Using Compendium to Gamify Your Content Strategy

You've probably noticed that we've been busy lately, introducing editorial calendars, enhancing page-load times, adding post-assignment capabilities, and most recently, building a most-active-authors leaderboard and a Top Posts leaderboard. These leaderboards are the first in a series of Compendium improvements focused on building gamification into content marketing.

For those of you unfamiliar with "gamification", it's a methodology that encourages the use of gaming elements in non-game applications. Example elements include badges, leaderboards, progress bars, and achievement levels. Gamifying is designed to make an application more fun and psychologically rewarding.

Our leaderboard highlights the most active authors and the Top Posts meter displays the most visited posts and their authors. Since Compendium has built-in moderation and workflow for message control, authors don't receive the immediate gratification of seeing their blog posts published. The leaderboards provide a visual reward to authors for both writing frequently and creating valuable content.

Over time, we plan to expand into additional game mechanics such as Foursquare-esqe badges ("Blogged 5 Days in a Row"), achievement levels ("Uber-Blogger: 100 Posts Written"), physical rewards ("August Blogger of the Month" t-shirts) and progress bars encouraging blogging in five different post types (list, photo, conversation, interview and satrical). If you have any ideas on how to reward and incentivize your bloggers, let us know in the comments! Together, we can make blogging easier and more fun.