Case Studies - Engagement

• Reddit. This giant social, news aggregation, and discussion site uses its members to vote up or down on submitted content. It’s the classic example of reciprocity Engagement: if you share content, you can access content, which drives Engagement and grows community and crowd. Reciprocity scales Engagement—and, therefore, your business model. Reddit boasts more than 1.5 billion monthly users.

• TikTok. With 700 million active users, this business phenomenon is the zenith of Community and Crowd. TikTok is also one of the best Engagement models ever devised. Its unequaled Algorithms hook users almost instantly—and turn them into fanatics almost as fast. 

• Duolingo offers 98 language courses that teach 39 different languages. With a deeply embedded Community Engagement structure, Duolingo has more than 500 million total users and about 40 million monthly active users, representing every country in the world. 

• iHeart Media. As the world’s largest audio company (radio and podcasts), iHeart reaches hundreds of millions of consumers monthly. At their physical concerts, fans scan QR codes to get “virtual swag bags” filled with unique, dynamic digital objects. Advertisers build creative campaigns, dropping branded, gamified objects directly into fans’ Vatom wallets, resulting in unprecedented rates of participation and data collection.

• Shareitt is an Israeli platform for sharing new and used goods. The company awards users digital tokens for items they no longer need; users can then use those tokens, or points, to acquire other shared items on the platform. Shareitt gets the ball rolling by granting points to new users and by “giving, exchanging, granting wishes, and inviting friends.” Shareitt’s goods travel on more than 400 routes throughout Israel.

• Axie Infinity is an NFT-based online video game developed in Vietnam. Players collect and create NFTs of digital pets, known as Axies, which can be bred and battle with each other within the game. But the real action is in the trading, where game developer Sky Mavis charges a 4.25% fee to players when they trade Axies.

• Crypto DAOs. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are self-governing groups of crypto enthusiasts who operate under a shared goal, vote in all decisions with no government influence, and whose financial transaction records are maintained on a blockchain. Crypto DAOs often represent enormous financial power. A classic example was the Constitution Dao, which in 2021 set out to buy an original copy of the US Constitution for a predicted $40 million at a Sotheby’s auction. While they didn’t succeed, their effort was a reminder of how powerful tokenomics can be—especially when it underscores the basic human drive towards Engagement with other like-minded people towards a common purpose. 

• Futurescope uses Artificial Intelligence to automatically generate and distribute engaging, hyper-personalized newsletter content to connect clients with their audiences, grow their email lists, and increase revenue. 

• OpenExO. The ExO community ran a cryptoeconomics experiment to increase Engagement via a doubling pattern using the Octalysis framework. One hundred candidates played a 30-doubling challenge, and 52 winners earned between 0.00002 and 10,737 tokens over 30 activities. Some took 30 days, and some were delivered in a weekend! The initiative resulted in 10x community Engagement.

Other companies and initiatives worth investigating for their Engagement programs include: IKEA, Fender guitars, Uber, Gymshark, Apple, Greggs, Coca-Cola (check out its “Share a Coke” campaign), Tesco’s virtual stores, McDonald’s store overhauls, Hershey’s Happygrams, chat bots that can recommend music, Domino’s Pizza Hero, Pep Boys’ Axonify platform, and gamification platforms like Microsoft Dynamics 365, Mambo.io, Agile CRM, Hoopla, Evoq, Engage, Gamify, and Spinify.