 elements migrate behind the firewall and this is one that hasn't really made it yet, except perhaps for a few snazzy SaaS apps. We're now all used to being rated in social networks 24/7 and I think it would work really well as a motivator.

I would encourage all software vendors to consider this as an integrated part of their offering.

[sadalit]

Ole, thank you very much for your thoughtful comment! The SharePoint development team may not be able to go to market with the latest web innovations, but this creates a lot of opportunity for the independent software vendors to step in and add value.

[Mark]

Funnily enough this is something we are considering within my team as well (We use SharePoint). Working as a member of the Computer game industry the idea of 'achievements' is a very strong one for giving players incentives.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept check out http://xbox.about.com/od/xbox360faqs/f/achievementsfaq.htm

The real key part of this is having these achievements displayed for all users to see, so motivated users can gain prestige from using the tool.

[sadalit]

Mark, thank you for your comment! I totally agree, the earned badges need to be visible on the individual's public profile to build credibility / prestige. I'd love to see someone build this for SharePoint!

[Vegard I.]

Thanks for an interesting post on how to trigger usage and interaction on a corporate intranet.

Still, how about rather just adding a 'I like' button at the bottom of any article on an intranet?

This would allow any reader to express what they think about the quality of the contribution. That's as easy as a click away and there'll be no need for administration which badges require. the number of people clicking 'I like' would give a certain clue of who's delivering quality into the intranet.

As far as I can understand, the 'I like' function works incredibly well for Facebook.

[comment system]

You are doing very professional work, i loved your idea and think you should try to go out for the big market, this badges system can be success.

[Mark]

Did you ever get anywhere with this? I have done this sort of thing on a normal ASP.NET site but I am struggling getting it going with SP2010. Just curious as to whether you have succeeded and how?

Many thanks

[sadalit]

Mark - I have not tried to implement this in SharePoint; I'd be very interested to know what some of the obstacles are if you're willing to share.

[cartoner]

this Badges system looking very good. i hve been looking for such a system for a long time now. thanks.

[Liz]

Stumbled across your post in the hopes of finding someone who had already produced this. We are using Sharepoint in an Education environment and think it would be great for the pupils who would already be familiar with this sort of system.
May have to give in and develop our own. EventReceivers, here I come!

[sadalit]

Hi Liz,

Before you develop your own, did you see Daniel McPherson's post on EndUserSharePoint2010.com? http://www.endusersharepoint.com/EUSP2010/2010/07/20/driving-user-adoption%E2%80%A6socially-sharepoint-and-badges/

Is the NewsGator solution out of the realm of the possible for your organization?

Also - I have heard that the next version of SharePoint may include some functionality that would do this.