It seems both consumers and businesses are at the peak of the social hype. Overwhelmed by social media channels, platforms, and processes both in their private and professional life, many early adopters are starting to feel the social fatigue. Mirroring what happened with email and web sites during the late 1990's - early 2000's, more and more managers are looking to move from ubiquitous social media tactics to the most appropriate business use case and processes. This step becomes even more important considering the year over year contraction in IT budgets and the consequent need to maximize return on every dollar spent in new technologies.

Ray Wang, CEO and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, suggests engagement through collaborative technologies both as a conceptual model and a transformational tool for enterprises to reap business value. Without participation - the reasoning goes - there is no value and good technology alone is not enough to guarantee employee and customer adoption. Enterprise gamification is a new lever to succeed with Social Business by directing a critical mass of participation towards desired outcomes.

What kind of outcomes? A recent study from Constellation Research (see 2012 Q1 Gamification Early Adopters Best Practices) highlights how Marketing, Customer Service and HR are leading the pack with gamification in processes such as:

• Sustaining long term customer loyalty (76.4%)
• Improving response in campaign to lead (74.5%)
• Right channeling incidents for resolution in social media (67.3%)
• Growing the number service and support incidents resolved by the community (63.6%)
• Improving employee referral rates and effective recruiting (43.6%)
• Driving on-boarding success with new hires (20%)

More than simply adding badges, points and leaderboards to existing processes, enterprise gamification should be holistically embedded into employee and customer experience to stimulate specific behaviors. According to Ray Wang this can be done at three core levels:

• Measurable actions. The behaviors we want to facilitate consist of granular actions (i.e likes, comments, posts, recommendations, etc) and more complex actions (i.e projects, initiatives, programmes) attributed to individuals, groups and/or external actors 
• Reputation. The reputation an individual has earned through his actions is a key factor in building motivation among others and it is determined by its identity, social standing status and competitiveness
• Incentives or the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards that motivate behaviors and drive actions

Listen to Ray Wang's video-interview to learn more about the dynamics that are shaping the future of collaboration and how gamification can help organizations attain new levels of engagement.