Carii Gamification.

Carii Coins and Badges.

In my recent post Sourcing with MosaicHub: Another Way to Search For People on LinkedIn, I mentioned how the MosaicHub website uses a rewards systems called "Badges". Under this system, the more you contribute, the more points you get for different activities. Get enough points and you earn a "Badge". The aim of this is to encourage participation by making contributing more fun and interesting. MosaicHub themselves go a bit further and claim "badges are an easy way to build your reputation and attract new clients".

Carri Gamification.

My MosaicHub Badges

MosaicHub is far from alone at using such "Gamification" (horrible word) strategies to encourage contributions. Other platforms like Quora and the SmallToday discussion forum also use similar points accumulation systems.

So I was interested to read an article in the Learn About Carii Community on Carii that they too have now implemented a rewards system. They are calling their rewards "coins" and the cover image above shows what you can get "paid" for. When you earn enough coins you can progress through levels (reminds me of the reward system for the old computer games of the 1980s). In the Community discussion, it was mentioned that beyond just being a fun and interesting way to encourage contributions, this system also provides a way to monitor the activity levels of community contributors and potentially reward the best contributors in other ways too.

However, for the purposes of using Carii for business networking (the focus here) is this enough for the Gamification to be attractive and not just seen as a gimmick? Well, if one can earn rewards, the actual benefit may be in the ability to spend them, like loyalty rewards schemes for supermarkets, or like on Quora where earned points can be spent to promote a piece of content on the website.

Naturally, in calling their points systems "coins", I surmised that the intent must be that they can be spent on something. So I asked +Denise Hayman-Loa about this and indeed was informed that "as we progress, Carii Coins will be used to donate to non-profits or causes you follow and/or get rebates/discounts from merchants or providers of services who accept them. Any other thoughts welcome!" [note to self - must come back to the donation element of Carii, something else worth looking at in detail and another unique feature].

Yes, I do have an idea about this. As I have mentioned before (see video below), one of the most attractive features of Carii for business use is the ability to monetize communities through sponsorship. Sponsored ads appear discretely next to the Carii newsfeed stream too. Now, what if a small part of these ad spaces was reserved? Either within a Community or in the main Carii areas, what if one could use the coins to rent the space for advertizing ones business for a period? Even more interesting what if each week we could bid for that space with our amassed coins through an auction of the ad space? I think that would be a very real tangible reason for businesses owners to participate in Carii Communities, especially in ones where potential customers are present too. The auction elements themselves could even be used as a mechanism to create more interactions.