Talkable Work Strategy 4: Encourage Play

We just sent five of our key thinkers here at 22squared to grown-up spring break: the SXSW Interactive Conference.

They came back buzzing about gamification and the ‘game layer’ that will soon become a part of everyday life. “Checking in” on Foursquare is no longer a novelty, and savvy brands now harness the power of games and play to incite word of mouth. Which leads us to our 4th talkable work strategy, Encourage Play.

What is play, really? It’s part of our human nature–we’re inherently competitive, and when we engage in competition, however large or small, we want to win and we want to make sure people KNOW that we’ve won. And, as Charlie Sheen shows us, winning = talk.  That’s all well and good, you’re telling yourself, but what does that have to do with making my brand talk?

It’s pretty simple, actually: if you give your consumers a platform for competition, reward them for their efforts and make it easy for them to share their victory, they’ll want to spread the word.

Here are some of my favorite examples of brands that are harnessing play in effective, innovative ways:

Puma: As I said before, it’s human nature…people are competitive, and they want to win. So Puma introduced the life scoreboard as a way for people to win in ways they’d never been able to quantify before. They could keep score in all aspects of life: who’s the better cook? who’s worse, reality stars or socialites? What’s going to prevail, me or my hangover? They turned life into one big “quasi-serious” game, and gave consumers a sharable online platform to announce their victories.

Mini Getaway: Mini staged a week long virtual scavenger hunt through Stockholm, with a very real reward; a new car. Players searched for an augmented reality “Mini” via GPS, captured its location with a photo, and got out of there as fast as they could, before their opponents could “steal” it by taking a picture at the same location. The player with the Mini on their phone at the end of the week was the victor, and in the process, Mini got an entire city talking about their brand.

AT SXSW, Seth Priebatsch (Chief Ninja at SCVNGR) gave a fantastic talk on the implications of a game layer on society at large. If you ever have an extra hour (yeah right, I know), watch it here on the SXSW Interactive site.