Author: Nick Shah

Using the Rise ScoreBook collector to create a “derivative” metric

Nick Shah Product News, scorekeeping

The Rise ScoreBook collector was created to help rise.global ScoreBook managers to create derivative metrics from metrics (and score entries) they already have on any of the ScoreBooks they manage.

The benefit of this is to enable you to re-use the score entry data you’ve already brought into your ScoreBooks and so create a more sophisticated ScoreBook.

Examples of when you can use this Score Collector are:

  • You have 2 different ScoreBooks for the same group of users, and you decide you’d like to create a 3rd ScoreBook that will have a metric that will be a function of metrics in the first 2 ScoreBooks e.g. you’ve got ScoreBooks for 2017 and 2018 sales for your sales reps, and you want to create a ScoreBook that scores on the total of 2017 and 2018 sales.
  • You want to create a derivative metric on your existing ScoreBook that calculates the sum or difference of score entries recorded at different time points for another metric on the same ScoreBook e.g. you’re tracking weekly sales of your sales reps and you want to calculate the % change in sales between two consecutive weeks

An example of a ScoreBook that I’ve created using this feature is Twitter Followers Club pictured below:

If you’d like to follow my steps, I’ve provided full details of how I built this ScoreBook in this help article:

How do I create a ScoreBook with a metric which auto-calculates the difference between the two most recent score entries of an existing metric?

 

13 Key Metrics to Measure the Success of Your Mobile App

Nick Shah Gamification in practice, scorekeeping , ,

This is a guest post by Michelle Joe:

Michelle Joe is a blogger by choice. She loves to discover the world around her. She likes to share her discoveries, experiences, and express herself through her blogs. You can find her on twitter: @michellejoe524

13 Ways to Measure the Success of Your Mobile App

Sleepless night, stressful days, crazy coding moments and many cups of coffee later, you have finally created the v1.0 of your app. It’s time to put it up on the app store and relax.

But wait!

There is no time for a breather because it’s now time to track all kinds of metrics about your app. It is important to figure out how the market is responding to your app, who is downloading it, and how they are interacting with it. The app store’s metrics, comments, and bug reports usually paint an incomplete picture.

So, you will have to do some detective work on your own.

The trouble is that, an app has many Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be tracked. And that’s why deciding where to begin, can be a major pain. However, we are here to help! Listed below are the very basic KPIs that must be measured to learn more about the users and their interactions with your app.

Let’s begin with the most essential mobile metrics that you must measure:

1.    Downloads

‘Number of downloads’ build a rock-solid foundation for the measurement of your app’s success. But it is the not the most definitive KPI. For example, millions of people might download your app after a successful marketing campaign, only to uninstall it a few days later. So, take the results with a pinch of salt. However, download numbers are still important, so keep tracking them.

2.    Installations

Downloads are not the same as installations, and the faster you figure out the reason for discrepancies between the two numbers for your app, the quicker you’ll be able to help your app. If the numbers aren’t the same, or at least pretty close, the reason could be unexpected errors in the installation process, or your apps inability to cope with different OS and devices.

3.    Uninstallations

See a sudden increase in uninstallations? It could be because of a recent app update, or a patch you just added. Tracking this KPI is important.

4.    Conversions

For starters, figure out how you define conversions for your app. It could be creating a user account for using your app, or making a purchase within. This is an essential KPI because it means that the user has volunteered information (email address, name, age, etc.) to use your app, and they might just be willing to become long-term customers.

5.    Churn Rate

Churn rate measures the runners, i.e., people who unsubscribed from your services and/or uninstalled the app. Lower churn rate is better, obviously. A higher one can indicate UX and UI troubles for your app. This churn rate could be affected by actual issues with your app, or even by word of mouth. For example, there was a rumor that the popular instant messaging app AirG spams, and that damaged its reputation, making users uninstall it.

6.    Crashes

If an app crashes once, chances are that it will never be used again. People have very little tolerance for messy apps. So, track them, and figure out what went wrong, where. Crashing apps are often abandoned and uninstalled, so this critical metric also ties into other KPIs.

