Is Social Gaming Crossing the Line?

Social gaming has become extremely popular for both gamers and the gaming companies. We all know about Second Life and World of Warcraft, but the Japanese company, DeNA is becoming extremely popular. They have announced their total revenue for 2009 was a whopping $517 million: up an exorbitant amount from the $205 million they made in 2008.

DeNA is extremely interactive, similar to the interaction in Second Life. Games on social networking sites offer a different type of interaction. You can play a game with your friends while privately chatting with them, or others on the side. Some bloggers have considered this a huge difference though, and games on sites like Facebook and Twitter should not be considered social gaming, but instead viral gaming.

Farmville is an extremely popular game. Whether you want to call it a social game, or a virtual game, it is advertised on many social networking sites, including Facebook and attracts people of all ages. The interaction with a user's own farm and their friends' farms is definitely a huge draw and Farmville has had a huge success because of this. This game allows users to farm on their own virtual farm, but also visit their friends, help their farm, and give and receive gifts. Users can even leave messages on their friends farms. While some sites believe these games are scams, they are advertised perfectly and give users what the want: INTERACTION.

There are over 400 million users on Facebook, which makes it a popular place to promote social gaming. Myspace used to be as popular as Facebook is now, which is why they had different applications on their site. If they were still popular now, the games on their site would be pulling in as much money as the Facebook apps. Satya Murphy put together a fantastic slideshow going into detail of the future of the mix between social networking and social gaming. It is definitely going to become a lot easier for people to play their favorite games, and I for one cannot wait!!

How Can You Measure ROI?

ROI is something that everyone is trying to measure. It is difficult to measure ROI when it comes to social media. Everyone is blogging about the best way to measure ROI. On the web, you cannot just look at the number of hits you have received, but also the bounce rate and the average amount of time spent on the page. It is also beneficial to measure the number of times your site is linked to another site. These collectively, all help understand ROI.

Do We Use Web SITES, or Web SERVICES?

Read Write Web is a great website about the up and coming changes to the internet. One major change is that websites are becoming services now. Most sites sell a product, which is extremely convenient. This makes them services. These services need a way to monitor their popularity. Many websites offer ways to monitor this. In fact, the article 15 Ways for Monitoring a Website's Popularity lists links and diagrams of how each site does this.

Web Services are great resources in today's society. People today are either extremely lazy, or busy: complete extremes. Web Services need to monitor their popularity, so they can gauge how to promote their products.

Got Something to Say?? TWEET About It!!

Marshall Kirkpatrick blogged about Monica Rankin's Youtube video which was marked as one of the top bookmarks on a day, but did not have that many hits. He then used this as motivation to analyze how her video ended up on that list. After some analyzing, Kirkpatrick noticed that Twitter was her the key to Rankin's success.

Twitter is a great resource to use to promote anything, especially if you know the tricks to using it. One great trick is to use a link shortener, such as snipr, which shortens a link so it can fit in the highly restricted 160 character limit Twitter has. Also, retweets, and using hashsigns really help for interested followers to check out everything you post. Everybody is on Twitter today. It is a great marketing resource, just ask Jeremy, the creator of his free e-book: Dandelion Marketing.

Get Out of Your Home and NETWORK (or Stay In and Use Technology)

Guest columnist for the Star Ledger, Lee Miller informs readers of the new ways to make future employment connections. Linked-in and Facebook are great ways to make connections and reinforce previous relationships. Another great networking site is coworkers.com which allows you to rate your coworkers' performance, analyze your ratings and improve your skills. This is a great site for people who are already in the business world.

Facebook and Twitter are great networking tools for people of all ages. It is suggested that people make two facebooks: one for personal relations and one for work relations. This way, future employers won't see those pics from your birthday in Vegas. For Twitter, it is recommended by author, Susan Britton Whitcomb, that you choose your identity wisely, shoot for a 75% to 25% professional tweet rate, be visible, and be worthy of a following.

We network everyday, yet it seems to be a difficult task. When looking for your next job just remember, Sit back, Relax, and Tweet!

Your Blog is a Reflection of You

Many organizations are looking at social networks before hiring new employees. Adam Darowski alerts his blog readers that your blog is a great way to network. It allows for future employees to expand on the type of personality they have and show how they are a great fit for a certain company. It is a great help to both the employers and those searching for a job to find the right fit. Joshua Porter agrees with Darowski. His blog breaks down Darowski's idea in a simpler way.
Porter breaks up each idea into bullet points. He then goes into detail for each point. This is extremely helpful to see how to build your online resume.

It makes sense that your blog reflects you, and how you have changed since the start of your blog; however, that means there is a lot of pressure to perfect everything you post. It is weird to think that what I am writing right now could someday be looked at by a future employer at my dream job.

It almost isn't fair to place this much weight on a blog because it hurts people who would rather solve math problems than write frequently about anything they can. Resumes and cover letters are stressful enough without worrying about our personal lives being judged.

T.R.U.S.T

Building trust with a virtual team is important, but can be challenging. Jaclyn Kostner thought of 6 great ways to help build trust: Availability, Competence, Consistency, Fairness, Openness, and Promise Fulfillment. She goes into detail about how each can be fulfilled. The most important is definitely openness. Just because you don't meet with a co-worker face to face doesn't give you a reason to hide what you are thinking. Openness is the key to every success. It can most definitely be challenging learning to share with someone you may have never seen, but sharing your feelings, ideas, and thoughts shows others that you trust them.

