Skylab Apps on Gamification & Social Learning

Skylab Apps on Gamification & Social Learning

Skylab Apps on Gamification & Social Learning

Gamification places emphasis on human motivation.

Social Learning Theory posits that people learn from one another, via observation, imitation, and modeling.

 The Skylab Apps platform has been built operating under the Social Learning theory that has often been called a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation.

 

 

Gamification has gained traction in recent years as an effective way of engaging users to perform actions in contexts that would otherwise be considered tedious and undesirable. Education is an area in which user engagement could have the greatest impact on success, with some advantages for users to improve or get better comprehension. Our goal in doing so is to foster greater user engagement using the system and thereby promote an environment better suited for active social learning. 

Skylab has built a Proprietary algorithm that places emphasis on commonly understood human habits and then leveraged technology to gamify the experience of Learning for example. 

“It’s Play That Helps Us Do Serious Things Better.”

“When you have a Game Like Platform where knowledge is applied, knowledge becomes a resource.  The more you know the better you are at the Game.”

Dean Grey: SkyLab Apps CEO

In essence, it’s “Human-Focused Design” as opposed to “Function-Focused Design” Skylab has thought and developed The Gamification Engine The perfect blend of Science, Psychology and Technology.

Imagine having a way to communicate (Smart Chat), engage, teach (Multimedia Channels, Gamified Trainings, Recognition Wall), reward (Contests, Habit Tracking), and monetize (In-App Purchases) your affinity group or community within one platform that you own.

That’s what we do!


Unconsciously, the key points below are enhanced in the user’s behavior through Gamification:

Epic Meaning & Calling

Core Drive is a player’s belief that he is doing something greater than himself or that he was “chosen” to do something. This creates a player who devotes a lot of his time to maintaining a forum or helping to create things for the entire community.​

Development & Accomplishment

The internal motivation of making progress, developing skills, and eventually overcoming challenges drives community. ​

Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback

Users are engaged in a creative process of repeatedly figuring things out and trying different combinations. People need ways to express their creativity, and to be able to see the results of their creativity, receive feedback, and respond in turn.​

 

Ownership & Possession

When a player feels ownership, he/she is motivated to make what he/she owns better and own even more. If a person spends a lot of time to customize his/her profile or his/her avatar, he/she automatically feels more ownership towards it too.​

Social Influence & Relatedness

​All the social elements that drive people, including: mentorship, acceptance, social responses, companionship, as well as competition and envy.

Scarcity & Impatience​​

The fact that people can’t get something right now motivates them to think about it all day long. Many games have Appointment Dynamics within them (come back 2 hours later to get your reward).​

Unpredictability & Curiosity 

Drive is wanting to find out what will happen next. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, your brain is engaged and you think about it often. This core drive is activated whenever a company runs a sweepstake or lottery program to engage users.​

Challenges

Users complete a series of steps to fulfill the challenge. Each step completed gives you a small reward, discount, or badge (e.g. 50% Discount at Starbucks). By completing all the steps you will earn the big reward. The goal here is to be the Pokemon Scavenger Hunt for businesses, thus getting people out of the house/office to capture their experiences in the real world.​

App Sharing

App Sharing creates a virality effect that drives community growth for the client, sponsor awareness, and behavioural data for the brand.This is critical for our advertisers and Skylab’s business model; as our success is tied to the growth of the client’s audience and behavioural data. For the user, it provides a fun way to engage in the growth of the cause/movement, creating a deeper desire to belong.​

Voting 

Voting invites the user to share selfies or photos for a reward as they engage within a popularity contest. People get excited about the recognition and rewards inside a private community where they feel the odds are higher than social media. As they increase engagement within their community, they feed a desire to belong.

The overall goal of the App Sharing & Voting contest is to maximize the MAU/DAU (Monthly or Daily Active User) of their user base with gamification tactics, thus instantly increasing the value of the company.


At Skylab, Social Learning & Gamification are the Core Drive. They permit to empower the followings:

SOCIAL NETWORKS

It puts the learner at the center of the people, information, and learning content they need. Comments on content increase community knowledge and understanding as well as drive engagement.

STRENGTHENING TEAMWORK

Community content enhances collaboration. Notes, comments, and ratings specific to your organization improve communication among teams and the organization as a whole.

NIELSEN’S 1-9-90 RULE

According to expert Jakob Nielsen, 90% of participants don’t contribute, though they find value in what they read and observe. The next 9% add to existing discussions, with 1% creating most commentary and giving the community food for thought.
 

AMPLIFY THE LEARNING PROCESS

Social learning connects people with relevant content, learning assets, and expert information specific to an organization’s unique culture. This combination of content, commentary, and community amplifies learning and helps you maximize your return on learning investments.