7.    Unresponsive Gestures

Try to find out if your users tend to perform some gestures more than others when using your app! This could be double tapping, swiping, or scrolling down the app. Is your app responding well to these gestures? Learn more about this too. Unresponsive Gestures can hurt your apps reputation and your image as an app developer. Use qualitative analytics tools such as touch heat maps to track the issue and fix it before it gets out of hand.

8.    App Load Time

Flagships phones are bigger, faster and have plenty of RAM, and that’s why they are sold at a premium price, and mobile users love them. Your app should be able to take advantage of these options and provide a smooth and fast mobile experience. Otherwise, the app will be replaced. So, keep a close eye on your app’s load time, ensuring that it is as fast as possible.

9.    Retention Rate

You have fantastic installation numbers, but the app doesn’t seem to get recurring users as it should. This means that your users are not getting value from it. And that’s why measuring and fixing the retention rate is of utmost importance.

10.           Session Length

Mobile app professionals must also measure the number of sessions per user, as well as their lengths and intervals. For example, for apps like AirG or Evernote, more sessions mean more business, but for something like Facebook, more extended sessions are just as important as higher frequency. Identify what the ideal session is for your app, then strive to create it for your users; keep measuring in the meanwhile.

11.           Devices Used

This one’s quite easy to track, and it offers valuable insights into your users and their habits. By monitoring this metric, you could learn more about the kind of devices being used, what OS these devices are running and how your app can be optimized for the most used devices for optimum user experience.

12.           Social Shares

Word of mouth works! It can make your app the superstar of the app store, or kill its success in a matter of hours. This is why app professionals keep an eye on social shares, and not just the numbers but also the content within. Are your users using the in-app social share buttons? Are they making fun of your app, or sharing because they think it is something that others would find useful? This information can help you decide the future course for app marketing.

13.           Conversion Funnel Drop-offs

Simply put, conversion funnels create a chain of events that lead to a specific action taken by the user. This action can be anything, from making a purchase to merely signing up for a newsletter. The events through the funnel can and should be tracked. If users are dropping off in the middle of an event, then they can’t complete the action desired at the end, and you need to know why!

Final Thoughts

An app is only as successful as it’s developer’s ability to monitor, scale and optimize it. Identifying the proper KPIs to do that is half the job done. Those mentioned above and many others will affect the growth of an app significantly.

Note from rise.global

Use our scorebook templates to create a scorebook on rise.global that can help you track these metrics – and if you create the correct score algorithm, you will be able to see how well your app is doing from day to day by just looking at the single score that your ScoreBook will produce.

Kred Influencer & Outreach score collector launched

Nick Shah News

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve introduced a new score collector for Kred Influencer and Outreach scores.  Kred’s objectives are to offer analytics for anyone’s social media use and performance.  Kred’s homepage is currently saying that they are revamping their service and Kred 2.0 will be available from 11th June 2018.

The Kred scoring rules are available here.

The new Kred score collector will be available for any rise.global subscriber that uses our Bronze price package.

Many of rise.global’s subscribers that are currently managing and running “Power 100” ScoreBooks that use Klout scores may change to using Kred scores, as Klout scores will not be available from May 25th 2018.  This will inevitably mean that there will be some movements in the “Power 100” ScoreBooks, as Klout and Kred each have their own proprietary algorithms for calculating “social media influence”

 

 

 

 

Looking for a Klout alternative?

Nick Shah News

The providers of Klout scores, Lithium Technologies, yesterday announced that they are stopping the Klout service including the provision of Klout scores from 25th May.

Rise.global has been offering scores from 1 to 100 based on social media activity for over 5 years.  Our unique flexible scoring-engine allows you to quickly spinout your own klout-alternative social media influence score for each of your members.  Consider using our Twitter score collectors to create your social media influence score based on your members twitter data – their posts, likes, mentions, replies, followers. Just like PwC have done so with their #PwC Global Power 100. If you’d like to create a similar score card, follow our guidance in How do I create a score card to track Twitter metrics?

 

Our Power 100 ScoreBooks used to use Klout scores but now use Kred scores.

