Social Gaming: Farmville Takes Over

Wonder why you get several wall posts about your friends finding lost cows and growing corn?

It's the phenomena of social game. Online games that allow you to interact with others.

Social games are web-based games played on social networking websites. Here are some statistics about social gamers:

• 65% of social gamers are women
• 64% of social gamers play everyday
• Facebook is the most popular social network to play social games
• 62% of social gamers play with real friends, 56% play with friends they have made online, 37% play with strangers
• Want to know more?

Zynga, Playfish, and Playdom are the biggest social gaming networking sites. Zynga created Farmville and Mafia Wars played on Facebook. Farmville has 61 million users, making it the most used social game available today.

And these games are only growing more popular. Today was the Social Gaming Summit of 2010, where panelists had the opportunity to talk about the future and growth of social gaming. Rick Thompson, co-founder of Playdom, predicted that 90% of internet users will be social gaming in the near future.

To play social games today, check out the Social Gaming Network.

To hear more of my thoughts on other blogs...

http://mashable.com/2010/02/17/social-gaming-survey/

http://blog.sgn.com/?p=37&cpage=1#comment-66

The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.

For our Dandeloin Marketing project for our Social Networking in Business class we are facing this very problem as we prepare to present how we used social media to market a e-book about "how to increase your chances of going viral."

When using social media, analytics only can take you so far. How can you determine where people clicked from, was it facebook or my gmail status? How many people came because I asked them to, how many people were generally interested? As social marketing becomes more popular it is important for people to know how to track how and why people are coming to their sites so they can determine was their ROI is.

Foursquare

Remember when Twitter seem like a fad? Now everyone has a Twitter account. Foursquare is the next Twitter.

Foursquare is a location based social networking service allowing users to "check-in" to specific locations using their smartphones. Foursquare is a game; you earn points for "checking-in" and the person with the most points at a specific location becomes the mayor of that spot. However simple it sounds, Foursquare is quickly rising in popularity and provides users a new way to enhance their social network.

Foursquare also provides businesses the advantage of free advertising. Restaurants are now giving away promotions every time someone "checks-in".

Check it out! Foursquare

Web Analytics - Part 1

Web Analytics - Part 1, a good place to start is what are web analytics? At the basic level web analytics tell you how successful your website is.

A five steps process will show you how to analyze website effectiveness with the help of web analytics:

1. Define goals for your website
2. Determine how you are going to measure goals (metrics)
3. Collect data using web analytics
4. Analyze data
5. Repeat

Check out Google Analytics or Yahoo Analytics if you are interested in learning more about how your website is performing.

Get Up From Behind Your Computer

Technology has given us the opportunity to network through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Coworkers, and more. These social networks allow us to reach out to people that we might not have been able to connect to with otherwise. But, you still need to get out from behind your computer and go meet people.

Your online social networks are far more valuable to you if you use them to widen your network of people to meet in person. Online social networks have the advantage of quantity, but meeting face-to-face give you quality.

Online Collaboration

We have dozen of different forms of online communication and more and more they are being used to promote and conduct business. Online collaboration is essential for the future success of businesses. However, businesses implement these technologies and then wonder why they don't work.

Supportive management within corporate cultures is the key to successful online collaboration. Employees need to be trained and encouraged to use new technologies on a regular basis. Technology is constantly changing, new tools such as GroupTweet, ooVoo, and Stixy all provide unique ways for employees to work together. Companies must continually communication to their employees on the benefits of online collaboration.

4 Parts of a Team

We all have to be in teams. In school, at work, life in general; you are pretty much always in a team. But the tricky part is being in an effective team.

When making a team to efficiently get a project done you need four key players:

The Leader

The Brain

The Anchor

The Soldier

The Leader see the big picture and come up with new ideas. The Brain creates a strategies to put the Leader's ideas into action. The Anchor looks for problems and plays devil's advocate when new ideas are brought up. Finally, the Soldier executes the plan.

The next time you need to create a team consider these four components. Do your teams now have these key players?