CREATING NEW CONNECTIONS

Social learning offers access to colleagues outside an employee’s traditional sphere, which can spark innovation and leverage connections to employees they may not otherwise engage with.​​

SECURITY & PROTECTION

A good social learning platform protects your information, while allowing employees to find, create, and share knowledge, learning assets, and expertise with their colleagues – without compromising security.

Game elements that can facilitate learning

Social learning is often coupled with game mechanics when you want to take audience engagement to the next level. We define social learning as an online learning experience where learners are able to see what other learners are doing and control other learners’ gameplay or content. With social learning, you can send messages to other learners, challenge a colleague to a challenge, leave a souvenir, and even create content to change the learning experience. The most common form of social learning that you can implement is a leaderboard. Simply seeing how well other learners are doing can get your audience excited and motivated to take training over and over again.

Doing our jobs is serious business, but learning about it doesn’t have to be. We’ve helped innovative organizations around the world make learning that’s as addictive as Candy Crush.​

Some of the potential benefits of successful gamification initiatives include:

  • giving users ownership of their learning
  • opportunities for identity work through taking on alternate selves
  • freedom to fail and try again without negative repercussions
  • chances to increase fun and joy
  • opportunities for differentiated instruction
  • making learning visible
  • providing a manageable set of subtasks and tasks
  • inspiring students to discover intrinsic motivators for learning
  • motivating users with low levels of motivation

 

The Growth Mindset: 10 Principles to Growth

The Growth Mindset: 10 Principles to Growth

Growth Mindset: 10 Principles to Growth: Skylab Apps Case Study

Many people begin to experiment and fail to see the desired results. They’re often missing on the key ingredient: The Growth Mindset. Let’s apply this method to Skylab Apps.

Skylab Apps was founded in 2015 by Dean Grey. He has the vision of growing a global company motivated by the idea that people would adopt the technology built by his company. Skylab Apps makes a white label community building platform that allows the app owner to track, train, grow and monetize their user, customer, clients, follower or fans.

“Company owners want to grow and they have a vague idea of how to get there. But, they lack the key principles to achieve their goals. They lack of a general understanding behind the practice.”

Dean Grey

What if you could increase your Growth rate? What if you could finally start to optimize your processes? Growth is the answer to these questions…

This article is about to give you a few principles to help guide you into your quest for Growth. It is a guide that we have lived by here at Skylab Apps, always testing, poking around and customer/client-centric.

The Infographic : You must be busy. So instead of having you read a ton of text, I distilled the main principles in the following infographic:

1. Learning from experience

Growth is all about testing hypothesis. “Testing hypothesis” means running a battery of tests to see what works and what doesn’t.We test a hypothesis because we believe that no one else has the answer to our questions. What may work in another business, will not necessarily work with yours.

When Dean Grey, Founder of Skylab Apps started Zooplr, his vision was to build a state of the art mobile platform that would allow companies and brands to engage, track and train all of the community member. After successfully exiting Zooplr, and Tags, he continued on with the same vision to build Skylab Apps. Except this time, he was going to take it all the way home

When you test something, you can either validate or invalidate your hypothesis. Most people see this through a success / failure lens. There is no such thing as a failure in Growth because you want to learn. Success happens when you learn, failure when you don’t.

It’s that simple. If your experiment failed and you’ve gained a ton of new insights, that’s a success.Learning allows you to make better educated guesses and to launch even more successful experiments.

Don’t expect to have a lot of success at the beginning but the more you understand your product & customers, the more successful your tests will become. In the case of Skylab Apps, learning from experience didn’t necessarily mean failure. In fact, as mentioned before, exiting the two prior companies successfully set Dean up on the correct pat to launch Skylab Apps with all oh the experience and data from his two prior companies.

2. Data-Driven

Running a digital business enables you to measure every step of the way. You can easily track what everyone is doing on your app.You know more about your consumers than anyone else in business. Use these insights! The best Growth people use that to their advantage. You need to use data in every decision you take.

When we speak about data, most people think about analytics tools such as Google Analytics or KISSmetrics. Never forget about other valuable sources of insights that you have available.

Customer interviews are a perfect source of insights, to help you drive Growth & Product Development.

Make sure that you invest into your Analytics stack early on to avoid learning about the wrong things… (Invalidating the wrong hypothesis will have disastrous impact on your business)

3. Innovative Testing

Growth is all about testing innovative and creative ideas. Don’t limit yourself to what your competitors are doing, you have the freedom to do whatever you want. Be innovative and challenge the status-quo: it’s not because you always had a 3-step signup process that it is necessarily the best process.

Look for flaws in your current processes and improve them until you’re satisfied with the results.