 

Convert your sales team spreadsheet into an online leaderboard so that you can share the data more easily and nudge performance higher.

Nick Shah Product News , , ,

Are you a sales manager who tracks the effectiveness of your individual team members by keeping track of key performance indicators  on a spreadsheet?

Capture

Would you like to share this data with your sales people and find it tedious to:

  • email them their individual, personalised stats by cutting and pasting from the spreadsheet?
  • re-sort all the sales people every week according to their overall performance?

In this case, why not use rise.global to automate these tasks?  You need to design your scorecard (sales reports) only once and then you can automate the sharing of the scorecard every week.

The benefits of automating the process and sharing the data regularly are:

  • all sellers can login via mobile web or desktop to see anytime, anywhere how they are doing
  • sellers can track history over time – so they can think about optimising their behaviour over the whole quarter, not just waiting to the end of quarter
  • managers can allocate points to the key behaviours they want to see more of – e.g. a focus on lead indicators such as prospects called rather than lag indicators such as sales achieved. That means sellers are nudged to the more useful behaviours right now.
  • managers can run “team v team” competitions. That means sellers who are doing badly aren’t disincentivised – every activity still counts to the team total.

Save your spreadsheet as a csv file and follow these steps:

  1. Login to your rise.global profile or if you haven’t already set up a profile, register
  2. Go to “Create ScoreBook” and choose the Blank ScoreBook Template – if you can’t see this template, email support@rise.global and ask us to upgrade your account so that you can have access to this template
  3. Name your ScoreBook, give a quick description and click “Create”

Capture

Choose Manual Entry for the source of your sales people (user) data and Email Address as their unique identifier

Capture

Navigate to ScoreBook Settings -> User Collector and Click on “Import Users from CSV”.  Follow the instructions  to import in all the individuals in your spreadsheet.

Capture

Goto Score Entries and Click on “Import data from CSV”. Follow the instructions again.

Goto ScoreBook Settings -> Score Algorithm and configure the scoring rules that will consolidate all the metrics into a single score, using our sophisticated ranking methods (one of which allows you to compare apples with  oranges!), weights, caps.

Finally, go to Bulletins and click “Create Bulletin”

Et voila

Capture

Every week, all you need to do is import in your spreadsheet data, create score bulletin.

You can now share this leaderboard webpage with exactly who you want and make it as private as you like and you can share just the individual score with each sales person rather than the full leaderboard.  You can share this report via email, Twitter, on a Big Screen TV display, embed the leaderboard onto your own website, share the link of the leaderboard on the rise.global domain.

 

How Google is using the principles of Success Tracking

Nick Shah News , ,

An email from the team at Google Maps landed in my inbox recently.  I knew that it was a “robo-generated” email, and yet I got engaged.  The title of the email grabbed my attention first – “Your  review is making a difference”.  As I looked at it further and digested fully the message, I realised that Google was using the 5 core principles of Success Tracking

So, here’s how:

This bit of the email shows that I have opted-in to receive the success tracking report (score)

And the main part of the email shows how Google are adhering to no prizes, a simple score, storified content and positive score keeping

This is a great example of how just relevant feedback, storified and positive, is driving my behaviour change.

Great to see #success tracking at work.

 

7 Key factors to consider when Choosing a Corporate Wiki

Nick Shah News

This is a guest post by Robin Singh.  Robin is a Technical Support Executive with a combined experience of 6 years. He is well acquainted with various Knowledge base tools and is currently associated with ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling

wiki1

Choosing a wiki for your business organization is one of the best decisions you can make as they are time-effective and will help you streamline your operations. For instance, if you need to email some important information to a number of people within your workplace, you can easily inform everyone concerned by putting all the information in your corporate wiki. This is just one of the numerous uses of a corporate wiki.

One of the most significant benefits that a wiki offers is increased efficiency and productivity, as it can be updated by multiple users in real-time, which eventually improves communication and collaboration.

In order to choose the right wiki software for your business organization, there are some key factors that you need to consider, so read on to find out what they are.

