Eric von Coelln, diggining into the data around Social Media and Social Games. See the whole blog at http://eric.voncoelln.com or you can also follow on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/evc
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EVCin With the constant push to "add friends" in order to advance in a game, I'm proposing that Facebook create a new "Game Friends" filter, allowing users to easily add users to their network WITHOUT sharing all the peronal profile data by default.
www.insidesocialgames.com
A funny thing happened to Facebook’s open platform – game developers took the opportunity and ran with it, even taking over the core of the service for a while. By this fall, parts of the site had become ...
EVCin Noticing that Zynga dropped the cross-promotion of Zynga Poker led me to look back at the history of social game dev from synchronous play to today's asyncronous mega hits like FarmVille and wonder if synchronous games can ever work within the Facebook platform. Users just don't spend time together on Facebook at the ...SAME TIME. I also look at the whole "add-me" aspect which entices users to add strangers to their network, and think Facebook needs to move quickly to fix this problem.
www.voncoelln.com
With the release of PetVille last week, one of the more notable changes is that Zynga stopped cross-promoting Texas Hold’em Poker, signaling that Zynga is continuing to move away from the synchronous games of its early days and dedicating its resources more fully on asynchronous games.
EVCin
I looked at the fish sim games on Facebook and see that Zynga's FishVille is seeing a Social Games Sticky Factor come down to around the 30% range like its rivals Happy Aquarium and Fish World. But also note that Chinese developed My Fishbowl has a Sticky Factor 33% higher - part of that is being able to capture the r...apidly growing Chinese speaking audience, but also highlights cultural differences in game play. http://www.voncoelln.com/eric/2009/12/02
www.voncoelln.com
As you might expect with the Thanksgiving holidays, the growth in the top fish sim games appeared to wane as we focused on real-life relationships and turkey dinners:
EVCin
Took a look at the increasing push to have users Bookmark and "Become a Fan" of
an Application by developers. Come up with some benchmarks to look at the Fans
per MAU to rank different developers and applications. But still stymied by a
metric for Bookmarks. Let me know what five or six items YOU have bookmarked in ...
the lower left footer of this Facebook page to help me compile the research.
http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/11
www.insidesocialgames.com
The push by marketers to be “bookmarked” has been going on since the Favorites tab first showed up in web browsers. A bookmark on Facebook is the Holy Grail for an app developer: sitting in ...
EVCin
Added another post on Inside Social Games, looking at why the latest Zynga release hasn't grown as fast as previous releases, plus looking at how advertsising is helping drive game launch growth http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/11
www.insidesocialgames.com
[In the latest post from guest author and social gaming consultant Eric von Coelln, he compares the growth patterns of new games from big developers to try to spot where Facebook advertising has been having a significant impact.]
EVCin I wanted to look further at the Social Game Sticky Factor and see how we could use it to measure the impact of different tactics. Very clearly the ability for users to send items to their friends and show off achievements had big impacts on the sticky factor. These same game mechanics are good lessons for general marketers to consider as well.
www.insidesocialgames.com
[The following is a guest post by Eric von Coelln, a social game consultant who occasionally contributes articles for Inside Social Games. Last week, he looked at how the number of daily active users correlate with the amount of money that a social game can make. ...
EVCin
Watching some of the developers figure out how to work the algorithm for the new, updated Facebook homepage News Feed. In the end, you need content that is engaging - which means content that people are "liking" and comenting on. See Zynga's attempt in this new post. http://www.voncoelln.com/eric/2009/10/31
www.voncoelln.com
Just a little over a week ago, Facebook launched an update to their News Feed, moving the default from a real-time feed to an algorithmic feed. After a week of the new feed default, the algorithm seems to have
EVCin While I look mostly at the changes to the Facebook API through the lens of game developers, I think it does make some pretty interesting changes for marketers as well. Really important to leverage the "Send Update to Fans" link in your arsenal besides just doing wall posts - this way it hits the inbox in case they miss you in the constantly changing feed.
www.voncoelln.com
I recently helped my father install the free Facebook app on his new iphone (to be honest, I am jealous he went out and got one before I did so I wanted to play around with it). Once I got it set up and ...
EVCin Branching out with new metrics: The Social Game Sticky Factor. This can be applied to any Facebook application, allowing you to look at how engaging the application is. Looking at games, it appears you need to maintain a 15% or above to have a successfully growing application -- below that churn reduces your escape velocity.
www.insidesocialgames.com
[The following is a guest post by Eric von Coelln, a social game consultant who occasionally contributes articles for Inside Social Games. Below, he takes a deep dive into the "daily active user" metric and how it ties into game growth and monetization. ...
EVCin As someone who worked at Prodigy, Zynga's approach to build scale thru Facebook ads reminds me of AOL's massive disk drops to build the ISP biz - they are crowding out nearly all the other developers.
EVCin If appointment TV is dying, then why is Zynga pushing appointment gaming where you have to plan your life around a game? Maybe because it's where the money is... bit.ly/JMJBI
EVCin
If you are a blogger or a marketer using bloggers or other viral means to get your media across, you should check out the disclosure rules in the updated FTC guidelines about endorsements: http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endo
EVCin A quick look at how marketers are mimicing game mechanics to better engage their users, but a look at how social spam is making users a lot more judicious about what they share.
www.voncoelln.com
Two trends hit me in the last week: 1) the desire for marketers to increase engagement through social media is leading them to explore game mechanics to incent users and 2) the quasi-backlash against “Social ...