Growth is all about being innovative. If you just copy what’s going on in your space, you’ll limit your potential results terribly.

4. Always go further

Growth never stops. Even if you have a conversion rate from Trial to Paid of 95%, there are always things that you can improve.

When you think everything is optimized, take a one-week break. Go back to work and think again: Where are we losing most of our users? Where can we have more impact?

You should never be satisfied by the Growth you’re getting. You can always go further.

5. Process first

Launching experiments in only one part of the story. The process is what actually makes everything possible.​

You can’t really sustain your Growth efforts without a process. You’ll start to launch experiments but you’ll soon fail because you’ll lose track of what’s happening.The process is what allows you to create a repeatable, scalable and predictable machine. Without a process, you’ll fail to show results over the long-term. Design your processes early on. They won’t be perfect but iterate and improve them as you move forward.

6. Authentic & Sustainable Growth

As Brian Balfour said,

“All Growth is not equal”. Are you looking for MAU (Monthly Active Users) or are you looking for long-term customers?

You can’t really sustain your Growth efforts without a process. You’ll start to launch experiments but you’ll soon fail because you’ll lose track of what’s happening. The process is what allows you to create a repeatable, scalable and predictable machine. Without a process, you’ll fail to show results over the long-term. Design your processes early on. They won’t be perfect but iterate and improve them as you move forward. Don’t think about Growth as something that can yield enormous result for the short term. It certainly can. However…
Look at Growth as a way to build your business over the long-term. Launch experiments that can have a long-lasting impact on your growth.

7. Start Small – MVT

You generally don’t have to go through 100 hours of development to test your hypothesis.

If you want to launch several tests per week, you’ll need to launch “Minimum Viable Tests”. In other words: What’s the minimum test that you can launch to test an hypothesis? You need to understand that Growth is an iterative process. Starting small will allow you to build up on your success (or lack thereof). If you launch a small test and it fails, you’ll have a greater “Time to Learning” than if you redesigned your entire on-boarding. Starting small may be be counter intuitive. But it’s the only way that you can create a positive impact on your business.

8. Customer-Centric

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If you fail to be customer-centric, you’ll only be able to drive short-term. Your customers will be annoyed and you’ll fail to retain them over the long term.

Increasing your Growth is only one part of the equation. If you squeeze out every dollar of your customer’s wallet without delivering more value, you’ll piss off more than a few people. The best way to be customer-centric is to examine their desired outcome. Are your experiments helping them to achieve their mission, their goals?

9. Ethic

Some people really don’t care about ethics and  that’s a mistake in terms of brand image.

The dating sector is a quite good example. They’re basically creating fake profiles and generating discussions with you so that you start your paid membership. A beautiful person of the opposite sex will strike up a conversation and show interest in you. You can only chat back if you start a paid subscription. But, wait! There is no one on the other side… It’s just a bot! Even if this trick is increasing their Growth, are they delivering value? What would people think about that? Having some sense of ethics is imperative if you want to seek Authentic Growth and avoid damaging your long-term brand.

10. Company-wide mission

This is a team sport and everyone should be involved. Everyone should be able to contribute their own ideas to your backlog.Relevant people should also be able to get involved into discussions on specific ideas. You’re designing a new onboarding flow? Talk to the person who designed the last one. If you don’t involve people within your company, you’ll get into political issues and they’ll slow down your efforts.Involving them can only be a good thing. The worse that can happen is that they’ll share valuable insights and help you launch better experiments.

Growth. Growth. Growth.

These principles should help you to get started with Growth. Don’t waste too much time and start experimenting as soon as you can. However… Make sure that you set yourself up for success by creating customer-centric, ethical and long-lasting growth…

Skylabapps.com enables to grow your community thanks to the Gamification Engine which uses Gamified features.

 

Check out Skylab’s Clients websites & apps. They’ve trusted us for growth.

http://www.allysian.com/ – http://www.amway.com/  – http://www.centerpointe.com/v2/     https://www.goodlovinfoods.com/ http://www.alticor.com/  http://www.eastwestartists.com/ http://www.mindmovies.com/ http://www.xterraplanet.com/ http://blowbunny.com/ http://www.betterplanetpaper.com/

The Entrepreneurial Spirit: Starting a Business

The Entrepreneurial Spirit: Starting a Business

The Entrepreneurial Spirit

Starting a business is exciting, and scary. Let’s explore how to tap in to your Entrepreneurial spirit​!

I’ve started more businesses than I’d care to admit. In my experience, it’s a bit like driving through a heavy fog where you are only able to see a few feet in front of the windshield — you don’t know what’s up ahead until it’s upon you. However, the longer you are an entrepreneur, the better you can navigate through that fog.

