OK…It’s official now. I’m SERIOUSLY addicted to Farmville and there is no denying the fact now. Howmuchsoever I tried to resist this game by blocking all Farmville updates or ridiculing my friends who have been playing it during work hours, but ever since I went to this app with a thought to just have a casual glance on this thingy called Farmville, there has been no turning back. This game is really addictive and I think after a long time I’ve become crazy for any game like this. Yes, when I had opened my Facebook account, I definitely enjoyed few apps but beyond those initial ones, rest I just visited more from a purpose of checking those out. But Farmville is a different story all together, the devotion is so much so that every night when I come back from work the first thing which I do is check out on my crops and harvest the ready ones. And I think I am still not as compulsive user as some of my friends are, someone now dreams of gaining XPs whereas someone wakes up at midnight to harvest his crop, there is one who smsed me his Facebook password to harvest as he was stuck in a long meeting and one who called up and shared the password so that I can harvest his ready crops as he himself was travelling out. Such is the user-involvement in this game!
No wonder Farmville has got 58+ million active users (as on 14th Oct’09) and it has been topping the list of social games ever since its launch on 19th June’2009.
Close to 60 million users in just 4 months??? That’s really some statistics in the history of social games! So, what could be the reason for this historical success of the game? Well, there are actually many but I think the key reasons which can be attributed towards the phenomenal success of this game are:
Engaging/Stickiness: Oh, this game is really sticky to its core and this is one of the biggest reasons for so much of repeat visits to this app. You buy crops with Farmville coins, sow them in your farm and if you do not return to your farm on time, your crops wither and die. That’s a loss of money and negative impact on your balance! So, one has to return to this game again & again if you want to make more or do not want to lose your money there. A lovely way to keep the users engaged.
Networking: With Farmville on Facebook, there is a possibility of networking within a networking site. You can ask your friends to be your neighbors in farm and there are different ways by which you can visit your neighbors and earn reward points in the game. So having neighbors is advantageous and within social networking arena of Facebook, it gives you another chance of farm networking by interacting and helping your friends. Now I do get actual messages like, “visit my farm as I’ve revamped it completely” or “check out the new tractor and decorations on my farm”
Viral: It spreads like crazy in your community and there are many interesting reasons for the same, be it free gifts which you send or receive from your friends and later can use those to make money, sharing the wealth of your success or helping stray animals, all have some rewards attached which motivates you to spread the word more and more. You automatically end up doing these making this game truly viral in every way.
Communication: Zynga content guys definitely know the art of communication, each action has a prompt for communication and most of it is in either such an interesting language or are encouraging announcements of your advancements that you actually end up publishing your updates to your friends. And these updates act nothing less than a trigger to your friend to go and do some more farming in their farms.
Design and innovation: I personally love the UI of this game, I mean the colors and graphics of those fully grown crops definitely give you joy of a different kind. To add to that, constant innovation by Zynga team in terms of new farm additions like those beautiful flowers, Indian flag etc. or themes like the Halloween ones are nice additions for the users.
Monetization: Farmville is not just another free social game, it has got a well planned monetization strategy in place too. And by money I don’t mean Farmville coins or cash, I definitely mean hard cash in terms of real $. Thanks to the addiction of this game that once players are hooked on to it, they actually end up spending “real” money in buying “virtual” goods. On any given day 500,000 tractors (which are $20 “virtual” Farmville tractors) are sold on Farmville. No wonder, Zynga the company behind Farmville is making good money and has been profitable every month since September 2007.
Last but not the least, I’m wondering if success of Farmville has some connection with users’ psychography too? The fact that quite many Farmville users are actually Indians, makes me think if it has something to do with roots of Indians being in farming and agriculture? Also in other countries too, amidst all hectic life and work stress people are heading towards peaceful farms in reality, so is setting up a virtual farm somewhere helping them relive the same experiences online too? Has Farmville’s growth got anything to do with user’s inclination towards pastoral lives and is it serving “this” intrinsic need in the virtual world?
