Most serious businesses in the world have a blog or at least try and blog.  They understand the benefits of doing that and know they should be doing it - yet so many fail at doing it effectively.  This is because the people you want to blog (i.e. the experts who know what they are talking about) are too busy doing their day jobs to be able to sit down and write 700 words.

We quickly realised with our clients that if you made the process easier then there would be a pretty decent spike in the amount of content teams produced.  Then we bumped into the brilliant Dr Claire El Mouden, an interdisciplinary researcher at the University of Oxford, who studies human behaviour.  She introduced us to the idea of gamifying what we do with our clients.

The results were immediately staggering with blogging activity going up, on average, 600%.   All we do is make it a team competition to see who can write the best content each week and see who can get the most social shares and the most reads.  The Prize: A bottle of Champagne and a trophy with "Thought Leadership Champions" and their name engraved on it.  That's £60 for a 600% increase in activity.

We realised that people do not mind being "gamed" as long as the thing they are being gamed on is something they want to do anyway.

We set up a new law firm client on Friday of last week.  Within 2 hours one of the senior partners had created two blog posts.  That's more than the average UK lawyer does in 4 years ... in 2 hours!  I dropped him a quick note to say well done on the great content and he simply replied:  "Nothing like a bit of competition to push people..."

Gamification and feedback form such an important part of what we do and to develop the right behaviours from our clients and everyone benefits.

Have you ever thought about gamification?  Where could you bring it into your business?  What could someone like Dr El Mouden do that would drive some of your numbers up 600% and transform your business?