We have reflected in earlier posts on the role that gamification may play in smart grid adoption. We continue to believe that transactive smart grids (i.e. smart markets) will be the only viable long-term motivation to sustain consumer engagement with their water or energy information, but that has not stopped firms from trying. Here are examples of the latest efforts of solar energy companies initiatives to engage and retain customers via games and social network competitions:
Via GreenBiz:
Among the many challenges companies face in their sustainability efforts is one of the most persistent and hardest to overcome: Getting your employees, and customers, to change their own behaviors.
This lack of engagement with green ideas, products and services has killed many a green initiative, and is one of the things that closed the coffin for both Google and Microsoft’s home energy management businesses, something that led GreenBiz contributor Truman Semans last week to opine on three possible solutions to the engagement dilemma.
One of the most obvious solutions — making behavior change fun — has also been one of the hardest to successfully enact. Butyesterday, I got a chance to learn about how one company is marrying social media, gaming and education in a new campaign that is already showing signs of success.
SunPower Corp., the San Jose-headquartered designer and manufacturer of high-efficiency solar panels and arrays, launched last month a Facebook contest to educate consumers about solar energy. The company hopes the campaign will reach people it wouldn’t normally reach — especially if the campaign goes viral — while also beefing up its online community and planting the idea of rooftop residential solar in the minds of potential customers.
“It is basically a way for us to engage with our audience in a fun and meaningful way,” Belis Aksoy, SunPower’s Marketing Manager, New Media, said during a press event Monday. “The Solar Discovery Game is highly social and shareable. It resides on Facebook, where contestants can share their experiences via the game, and at the same time, spread the word to their friends and family.”
SunPower believes the contest is the first of its kind for the solar power industry. The contest’s grand prize for the contestant who earns the most points is a SunPower solar energy system for their home worth up to $25,000. There will also be random drawings for more than 60 prizes from the company and its affiliate partners, including airline tickets to Hawaii and museum passes.Contestants earn points and virtual badges by answering a series of questions about solar power that range from easy — such as the meaning behind the acronym “PV” — to difficult, such as the number of solar panels installed by a New Mexico family who made a documentary about their SunPower system.
The contest not only gets users clicking through its website and learning about the company, it also helps SunPower dispel misconceptions about solar energy, such as the sturdiness of the solar panels, which have been shown to withstand golf ball-sized hail. Contestants may turn into customers by using tabs for an instant solar quote and free home evaluation.
On average, contestants spend 18 minutes on the site. Success is also measured by the number of people SunPower can reach and educate as a result of the game, Ingrid Ekstrom, SunPower’s director of corporate communications, said in an email. “In the first three weeks since we launched the game on June 21, SunPower’s Facebook community grew by 67 percent.”
SunPower’s online community increased to nearly 9,000 after the contest’s launch, Aksoy said. The Solar Discovery Game has also attracted participants from nearly every state in the U.S., and although the company expected many players under the age of 24, the game is also attracting more mature players, which mirrors something else Semans noted last week in his blog about engaging consumers on energy management products:
“Check out these stats: Farmville has more than 39 million monthly users (9.6 million active daily). Guess what the average user profile is? Teenage male? Not! Would you believe: middle-aged woman? That’s right, and those same women are key decision-makers on residential energy use and spending. Why do they play online games? One of the main reasons, former Zynga CFO Mark Vranesh told me recently, is community. It’s a platform for social interaction. So, imagine instead of an energy management dashboard that you use in isolation, customers get an interactive social game with energy inside?”
Via GigaOm:
You just shelled out $30,000 for rooftop solar panels on your home — what’s the next obvious step?: Let everyone know about it on your Facebook page. Year old company SunReports has launched a Facebook app that shows how much solar power your home solar system is producing.
The idea is to make solar “visual and easy to understand,” explained SunReports CEO Tom Dinkel, a former early employee at solar monitoring company Fat Spaniel, in an interview with me. Better monitoring of solar systems can also overcome a somewhat shocking stat that Dinkel related to me: they’ve found that there’s somewhere between a one out of ten and a four out of ten failure rate for residential solar systems. So for whatever reason — a faulty inverter, a tree branch on the system — a large portion of solar systems “go dark” and don’t have monitoring systems to make sure they stay working.
SunReports uses a $800 monitoring device called the Apollo that a solar installer deploys at the home, and which can track both the temperature and flow from a solar water heater, and the electricity generated by solar panels via an inverter. SunReports launched its business first for solar hot water heaters a year ago, and is just now moving into the solar panel business. The device picks up the data from the solar system and sends it to SunReport’s servers, and then back to the SunReport’s website, where home owners can log in and access that data. That data is also used to populate the SunReports Facebook app.
SunReports is really targeting its business model around selling to solar installers, and the company has already racked up a group of solar hot water heater installer partners, including SunEarth, and UMA Solar. Since the company just moved into the solar panel business, it doesn’t have any official partners to announce yet. The solar panel installation business has been pretty rough in recent years and SunReports is hoping that installers will use its monitoring product and Facebook app as a differentiator for its solar customers, potentially supplying an Apollo to the home owner for free and using the Facebook app to act as a valuable referral.
Solar home owners probably have peers who also want solar, explained Dinkel, and the Facebook app is branded with the installer and panel maker’s logos. “One referral that results in a new solar installation, pays for the monitoring product and then some,” said Dinkel.
Other companies like Geottellar — which sells big data analytics — are also trying to sell into the solar installer market, which is filled with both national brands like SolarCity, but also regional installation shops. A lot of these companies are good at engineering and installing, but not necessarily good at marketing and communication, said Dinkel.
One barrier I see is that inverter companies are also targeting this monitoring market, and large companies like Enphase Energy offer similar products and are already doing business with the installers. Solar installers also might not want to bear the cost of the added monitoring device and could end up only agreeing to offer the product if the customer pays for it, making it a much harder sell.
To date, SunReports has been bootstrapped but Dinkel says the company is in the process of raising its first round now. Next up: the company wants to launch an integrated solar generation and home energy consumption tool, as well as a system that also adds in how an electric vehicle fits in.
You must be logged in to post a comment.