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?

Learning in a Virtual World

Second Life provides countless opportunities for business, education, and socialization all in virtual world. With the use of Virtual Environment Real User Study (Verus) Second Life, one day, could look completely realistic.

Will all of our social interaction one day be done through Second Life or some other form of social media? Although Second Life is extremely convenient in some cases, for example long distance business transactions, but what happens when we depend on it too much?

Some people are already complete addicted to their computers through video games; will everyone be addicted through social media? I do not want to end up like those video gamers (check out the link).

Link To Me, I Need a Job

There a dozens of different ways to use LinkedIn, from improving connect-ability to increasing the relevancy of your job search. Just look at Guy Kawasaki or The Mashable Social Media Guide or even the LinkedIn Learning Center.

If you don't have a LinkedIn account already, get one. This social media is specifically to help build people's career. It's like a resume online for everyone to see. By connecting with people (friends, students, colleagues, prospective employers, groups, etc...) you have more of an opportunity to network for future job.

Link to me!

We Will Find You

Mobile Social Network Software, or MoSoSo, is down right scary. According "Students' New Best Friend: 'MoSoSo'", under-25s are the hot new market for using GPS combined with cyber-social networks to find people. Anyone. All the time. All you need is phone.

I'm under-25 and, again, that scares me. I don't want my parents, crazy exs, siblings, and friends to have the ability to know where I am at all times; it feels like an invasion of privacy just thinking about it.

I feel like that kills the term "weekend getaway" and completely kills any chance of the up and coming generations from sneaking out without their parents find out. Do people really want other people to know where you are at all times?

Not me. But, at the same time I definitely can't give up my Blackberry...

We "Yelp" for Reviews

Online reviews of products and services are becoming more and more common. If you have ever shopping online, you have probably read a review. Amazon.com is one of the leaders in online reviews, but Yelp is now one of the most popular websites specifically for reviews. Yelp offers reviews on restaurants, shopping, night life, hotel, spas and beauty...anything your area that you want to know about.

I personally love online reviews. I used them when buying all my furniture online and I use it to find local restaurants. I believe it holds producers to a higher standard; if people don't like a product or service they can write about it online for everyone to see. From a business owners perspective, one bad review can make or break a company.

So online reviews; good for buyers, bad for sellers?

Change or Die, Books vs. E-Books

In 2006, John Updike spoke at the Book Expo event in Washington, DC warning booksellers they were going to be threatened by a "liquid book" and stating "books are intrinsic to our human identity." Welcome Kindle, Sony Reader, and iPad.

Newspapers and music companies have already transitioned from print and CDs to online media. And now publishers are being forced to "change or die" according to The Digital Emperor Has No Clothes.

But, are we ready to give up books? Our generation is stuck between the age without Web 2.0 and the age where Web 2.0 controls people's lives. Although the idea of having instant access to thousands of books, newspapers, and music all in the same place is appealing; I still like being able to hold a book and flip the pages.

Any one else out there going to miss good old paperback books?

Sharing Everything - Open Innovation

Open Innovation

Opposed to companies having private research laboratories (closed innovation), there has been a shift towards companies sharing or licensing research (open innovation). Below is a diagram of closed innovation, on the top, versus open innovation, on the bottom.

Open innovation allows companies to bring technology to the market faster, provides feedback from a variety of consumers, and overall creates a win-win situation for everyone.

So why is this just starting now?

Technology, especially social networking, has made it beneficial for companies to work together rather than against each other. We have already seen this shift between generations; in school we constantly work on group projects, whereas the generation before is use to individual work.

Are we going to experience a complete shift to sharing everything online? If so, is that a good thing?

We Are Family - Social Networking Analysis

"Six Myths About Informal Networks - And How to Overcome Them" and "The People that Make Organizations Go - Or Stop" both discuss social networking analysis.

Businesses today are creating extensive diagrams, graphs, and charts to describe the different roles employees play in informal networks. The main categories of employees are central connectors, boundary spanners, information brokers, and peripheral specialists.

To simplify the four main roles, lets take a look at AU. AU is the company and the different school are the different divisions. The central connector is the friend that knows everyone and everything going on, the boundary spanner is the friend who is in one school but still spends time with friends in other schools, the information brokers the friend who is always trying to get all the friends from different schools together, and peripheral specialists the friend to go to from each school if you have a specific question relating to their school.

Looking at it this way, most of us have been doing social networking analysis for years. Now companies are paying consultants and specialists thousands of dollars to analyze companies to create more efficient informal networks for more efficient flow of social capital. I could do that.


"Six Myths About Informal Networks - And How to Overcome Them" http://itec335.wdfiles.com/local--files/reading-capital/myths.pdf
"The People that Make Organizations Go - Or Stop"
http://itec335.wdfiles.com/local--files/reading-capital/people.pdf

First Blog

For ITEC-335, Social Networking in Business at American University, everyone in the class has created a blog. Every week we will post our thoughts relevant to the topics and reading from class. We are linking with others in our class to create a blog circle and will comment on their blogs as part of our weekly assignments.

Today, we have created our blogs, made our first post, and linked with the other students in our Blog Circle.

"On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own.”