Jive adds gamification elements to drive engagement

From customers to employees, Jive hopes gamification tools will boost interaction, communication

Social enterprise business Jive Software has previously focused on building a platform for social collaboration in the enterprise environment, and now is looking to utilize gamification elements and a whole social intranet.

Jive's Facebook-esque offerings for the enterprises, launched a package of new applications on Wednesday that help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, communication, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, social networking features and more.

While it sounds outdated, Jive says that many businesses rely on traditional, stale intranets for company-wide communication and team collaboration. Jive is hoping to disrupt this space by offering a more social intranet platform that includes gamification will provide a greater advantage against others in the field such as Yammer.

The new applications allow managers to create and implement missions, challenges, status levels, goals, badges, competitions, and receive virtual or physical rewards. This is tantamount to a virtual incentive program and activity tracker to keep all employees on track so managers aren't left guessing or bugging people on their status all the time.

Lately game mechanics have made their way into a bunch of non-gaming companies in order to help inspire people to communicate more often and provide credit and thanks to people completing tasks on schedule.

Jive has hopes that businesses will be able to dramatically increase adoption, engagement and productivity within the Jive network through incentives and activities tailored for specific groups of users. The new gamification features is powered by Bunchball, and is available on both the internal social networks and in external communities.

One way the a sales staff could take part in a gamification methods is by creating a competition to see who can complete training materials first. While, in an external community, contests and rewards could be used to encourage customers to help answer each other's questions and become product champions.

Bunchball is a company focused on innovation in gamification, an innovative way of engaging users, motivating employees and increasing customer loyalty. Bunchball's cloud-based Nitro gamification platform is being used by Adobe, HP, Cisco, Warner Bros., Comcast, LiveOps, VMWare and Hasbro. The Silicon Valley-based Bunchball has investors that include Granite Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Northport Investments, and Correlation Ventures. 

The 11 year-old company went public in mid-December and has been trading well above its $16.50 IPO price. Jive Software (NASDAQ:JIVE) was level in early morning trading at $26.61.

The company is currently not profitable and has announced that it does not expect to be so "in the foreseeable future" but is nonetheless expected to fair well on the market because of its cloud-based services.

Jive, which makes a software platform that has been out for four years, Jive Engage, and is used by big industry mainstays including Hewlett-Packard Co. and SAP AG, entered it IPO having raised $57.5 million for its enterprise social networks and cloud services.