Four years ago, Bluewolf started to experiment with gamification for external and internal collaboration and were one of the first to use social technology to unlock productivity and collaboration. A 2012 global McKinsey report found that $900 billion – $1.3 trillion in annual value could be unlocked by social technologies.

Corinne Sklar, Global CMO of consulting firm Bluewolf, which was acquired by IBM earlier this year for $200 million, spoke to B&T earlier today at Dreamforce in San Francisco on this subject.

For Sklar, the simple premise that happy employees leads to happy customers is key. Driving employee engagement creates great customer engagement.

Four years ago, the marketing department realised that they had an amazing group of individuals (consultants and experts) within their business but they had a challenge in taking their thought leadership and amplifying not only the voices of the individuals but also the Bluewolf brand.

They were using the Salesforce internal collaboration tool “Chatter” but were dealing with globalisation as a growing company and they were finding it harder to drive internal collaboration and communication.

First of all, they benchmarked the company to see how collaborative they were internally and ran a separate study on how social each of their employees were by measuring how often they posted and engaged with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

They then gave each of their employees control over their individual Profile pages on their company website, connected these to social channels and encouraged every employee to become socially active.

Bluewolf helped individuals build content and every time a staff member shared this content on their Twitter or LinkedIn page, they would get points. If the content reached a certain number of views, there would be additional points. They used gamification to drive content creation and distribution.

This was just one part of the puzzle but helped expand their employee’s personal brands and also the Bluewolf business simultaneously. They immediately saw huge improvements in their SEO and an increase in inbound leads.

Gamification was also used for “Chatter” to encourage individuals to post content and drive collaboration and conversation internally.

The Bluewolf CMO shared that she finds this the biggest challenge in her role. Data and technology challenges are important but they are secondary to communication and collaboration. It’s a personal world with so many dimensions. Driving collaboration, in a visual way to execute the vision is hard.

However gamifying the internal “Chatter” tool has helped – this is another way employees can gain points.

Points can be redeemed for prizes and the top 50 people across departments are given the opportunity to go on a rewards trip.

Instead of a “President’s Club” system where only the top performing sales people are given the opportunity to be rewarded. Instead it is based on promoting those who live and engage with Bluewolf’s culture and values, something Sklar is very proud of.

The program was first launched as “#goingsocial” but has now evolved to become PRIME.