As I’ve been driving through the fog for over a decade now, I thought I would take today’s post and boil down 15 of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the past decade of building and growing businesses. Consider these tips “stuff I wish I had known when I was young and stupid.” This is what has allowed me to develop my Entrepreneurial spirit  Let’s get to them.

1. Don’t listen to statistics. People love to throw around the statistic that 95 percent of business fail. Don’t listen to that — it’s an excuse to make you feel comfortable about giving up. If that number is even correct, it’s because most people don’t commit, they don’t follow through to the end or they are stupid in how they manage their money.

2. Do something you like. Don’t start something you won’t want to do in five years. Because if you are successful, you’ll still be doing this in five years.

3. You are not going to know everything.In fact, you probably won’t know anything when you first start. Start anyway. When I first got into real-estate investing, I had no idea how to buy a property, rent a house, or evict a tenant. I figured it all out “on the job.” You will too.Entrepreneurial spirit 

4. Finish what you start. Nearly every entrepreneur I know suffers from the same curse: we like to start things more than we like to finish them. In other words, if you are a good entrepreneur, you’ll have a lot of great ideas. Most of them would probably work out well and make you a lot of money. However, that doesn’t mean you should pursue them. Pick one and go with it until it dies or it makes you rich enough to buy a private island.

5. Never partner with someone because it’s convenient, think like an entrepreneur. Partner with someone because it makes you stronger. The wrong partner will drive you crazy, make you hate your work and end up causing more problems than they solve.

6. You are going to suck at managing people.It’s OK, we all do at first. However, this is one task you must get better about. Hire an assistant right now, even if it’s only a virtual one for $3 an hour. It will give you some great training on managing, with little downside.

7. Social media probably isn’t that important. We just pretend it is so we can look at cat pictures on Facebook. I’d recommend installing a Facebook newsfeed blocker.

8. Stop designing business cards, logos, business plans and stationeryThey don’t matter right now. Go build your business and stop doing busy work that makes you feel like you are accomplishing something.

9. There is a fine line between dedicated and obsessed. Screw the line. Trample right over it. You need to cross that line continually, so never let anyone tell you that you are too obsessed with your idea. I’m completely and overwhelmingly obsessed with real-estate investing — and it’s OK. This is one of the best ways to know that you have developed that Entrepreneurial spirit!  What are you obsessed with?

Entrepreneurial spirit 

10. Don’t quit your job too soon. Yes, you’ll have more time to build your business, but let’s be honest: there are 168 hours in a week, only 40 are consumed by your job and another 50 by sleep. You have plenty of time if you would just hustle and turn off Netflix. But don’t be afraid to quit your job if you can afford it.

11. Focus on your higher paying tasks. Divide up your tasks and determine what your “$10 per hour” tasks are and what your “$1,000 per hour” tasks are. Focus on doing more “$1,000 per hour” tasks and fewer “$10 per hour” ones. For more on this, read Want to Make $1,000 or More Per Hour? And yes, you do a lot of $1,000 an hour tasks, even if you don’t realize it. Just do more of them.

12. Your spouse and kids matters more than your business. Never forget that.

13. Read — a lot. If you don’t have time, listen to audiobooks. And not just business books. Read motivational books, self-help books, success books, fiction books, biographies — whatever. This was one of the best ways to develop my Entrepreneurial spirit

14. Get up earlier. Yes, you can, and you should. I don’t care if you are not a morning person. That’s an excuse lazy people use. For more advice on this, read The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. It’s life changing.

15. Don’t worry about raising money. Focus on building a business so incredible people throw money at you.

Like driving down a lonely highway on a dark, foggy night, entrepreneurship can be a little scary. But hopefully at least one of the above tips will help you navigate through the fog a little easier with more confidence. If you are just getting started with your business, just remember this: keep driving through the fog. Your future self will thank you.

Do you have any additional tips you’d like to add? Or something you’d like to expand upon? Leave your comments below and let’s continue the conversation. I would love to hear your story on developing your Entrepreneurial spirit.

 Skylab apps CEO & Founder, Dean Grey, has excelled at identifying business opportunities and staying focused on the positive aspects of these opportunities. Realizing how networking is your greatest strength, Grey decided to take this idea and apply it to one of today’s most commonly-used technologies: mobile applications.

Finally, if you think this post could help one of your family members or friends, share it on your favorite social-media channel. You never know whose life you might change.

The author Steve Wolf is a serial entrepreneur and currently the Director of Sales and Marketing at Skylab Apps. Along with the CEO of Skylab Apps Dean Grey Contributed to the article. If you are interested in finding out more about what Skylab Apps is all about and the entrepreneurs that make up this company, please check us out at www.Skylabapps.com

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