  1. Choose a Software Delivery Model for Your Needs

There are three software delivery models when it comes to choosing and managing a corporate wiki, and they include – on-premises wiki, a hosted wiki (SaaS) and an appliance wiki. If you go for an on-premises wiki, you are choosing to install the software on your own and store all of your data on your own servers. On the other hand, if you go for a hosted wiki, your wiki software vendor will store your data on their servers.

The third software delivery model is a combination of the first two models. It is a popular option as you don’t have to tackle the installation of your wiki as your solution provider will do it for you while the data remains stored on your servers.

  1. Authenticate Your Corporate Wiki Users

wiki1

The authentication of users is important because everyone with access should know who exactly made every single edit to your corporate wiki. Also, it will enable you to grant access to some of your wikis only to a small group of people for instance group of executives. Therefore, your corporate wiki should enable user authentication to verify the user’s identity and it can be achieved by a single sign-on  (SSO) or LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).

  1. Communicate with Your IT Department

Communicating with your IT department is crucial if you choose an on-premises software delivery model, because they can tell you exactly what needs to be done in order to successfully install your corporate wiki. They certainly have the right knowledge for choosing the right wiki software for your company and they know what kind of server storage you will need. Hence, it is best to consult the IT team.

  1. Eliminate the Risk of Mistakes

wiki1

How many times have you edited a document and made a mistake that caused all of your added content to be completely lost? The same problem can happen with a corporate wiki as well, hence selecting the right wiki software will enable you to save each and every edit without any possible glitch taking place.

You need to ensure the software will enable you to save and track all the changes made to your wiki so that you can restore every previous version of an edited document in case the content gets lost.

  1. Track Every Change Made to Your Corporate Wiki

How can you track all the changes made to your wiki in real-time? It is simple. The notifications can come in handy here. Therefore, you need to make sure you enable notifications and monitor every change that occurs. One can achieve that either by enabling email notifications or really simple syndication (RSS). RSS feeds are an effective way to keep track of the changes to your wiki as well.

Another precise way to track changes in your wiki is through external API. Tracking options are essential in keeping everything under the tab. Success tracking tools like Rise.global offers great insights to track your changes and progress. The real time tracking options and critical reporting and analytics can keep you on top of your game and offer insights to improve your team coordination even further.

  1. Tag Your Documents and Make Your Wiki Easily Searchable

wiki1

The most important feature of an effective wiki is its search capability. Hence, you need to make sure your corporate wiki has a powerful search option that can help the users to find exactly what they are looking for within seconds. This is especially important when your wiki grows in size, as it can be difficult and downright stressful to find relevant information.

If you choose to include tags in your documents, it will help your wiki become easily searchable and ensure users are able to instantly find any page they are looking for. However, you should avoid general tags, such as “sales” and “marketing” because, otherwise, tagging won’t be of any help when you scale your business and create a number of new documents.

  1. Add as Many Useful Features as You Can

The more features you add to your corporate wiki, the more effective it would actually be. If the users find it helpful, your wiki will help them achieve their goals faster. One of the excellent and pretty useful features you could add to your wiki is multilingual support, as it can help users overcome language barriers when communicating and collaborating with those users who speak different languages.

Also, you can add the feature of attaching documents and provide a widget for making your wiki instantly accessible via your personalized web page. There are a lot more features you can consider adding to your corporate wiki, so ensure the wiki software you choose enables you to add those features most important for your business.

Rise customer ClickMechanic shares their success story

Nick Shah Customer News , ,

It’s not often that you get a customer story told in a guest post like this. We’re thrilled with the ClickMechanic team’s Rise journey – this guest blog has been written by Simon Tinsley, Click Mechanic’s Digital Marketing Executive:

clickmechanicphoto

Hi! We’re ClickMechanic, not only are we satisfied customers of Rise, but we’ve taken the success tracking philosophy of the effective use of data and targets and applied it throughout our company with great results. We’re so excited about sharing our story so it can help other growing businesses that we asked Rise to let us share our story on their blog and they kindly agreed.

Firstly, a little background, we’re an online marketplace for car repair, servicing and inspections with a nationwide network of mechanics. We’ve used Rise’s leader board to promote engagement on social channels amongst our mechanics and found that it provided a 23% uplift in sharing from our mechanics.