“Considering the influence which celebrities have on Indian consumers and twitter becoming twilmyI’m wondering if the next trend will be celebrities endorsing brands on twitter or promoting services amongst their followers”
So it comes as no surprise to me when I read the news of Gul Panag being the ‘Twitter Face’ of the forthcoming Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week. Wills Lifestyle has initiated this association to explore the platform of new age media and to engage with the patrons of WLIFW in an interesting fashion. For the very first time in the world, a celebrity will tweet directly from the event venue on the on-goings of the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week. Recognizing the growing popularity of Twitter in India and especially of Gul Panag on this platform, Wills Lifestyle decided to take on board Gul Panag as the ‘Twitter Face’ to cover the event for this medium. You can read more details of the story here.
Indeed a smart way of interacting with fans and viewers. And smarter is the choice of celebrity as Gul definitely knows the art of customer engagement and involvement in this space. With her loyal fan following and twee-peal (twitter-appeal), I’m sure Gul will manage to create enough word of mouth and viral effect for WLIFW this year. She has already started creating the excitement with special contests for tweeple where winners are going to get free passes for the event. With more and more Indian brands jumping on to the twitter bandwagon over last couple of months, I think it would be fair to say that twitter is one of the fastest adapted new age media by Indian marketers; it has proved to be a great communication medium, in fact in digital media right now it is definitely “THE” marketing medium so to say.
Presence on social media has become a hygiene factor for most of the brands and many Indian brands / events / services are using different social media platforms for different purposes. Some of them have been successful whereas some are still trying to figure out the use beyond posting links of advertising campaigns or PR coverages. But despite this mix, noteworthy thing is the innovative ideas which Indian marketers are coming out with for new age mediums like twitter. I personally loved this idea of a tech-savvy bollywood personality being “twitter face” of WLIFW and I think it’s one of its kinds in Indian market currently. Now let’s wait and watch which other brands follow the suit. Though a word of caution here for marketers would be to think carefully before deciding on this “me too” strategy as not all celebs can actually create the same aura in this medium and also not every product / service needs to be promoted through this platform.
Damn! Can it be really this simple to make thousands of dollars by wearing a t-shirt? Yes, if only one could have been as innovative as Jason Sadler. Jason started a unique social media drive known as “I Wear Your Shirt” this year. In this campaign, he is wearing one shirt from one company per day and will be posting his image on YouTube, Twitter, Ustream etc. and at one go the brands would have a poster cum social media campaign through Jason. Interesting, but more interesting is his pricing strategy which varies upon the day of the calendar. For the 1st day of year, he would be charging $1 and for the last day $365. Ustream.tv gave him 1 dollar to wear its shirt on 1st Jan & on Jan 29th he was paid 29 dollars to wear Zappos.com shirt. And this is no joke, his 2009 calendar is already sold out and this means that he has made $66,795 this year by just wearing these shirts. To add to that he charges extra for contests & deals etc.
His idea has been so successful that he has extended it for another year and that too with twice the earlier price, as quoted on his website:
I’ve had so much fun wearing shirts this year that I’m going to keep wearing them in 2010, but with a twist… 2 guys in your shirt, 2 time zones, 2x the exposure and January 1 starts at $2! Reserve your day now on the 2010 calendar and meet the person who will also be wearing your shirt next year.
As I’m writing this post, his 2010 calendar is already sold out up till May’10! Now this definitely speaks for the popularity of the idea clearly! I don’t remember any media property in recent times being booked so well in advance by any brand. And the way in just one year there are already takers for this property with double exposure at double rates, I’m wondering if Jason will soon make this a full-fledged promotion company where he will have promoters across the globe working for him as walking-talking media properties and he can offer clients customized exposure at customized rates! How about Jason or likes of Jason doing this in India? Well, I think this idea is expandable & undoubtedly one of the most innovative utilization of social media to promote a brand.
Some brands definitely know how to use social media for an effective promotion campaign. While lots of Indian brands are still wary of social media or are trying to figure out how to use it beyond forums and customer complaint management, here comes a very engaging online cum offline reality campaign from Mitsubishi Motors which has set an example for social media marketing in India. They have launched a marketing initiative “The Great Driving Challenge” as a promotion strategy for launch of its sports car brand “Cedia Sports” and what makes it really unique is the way it has integrated its online initiative with the offline one.