Remember when your mom told you 'honesty is the best policy'? Well, that is true in the business world. Honesty, especially when working on a business project, will help the project succeed because all the participants trust that they have all worked as hard as they can to create the best product they can.

Technology Has Gone Too Far

Second Life is a growing virtual world. It is popular amongst all types of people and businesses. I have never used Second Life, but I don't understand the drive to go on it. Why would you go online to socialize, or build a business, basically just live another life. Are people so dissatisfied with their own ability to breathe and move on their own that they have to sit at a computer and move an image around a screen to socialize? Yale University stated that they use Second Life as a virtual resource for creating new buildings on campus. This way they can see the schematics of the building without hiring an architect.
However, there are over a million active members on Second Life. All of them are probably not just online to see what a new structure will look like. What else is there to do on the site? Live the dream life you want?

If you are so dissatisfied with your own life, do something to change it. Don't create an alter ego on a virtual website. Is our world depending on technology too much and we will all become useless life forms?

Spend 4 Hours on Your Next Post

In Networking for People Who Hate Networking Penelope Trunk gives tips on how to network successfully. Her tips are extremely helpful, but seem a bit intense. She mentions how real bloggers spend around 4 hours on one blog post! That is most definitely excessive. There are much better things someone could be doing with their life than writing a couple of paragraphs on a blog. LinkedIn seems like a great way to network. Users can see which of their friends are connected to companies they are interested in working with and can network with them through their friends. It is a much simpler way of networking over the computer than blogging for 4 hours.

Stalker Phones

In 2002 Spiderman taught the world a powerful message: "with great power comes great responsibility." This message strongly applies with the technological advances today. Today we have the power to do pretty much anything. One thing we do is have GPS devices inside every phone. This is useful, but scary to many people who think their right to privacy is being taken away. NEWS FLASH: Homeland Security has better things to do than to stalk everyone in the US through their phones! These devices in our phones are created to make our lives easier, not the Federal Government's.

GPS in our cellphones allows people to figure out where they get lost while they are walking in a big city. They are made for the convenience of the everyday citizen so we don't have to carry twenty five devices with us at all times. Unless you actually have something to hide, don't worry about what the Government is doing with the GPS in your phone.

Is Our Blog Popular Yet?

10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging
What Conversational Marketing Is Not

I find it interesting that websites are telling corporations the truths and dos and don'ts about corporate blogging. Do corporations realize that blogs don't become popular overnight? They have to have the right connections (ie the right people reading them). In order to get their blog in the public eye, they must continuously blog. They must also connect with people and give them what they want while still leaving them hanging. Its the literary aspect that keeps people coming back.

My favorite 'harsh truth' from 10 Harsh Truths About Blogging is number 10. This one mentions that corporations should realize that competitors will look at their blogs. This one should almost not be said at all. It is inevitable that the competition will stalk a corporations blog to find out all the inside details about their new product. Every company does something along those lines. In order to use blogging in PR, a company needs to learn the rule of blogging and learn to accept that it will take sometime to get a following.

Is Technology Making Us Stupid?

Nobel Prize winner, Dora Lessing, made her prize winning speech about how technology has made humans stupid. She argues that

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

This woman has grown up before the computer era and has definitely does not realize that people haven't become more stupid with technology, but just more dependent. We use technology to find the answers to all our problems. It is a much easier, more efficient method of running our lives. In this time in history, people are all worried about every second of the day. They are more strained and get less sleep because they need all 24 hours in the day to fill their busy lives. The internet makes people smarter because they have easier access to information.

The Controversies of Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is an interesting idea. The website Wikipedia works off of it, but how popular of an idea is it? In The Myth of Crowdsourcing (http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/28/crowdsourcing-enterprise-innovation-technology-cio-network-jargonspy.html), the author mentions that Wikipedia isn't a true example of crowdsourcing because a "vast majority are the product of a motivated individual". Even still, since Wikipedia is open to the public to edit and update, it should still be considered an example of crowdsourcing. Most of the time in groups, there is one motivated individual that does a lot of the work, and this carries through into crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing is not too intense because it isn't efficient or smart for companies to open their networks to the rest of the world to updated their data. However, employees in firms that deal with encyclopedias and other reference works should watch out for crowdsourcing because sometimes, the people that know the most about a certain subject aren't the ones working for reference companies. In that case, crowdsourcing is definitely the best bet for sharing information.

Blog # 1- 1/18/2010

6 Myths about Informal Networks

This article mentioned a lot of myths and the realities of these myths. It brought forward an interesting point of view, but i disagree with some of the realities. The article said that people should be connected only when a strategic payoff is necessary. I think everyone should be connected, whether a payoff is necessary or not, because it improves efficiency and allows everyone access to all information about their company. It feeds into the myth that each employee knows everything about their company, which they dont. This will allow them to know more about their company.

Social Networking Analysis

Barry Wellman knows a lot about social networks. He does a great job of explaining what a social network is. He uses previous cases to explain the scientific facts about social networks. His article is mainly informative and really useful.

My First Blog Post

I am a student blogging for a class. On my honor, all my posts on this blog are my own.