State of Social in Social Games | Aki Järvinen. Rating: 3.8/5 (4 votes cast) What, if anything, makes social games social? What is ‘social’ made of, anyway? Digital Chocolate’s Lead Social Designer Aki Järvinen answers the question by analyzing the current state of social exchanges in Facebook games. He introduces concepts such as social presence, social graph, and social space to explain the kind of social interactions these games embrace, and fail to embrace at the moment. The concepts are put into practice with a display of concrete examples from various titles. The talk is targeted at anyone working with social games, regardless of platform.
The attendants will walk away with a set of design vocabulary which helps in creating and evaluating engaging social exchanges, and serves as an inspiration to redefine social in social games. Delivered at Casual Connect Europe, February 2011 Aki Järvinen works as the Lead Social Designer at Digital Chocolate’s Helsinki studio in Finland.
Here Are 10 Tips From BuzzFeed To Make Your Content Go Viral. Avoid the Temptation of Common Sense, Says Researcher Duncan Watts (Video) | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD. Social science researcher Duncan Watts says we are too trusting of common sense. We fool ourselves into thinking we can explain how influence and innovation happen, when we really have no idea. Watts’s new book, “Everything is Obvious, Once You Know the Answer,” argues that the problems of social systems require rigorous study just like physics and engineering (where Watts started his career). But because we are all humans trying to make sense of the world and how we relate to each other, we tell ourselves stories about why things inevitably happened that seem to suffice.
The good thing is, now that we’re putting all this personal data online and having all so many of our interactions documented, we may be able to better study ourselves. It’s common sense to think that influential people start social trends, a la Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.” Watts is extremely well respected in his field for his study of social networks. Www.davidmeermanscott.com/documents/Viral_Marketing.pdf. Ning's Infinite Ambition -- Viral Networks -- Social Networking Start-Ups | Page 5.
What’s your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption. What’s a “viral loop?” A term I’ve heard tossed around frequently in real life, but not in the blogosphere is the term “viral loop.” In fact, when googling it, I only saw one mention from Jia Shen (cofounder of RockYou, with $120M raised from Sequoia/Softbank), a very smart guy: “The viral loop of people inviting each other to most social networks revolves around a user posting a widget to their page and having friends see their page.The viral loops for Facebook (there are multiple) revolve around the news feed, the mini-feed and the invite request.
Not around people coming to your page and interacting with it” Anyone who cares about this topic should read the entire VentureBeat article Q & A with RockYou — three hit apps on Facebook, and counting. To define the viral loop, you can think of it as: The steps a user goes through between entering the site to inviting the next set of new users1 Simple enough? What’s an exampleNow let’s look at the viral classic, YouTube. … and so on. That’s it! DFJ - Viral Marketing. Untitled Document. Case Study #1 "How Hotmail grew to 12 million users ... in just 18 months! " When Microsoft launched their Hotmail e-mail service, they wanted to grow fast. So they launched an extremely clever viral marketing campaign: Hotmail attached a tiny advertisement to the bottom of every e-mail people sent using their service, offering FREE e-mail accounts.
Here's what it looked like: So every e-mail sent by a Hotmail user became a word-of-mouth referral for the company! In just 18 months, Hotmail grew its subscriber base from zero to 12 MILLION users -- faster than any company in any media in the history of the world! In the process, they built a multimillion-dollar business... ... and blew other free e-mail providers, with their ultra-expensive ad campaigns, right out of the water! ISSUE: Unless you have a product people MUST share to use, this viral marketing technique will be difficult for you to implement!
Going Viral in 6 Questions, Part One: Spymaster. Many web apps claim virality; very few actually find it. In a new series exploring the anatomy of truly viral apps, our first specimen is Spymaster, the Twitter- and Facebook-based social game that exploded with tens of thousands of users within hours of the creators throwing up a simple page and absolutely no media coverage. From creating addiction to managing site traffic, read on to learn how they did it and what they're doing next.
What kinds of outreach did you do during the early days? Chris Abad, CEO of Irata Labs, the company that developed Spymaster, revealed that their early promotions were extremely minimal "We threw up a splash page, but didn't talk about it too much. To give some context, Abad told me that I personally had signed up for the game within a couple hours of its launch; by that point, I had already seen a few tweets and a DM about the site and was completely intrigued.
"The media buzz (there was a lot in the first few weeks of Spymaster)... provided the fuel. Joshua porter. Viral Marketing: Engineered or Happenstance? | VCMike's Blog. The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing. Editor’s Note: Dr. Wilson first published this article in 2000. He then updated it in 2005. We updated it a third time, in 2012. I admit it. The term “viral marketing” is offensive. Call yourself a viral marketer and people will take two steps back. I would. But you have to admire the virus. In a few short generations, a virus population can explode. Viral Marketing Defined What does a virus have to do with marketing? Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” The Classic Hotmail Example The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free web-based email services. Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.
Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy Accept this fact. Let’s examine at each of these elements briefly. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Most people are social. 6. Changethis.com/manifesto/7.WordOfMouth/pdf/7.WordOfMouth. Facebook viral marketing: When and why do apps “jump the shark?” Excel spreadsheet download For those of you who are interested in the gory details, please download the following spreadsheet here: Viral and Retention Excel Model (Click to download) Math warning! This blog post will be a little more technical than usual, so I apologize to those of you who are bored by this. Anyway, let’s get started. See this image before? That’s what happens when you “jump the shark” and your app goes from successful to completely not successful. Modeling user acquisition First off, let’s look at some ways to model user acquisition. Invite conversion rate % = 10%Average invites per person = 8.00Initial user base = 10,000Carrying capacity = 100,000 (note that these are just example numbers) To understand how these constants work, you basically want to think about how viral marketing works.
That means that in the first time period, you have 10k. U(t) = u(0) * (1 + i * conv)^t where u(0) = 10k, i = 8.00, conv = 10%, and t is the # of time periods Does this make sense? Ouch. Arch Viral: Creating Social Apps for Social Platforms (Lance Tokuda, Startonomics SF 2008) Let's just add in a little virality. It happens all the time. I’m meeting with an entrepreneur, who is telling me about a really innovative product idea for a consumer website. And I’m liking it. We’re going back and forth on product ideas. And before I know it, we’re approaching the end of our meeting. I then ask them, “So, how are you going to acquire customers.” And that’s when it happens. The most disappointing answer is when they say “Oh, we’ll just make it viral.” Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning…and it’s harder to create virality than it is to create a good product. That’s why First Round Capital’s website has always said: “Too many companies treat marketing and sales as a tactical afterthought.
Customer acquisition (also called distribution) is the number one challenge facing consumer web properties. Virality is all about making your users look awesome in front of their friends | Henrik Werdelin. Understanding the key variables in Viral Marketing. A short study of this web site reveals that a hugely important factor for success in startup companies is finding ways to acquire customers at a low cost. In the Business Models section, we looked at the perfect business model: Viral customer acquisition with good monetization. However viral growth turns out to be an elusive goal, and only a very small number of companies actually achieve true viral growth.
In 2005, I invested in a company called Tabblo (acquired by HP in 2007), and had the good fortune to work with an outstanding entrepreneur, Antonio Rodriguez. Tabblo did manage to achieve good viral growth, but around the same time YouTube was launched and managed to achieve explosive viral growth. In the process of looking at these two companies, we learnt several important things about virality. To give you a preview of this post, what you will learn is that there are two key parameters that drive how viral growth happens, the Viral Coefficient, and the Viral Cycle Time.