I had the opportunity to evaluate BunchBall and BigDoor, two of the leading social gaming service providers, aka gamification. Here’s a quick low down:

BunchBall – Great demo by Kevin Spier, Director of Sales. Bunchball has a mature tool set and has been around since 2005. They have  many well known clients such as Comcast, Victoria’s Secret, and NBC. I was quite impressed by their capabilities and analytics.  It’s rare that service providers surpass my expectations but BunchBall did. BunchBall is backed by Granite Ventures and Adobe Systems Incorporated. The downside is that their current pricing model reflects their targeted clientele. Bunchball has a set pricing model in the mid 4 figures per month for up to 1MM unique visitors. All in all, a great value for established customers who have the budget to drive traffic to their site in a meaningful way – because let’s face it, gamification works if properly implemented. Kevin was quite helpful and introduced me to several of his connections who are interested in the space of my new venture.

BigDoor – Good demo by Keith Smith, CEO of BigDoor. BigDoor recently scored a $5MM venture round led by the Foundry Group, so they are playing catch up in some ways to the more established BunchBall. They have a toolset that will be able to get me the gamification features I desire, albeit with more massaging from my own development team than BunchBall. One plus about this is that BigDoor provides their technology more like an open source library so I can customize the features to fit my needs.  Keith also has been quite helpful and BigDoor has a huge advantage for two reasons: First, I, too, am a Seattle based startup CEO, so I am biased towards supporting local businesses and startups and Second, their pricing model, while based on API calls, scales with my business. This is an almost unarguable advantage for a cash-strapped startup and ultimately led towards our choice to go with BigDoor.

Do yourself a favor if you need to drive traffic and participation to your site and check out these two Companies, both offer superior value-added services.