More striking has been the impact that applying targets carefully has had throughout our company. We noticed recently that a quarter of bookings placed never get assigned to a mechanic – meaning more unsatisfied customers and less revenue for us. Recently we introduced a number of initiatives that reduced the number of customers without a mechanic by 60%. So, how did we do it?

Firstly, we gave people responsibility for a particular area of customer service each day. This focus allowed our team to reduce the amount of time they spent switching tasks, and therefore reduced wasted time. Alongside this, it gave a sense of ownership and responsibility over that area for the day. Secondly, we made the key metrics visible to the whole team. Such that the team can see the results of their efforts. The immediate feedback has seen our net promoter score increase from 80 to 85.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we introduced targets for assigning bookings to the team. Here, we followed the key principle of ‘Count Fruit Not Leaves’. Initially these were individual targets, though we found this provided faulty incentives. Team members on other tasks for the day would try to squeeze in assigning bookings to inflate their numbers and ‘win’ and neglect other tasks. With this in mind, we switched to a team target to encourage co-operation between the team. Not only have we seen the KPIs increase, but also we’ve had feedback that the team like having something to aim for and find it motivating.

We’ve also applied personal metrics to our development team. We work on a fortnightly sprint and plan our engineer’s time using ‘points’ to represent blocks of time. By doing so, we are better able to plan our development work and coordinate the rollout of new product features. Alongside this, it creates accountability within the development team – if tasks aren’t completed then the reasons why can be discussed transparently. Tracking this data allows for improving our estimation of how long projects take and can help us to identify if there are certain aspects of our process that consistently cause projects to run over.

Rise launches monetization features for boards

Nick Shah Product News

In case you were wondering, Rise’s network model is akin to meetup.com. We charge managers a fee but crucially we let managers monetize their boards in whatever way they like.

To support this we’ve added a major new monetization feature this week that you can see in action on the ENERTOR Sports Journalist 100.
The three key features are:

  1. adding ads around your leaderboard (above, to the right and intersticially
  2. capturing emails for your marketing campaign
  3. adding ads on your email notifications in 3 different sections

I recommend “following” the ENERTOR board to see it all in action

The ENERTOR Sports Journalist 100 2016-05-03 15-49-03

 

Travel1k Email Advert Example

Reflections on using Rise to support conference-based gamification

Nick Shah Customer News , ,

This is a guest blog from:

Fiona MacNeill, Learning Technologies Adviser, University of Brighton and UCISA Digital Capabilities committee member. AboutMe: http://about.me/fmacneill Twitter: @fmacneill

In early June I had the pleasure of implementing a conference-wide gamification activity in support of the UCISA Digital Capabilities event. The event took place at MediaCity, Salford; a vibrant and engaging venue for an event stocked-full of innovative ideas. The event focused on showcasing successful practices for supporting academic staff and learners in their use of technology within further and higher education. Another goal of the event was to highlight findings from the recent Digital Capabilities survey. So when a member of the event organising committee, Iain Cameron (University of Aberdeen, and UCISA Digital Capabilities committee), mentioned the idea of a Twitter selfie (or Twelfie) competition as part of the proceedings; Rise immediately came to my mind as the right tool for the job! I had encountered Rise before at a demo at the International Confex event in 2013 and then again during the Mahara 2014 Hui held at the University of Brighton.

The rules of the game were simple and already outlined for me by the organisers. One point was awarded for original selfies; @mentions; and retweets featuring the #udigcap hashtag. Two points were awarded to reward the befriending behaviours needed to: take selfies with another delegate; take selfies with a speaker; and take selfies with organisers. Three points were awarded for imaginative selfies; selfies with passing celebrities who work or visit the television studios of MediaCity; and a selfie with a famous landmark. Although the game was simple, we entered into it with a sense of playfulness, completed by my donning the literal udig-Cap on my head, to signify my position as the twelfie official! Here’s the photo evidence

Leaderboard-cropped

Benefits

Observed positive effects of using Rise Leaderboard:

  • Rise really stoked attendee engagement via Twitter. There were around 90 tweets that included twelfies. Overall, there were almost 1200 tweets related to the event, many of which were a direct result of attendees taking part in the Leaderboard.

