social gaming- what's it all about

Games are big news in the entertainment industry. I know I have to say that because games pay my salary, but if you look at game they’re moving out of the preserve of geeky teenagers and into the family sphere. I think the wii has done a lot for making games accessible to people who were born in an age when controller didn’t exist. The wii is all about simple movements much like you’ll use in real life and its really intuitive to use. Similarly the games that are being developed for it are easy to pick up and understand. Nicole Kidman aimed straight at the baby-boomers when she was advertising brain training through gaming as a way of reinvigorating your grey cells.
These are all interesting incidents of games coming more into the sphere of the common (wo)man , but there is another quiet phenomena which is revolutionizing gaming. Social networks have got people playing games in droves, I’m sure that you would have had an invite for Mafia Wars or Texas Hold ‘em on Facebook.
First, some facts about social gaming;
1) Monthly active users (the metric of choice) of the top 20 Facebook games apps was 139,820,009 in May (these are not deduplicated, so there will be some overlap with people playing multiple games)
2) Zynga (one of the top developers) claims to be making $100million a year
3) Playfish has 100MM installed games in 18 months
4) The top 25 Myspace games apps have had about 100MM installs
These are big numbers for an industry that only started less than 2 years ago. There are a couple of different approaches amongst the front runners in this industry; some are all about developing the best content, whilst others have a laserlike focus on the consumer and their experience. Both approaches seem to work. The big challenge is trying to monetize this audience; it costs a lot to keep servers running and the current monetization opportunities are through subscriptions, micropayments and advertising. These are less tested and guaranteed than the traditional method of license sales through some sort of freemium model. There is also a long way to go in terms of playing socially on your telephone. There have been some initial forays into this (“Who has the biggest brain?” used Facebook connect), but there is a scope to develop this into something huge in the future.
The big ideas behind social gaming is that it transforms gaming from where it is at the moment; its not about a solitary pursuit in the warm glow of the screen, its more along the lines of playing a board game with the family. Its entertainment with a low threshold for getting involved, with more of a focus on the communication and interaction around the game rather than strictly the game itself. Its early days in this market, but I’m excited to be involved with it.

Putting your brand into the wild

Zynga is one of the top social games developers out there with revenues of $100MM annually (or so they say). They’re as web 2.0 as you can get (their games are developed for social networks) so it would stand to reason that they’re active on twitter and the other networks. Only problem being that their customer service is not supposed to be that great, and people do complain about it. I was on their site the other day and they have a live link of what people are saying about them on Twitter. 3 out of the 9 newest comments were complaining about their customer service and lack of attention to this.

This is something that they need to address. I understand; a buggy game with vast amounts of users that don’t monetize well =customer service nightmare (you can’t afford to get everyone the love they expect). But that’s why twitter and the web are such great tools. they could set up a specific twitter account for customer service/bugs, and aggregate the information to inform how to better improve their product. They can inform from there how they understand things are buggy and will work on making it better. It’s a tough job, but a necessary one to stop alienating their users

KRD- keyword rich domains

I love an acronym more than most, and this is a good one
Google has an inordinate focus on domain name(and a difficulty in concatenating).What concatenate means is that brendan-mcnulty is a better domain about me that brendanmcnulty as Google has a way of differentiating where one word ends and the other starts.


As Google has a preference for the keyword in the domain, this gives you an opportunity to ran highly if you have the keyword in your domain. However if it is a highly trafficked term then you will struggle to get the domains. Which is where this tactic comes in. the theory is to build a number of simple websites with second or third tier keyword domains with a lot of interlinking between them. No need to create fancy sites, blogs will do, as long as you obey all the usual rules (h1’s, alt tags, keyword density etc)

I’ll explain how you would put it into practice; you want your Michael Jackson memorabilia site to rank highly, but all the good domains are gone (mjtribute etc). So you buy ilovethriller.com, billiejeanismylover.com (I’m being facetious, but things like thriller or associated terms around this would be useful, the yahoo keyword suggestion tool will help you with this). Put up relevant content about mj, and link cleverly between them (and with a link going back to your main memorabilia site from each of the pages), as well as putting your shop onto each of these pages.

Google views the domains that you have as being in the same interest group, so therefore relevant, and the number of sites builds an interlinked web of interest about a specific topic. The search volume on them is significantly less than on the more generic terms (which is a mixed blessing- the domains are still available, but you need more of them)

I wouldn’t put this topic as the first step in your SEO approach, but once you have exhausted your initial optimization on your site, it’s a good one to begin

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Virtual goods, real pleasure

Virtual Goods, Real Pleasure

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5 hypotheses (and results) for getting blog traffic

I say that writing this blog is all about sharing my brain, and promoting my personal brand, but at the same time it’s a bit of an ego trip. I like to know that you’re all out there listening to me rant.

So how do I ensure do I ensure there is more and more of you coming to my site on a regular basis? I decided to test a couple of hypotheses and from there to see how to leverage.

Hypotheses 1:
Comment on other relevant blog posts, and link back to your own post.
Result:
This is the one that really worked well for me. I used my post on iphone marketing (which I humbly think was pretty good), did a couple of searches and commented on the posts and presentations (on slideshare)with a link to my blog post. This brought me a huge amount of traffic (proportionally) as it went on a few blogs and they sent traffic back to me. I will continue to use this in the future, I think it was so effective because there isn’t a lot written about this niche, and I found the right people to seed it with, however this is a consistent method of getting

Hypotheses 2:
Use twitter to promote it
Result:
Its Ok. I do get traffic from twitter, and I announce some posts from Twitter. But (through my own choice) I don’t reciprocate/mutual friend everyone, and I don’t actively try and recruit people. So compared to the 50 odd people I have following me it’s a decent conversion.

Hypotheses 3:
Syndicate your content and try to get profile (and traffic) through that
Result
OK-ish. I posted an article/recycled a blog post for the Tech Leader board. It was read by 514 people, and I got 9 visits from it. I was expecting more frankly.

Hypotheses 4
Use your family to blog-roll you
Result
Better than expected. Its consistent and bubbles under, even though people are coming from different genres (creative writing/literary tourism/crafts). I’ll try and ensure a higher profile or get more of my family to start blogging 

Hypotheses 5
Put your blog everywhere in your profile (Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, signature etc)
Result
Ho-hum. I was expecting more from these too, but it seems that my profile is not looked at as often as I would have expected.

So, number one is the one that works (at a scale of at least 10x the combined others) in terms of driving decent traffic to your site. Any other options you can recommend?

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Blog posting slowdown

Excuse the blog slowdown over the next week or so. We’ve taken the big jump back to South Africa, and we don’t have internet set up (not to mention we don’t have a couch, a table etc etc).

Not to worry I’m thinking of some kickass content to share with you.

link bait

I was chatting to someone about creative link building and this example came up.
They wanted to create more World Cup focused traffic during the World Cup, but it’s a pricy time to buy search traffic. They came up with a plan to create the “Anti- World Cup Association”- women who feel abandoned by their husbands and boyfriends during the World Cup and wanted to protest again it. They created a page, sent some pretty girls with t-shirts and banners down to where the Dutch team was training to stage a protest. “Coincidentally” there was a lot of press covering the team, and their story got picked up and was syndicated worldwide. The result; they got a huge volume of links, and correspondingly rose in the natural search rankings. Clever, fun and effective. One caveat is that Google normally penalizes significant increases in links over a short time period, however if they come from news, then its OK.