Gather

Social Media and Marketing Survey

If you work as a marketing / social media consultant for multiple companies, please feel free to submit this survey on behalf of each of those companies.

  4. How likely are you to use each of the following mediums for paid advertising?

  5. To the best of your abilities rate whether you agree or disagree with the following statements based on your company's business model or leave blank if you cannot or do not wish to select a response.

  6. Rate your opinion of your company based on your view of the current strategy employed by the company.

  7. According to Nielsen research, 4 out of 5 adults (18+) who are active internet users have at least one social media account [1].

    This group of social media users are more likely to buy online (75%) and attend real world events (20%). Those who connect with brands through social media are 47% more likely to be heavy spenders on retail items compared to the standard adult.

    Rate how likely your company is to currently use the following as part of your online brand strategy towards this demographic.

  8. Over 40% of consumers use their mobile phone to interact with social media, a number that is growing daily. Using social media on a mobile device (60%) is only slightly less popular than gaming on mobile devices (67%).

    Rate how likely your company is to currently use the following as part of your online brand strategy for engaging existing users via mobile.

  9. As mentioned in the previous question, gaming is the most popular category of application on mobile devices, beating news, social media and the weather.

    On top of being popular on mobile devices, over half of the active adult internet consumers spend 10 minutes or more playing games online each month. One in three spend over an hour playing games each month [2].

    Businesses are benefiting from these games with 39% of those who play responding to marketing activities within the game. Of consumers surveyed, those who have interacted with a brand inside a game are 26% more likely to trust that brand when making real world purchases.

    Looking into the future, if your company used a social game as a part of a marketing campaign, how likely would you consider the following as important to the success of the game?

Welcome

Hello. We are a group of entrepreneurs researching social games for businesses as an engagement strategy. If you are involved in social media or marketing, please take our survey on the left.

We are using this data to better understand how businesses approach social media and modern trends such as mobile to see how this can help shape our advergaming and gamification platform for enterprises.

Take our survey

What is Social Media?

When we talk about social media we refer to online communication and distribution through tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other similar services.

These communication tools help develop multi-way interactions between people and without any of the barriers of traditional methods of connecting with customers.

Many businesses, government departments and services have followed the trend of using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and others to provide streams of the latest information to subscribed users instantaneously all over the world.

What is Advergaming?

It is the practice of using gaming for the purpose of advertising and educating players about a business or product.

Using Gather will simplify Advergaming for businesses by providing an easy to configure set of mechanics to launch their own Advergames from.

What is Gamification?

Gamification summarises the art and science of using dynamics and techniques from the gaming world and applying those to non-game applications.

Common techniques used in applications include challenging the player, gratification, recognition through rewards, and competition between players (leader boards).

Humans have a psychological predisposition to tackle challenges and competitions. By taking those conditions and applying them to applications used in marketing campaigns, we can educate, motivate and reward certain behaviours through fun, light hearted and enjoyable entertainment rather than direct marketing.

Why Gaming?

Gaming is one of the most engaging mediums in not just digital space, but ranks highly compared to other marketing mediums.

While users may spend 30 seconds watching your business' TV advert or radio commercial, business games, or gamification of an existing app can draw users into your brand for hours by chasing incentives and rewards, while proactively being stimulated by a perceived purpose.

Nobody wants to be directly marketed to, and customers are quickly opting out of current methods. Popular services such as NetFlix and iTunes have also changed how customers consume information, so the time has come for a change in how brands interact with their customers. We believe that interactive games are an important tool for businesses.

Who are we?

This website, survey and the Gather platform is part of a project by a group of entrepreneurs based in CreativeHQ, Wellington.

We are looking at casual gaming through the development of a game engine with a focus on advergaming and social gamification. We believe that our work can be used to help companies in a positive way and provide more innovative solutions to how brands empower their customer base into action. We are looking to launch our first game demo of the engine in March 2012, which will showcase Gather's features to businesses.

What is Gather?

Gather is part of our strategy for opening the world of social gaming to businesses. Businesses will be able to utilize Gather to deploy their own custom social games to their website, mobile application or Facebook page for a fraction of the cost it takes to develop a social game from scratch.

The mechanics of Gather revolve around short, fun, skill based challenges for the player against the clock or computer. By beating the game, players can earn instant rewards in the form of badges or items in line with your store or marketing promotion.

With public leader boards tied into your customer's social media accounts, you can build a community of players competing with one another around your brand and allow them to spread the buzz around your marketing campaign.

Once you've launched your game, Gather doesn't let it just sit there, it keeps track of your players by analysing how well they are doing and how long they interact with your game. By looking through these metrics, we can tweak and improve your game to ensure that your customers are having fun.