TweetFeed

  • The competition called for attendees to take photos of themselves with other attendees, speakers and celebrities. This encouraged both in-person and online engagement.

TweetFeedwphoto

  • The twelfie competition promoted a sense of fun and resulted in crowdsourced documentation of the event proceedings. The documentation is now archived as a Storify
    • The competition boosted discursive engagement and publicised the twitter feed prior to the event. This was largely achieved by some pre-conference challenges where attendees were asked to take engaging photographs of their journey to the conference.

TweetFeedwphoto2

Top tips for using Rise in a conference situation

  1. Our photo-based metrics meant that we had to do a lot of manual scoring. I suggest using a wider variety of metrics, including a mixture of automatic metrics derived from twitter polling and manual metrics.
  2. I recommend linking a Google doc to the active leaderboard to enable simpler player addition and
  3. Limit the number of times a certain metric can be scored. We found that some of the twelfies became repetitive, as there was not a limit on the number of times that a twelfie could be scored.
    • Include some wildcard activities to promote positive conference behaviour:
      • g. tweet and tag someone whom you met at lunchtime (with their permission);
      • engage in the conference treasure hunt and tweet what you found etc.
  1. Take greater advantage of the need for the human superviser, or games-master, and consider using them to lead tweet-ups of certain topics raised during the event. These could also have point-awarding options.
  2. Consider day-by-day scoring and options for remote attendees and second day attendees.
  3. Points for @mentions of anything other than the conference hashtag, can affect the quality of tweets’ written content due to the character limit. Best to keep it to one @mention metric.
    Add players in advance of the conference, if possible.
  4. Having clearly defined board release times was a good strategy and led to a sense of anticipation, e.g. breaks worked well as times to release and show the updated leaderboard. Leave at least 10 minutes for the polls to complete and to release the board. I owe this idea to Katie Piatt (University of Brighton), who used this strategy to great effect at the 2014 Mahara Hui.

Future ideas

As I contemplate gamification at the next iteration of the Digital Capabilities event I have been considering how the competitive element could be developed further. Here are a few ideas, although I won’t go into specifics, as I don’t want to give the game away in advance!

  • Make awards unexpected – as Daniel Pink, explains in his 2010 book, Drive expected extrinsic rewards can negatively affect performance (pp. 63-70). Therefore adding some unexpected rewards for completed tasks could add value. However these rewards will not be itemised on the rules list, so a disclaimer about judge discretion may be helpful!
  • Reward introverts as well as extroverts – one of the best conferences that I have ever attended was Eyeo Festival based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (http://eyeofestival.com). Eyeo is an awe-inspiring event focusing on data visualisation, interactivity and maker ethics. However in the midst of all the flashy stuff, in the two years that I attended they had quiet spaces where one could engage in puzzles and inventions related to the event, sans supervision or sales influence. This was an invaluable opportunity to play and learn. Having an area in a conference like this provides time for time-out and inspiration as well as hidden scoring opportunities!
  • An idea inspired by Jane McGonigal’s book, Reality is Broken (2012): we allow attendees to +1 each other. This is like an in-person analogy of a “favorite” star or a “like” thumbs-up, but because it is real, perhaps it means even more within the context of the event. I like the idea of using physical +1s (think cardboard cutouts the size of a plate) which could become the subject of a selfie; a nice option for camera shy attendees.
  • Finally this is an idea that I owe to Pete Jenkins (http://gamificationplus.uk), who suggested making the next iteration of our competition, a team-based activity. Rise Leaderboard can support this mode of use. The concept is that player interest will be more sustained if they are contributing to a group effort, as opposed to seeing individuals rapidly ascend up the leaderboard and losing the will to compete due to very high leading scores. In the team model points can still be awarded individually for small activities and these can contribute to the collective team score.

Well, I for one am excited about the next Digital Capabilities event!

References

McGonigal, J. (2012). Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. London: Vintage.

Pink, D. H. (2010). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.