The Great Driving Challenge is a web-centric campaign where couples are asked to apply for the challenge on www.greatdrivingchallenge.com. Out of all the applicants, top 100 will be selected for the next round based on public voting & the quality of their profile on the website. These 100 will be further narrowed down to 25, then 9 & finally 3 by a jury set by the promoters. The final 3 will go for an all expense paid drive in the Mitsubishi Cedia Sports car allotted by the company. The challenge is to drive 3000 kilometers in 10 days and tell the world about your travel experience through your blogs, twitter & other online social media forums. Well, name “Driving Challenge” sounds like some sort of driving race or sports rally, ain’t it? But this is definitely neither of it. In fact here the winners will be decided based on number of posts (videos/ blogs/ pictures) uploaded by the finalists during the drive phase & quality of their posts uploaded. The final winner will get to win a cash prize of Rs. 10 lacs! Interesting, very interesting! You can read more details of the contest rules here.
I think I liked almost everything about this campaign. But some aspects which are surely worth highlighting are:
Content / Word of mouth: In an era where content matters so much & online word of mouth can make or break a brand, I think this is definitely a unique way which Cedia has adopted to create content & positive pages online. What a better way to generate online buzz than blogs & tweets these days. To add to that the whole contest is based on the quality of content.
Effective targeting: This was a launch of a “sports” car & I think Mitsubishi did a great thing by taking a social media route as that’s where today’s young urban Indian is available. It’s really great to observe a shift towards digital medium for as important campaign as launch of a new product.
Cost effective: As per the official reports, this website was a huge success in its first few days itself. The website was launched on 22nd June’09 and received 2.06 lacs unique visitors as on 8th July’09. Well, definitely huge number of hits in a very cost effective way. A launch campaign to create an equivalent buzz if done through only a traditional media route would definitely have costed the company more.
Online & offline synergy: This initiative definitely proved that digital campaigns are not mere extensions of traditional ones. In fact in case of The Great Driving Challenge, the initial buzz was on online medium with actual execution being on ground – a perfect marriage between new age & traditional marketing so to say.
Overall an exemplary initiative for sure, let’s wait to hear for some statistics from Cedia to know the actual impact of this campaign.
Which one sounds better? http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?id=123456&ref=profile(dummy id) or http://www.facebook.com/kanupriyasindhu? Clearly 2nd one, isn’t it?
With 3 million URLs in first 14 hours itself, Facebook’s launch of its username URL is definitely outdated news now. I was also one of those who decided to grab my username URL immediately but before I got my personal one I actually decided to create it for the brand I work for. Now there are many pages for this brand already on Facebook, one created officially by me earlier, some created by employees, some by fans of this service & some by dissatisfied customers, so this immediate rush to grab the official URL was definitely to ensure that the organization only gets the actual name before anybody else. And now that I’ve got it, I think I definitely like this feature. Here are some of the reasons why I think it’s a cool feature esp. from branding perspective:
It’s a good feature for individual branding. We use our social media URLs on different communication platforms & a URL like http://www.facebook.com/company(dummy id) is easier to promote as compared to http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1122334455(dummy id)
A branded URL will definitely help in climbing the ladder up in SEO. Just google your name / username & you can see the result.
A formal URL will now finally help in distinguishing an official page with others. Earlier distinctions used to be just on the basis of some profile id numbers and there was hardly any individuality in those URLs.
Considering their huge popularity, it was one of the must-have functionalities which Facebook was lacking behind as compared to say a linkedin or twitter. Though late in its launch but still it’s a welcome change from Facebook. In case you’ve not set your username URL till now, go & grab one here.
Whew! Indian Political parties are on twitter now… While I was already chating about change in campaign strategy of Indian politicians this time, here I observe some other interesting & noticeable updates:
BJP on Twitter: Yeah BJP has really gone ahead of Congress as far as online strategies are concerned, you go anywhere online & you just can’t ignore BJP’s ads or L.K.Advani messages. And now they are on the latest micro-blogging fad – Twitter too! Not only they are present but they are tweeting quite regularly both by posting their updates as well as interacting with followers. Have a look on some of their latest updates, updates do look promising enough.
Congress on Twitter: Till now I have not observed Indian Congress Party formally present on twitter, yes but SM Krishna (candidate from Bangalore) has definitely joined twitter now. He says he has done this to interact with net savvy Bangaloreans!
Well, all interactions & communications on internet with today’s generation are fine but I again wonder – do all these political parties really understand their image amongst Indian Youth? As mentioned in my previous post it’s a welcome change to see such aggressive new age political campaigning in India but don’t you think that these are simply marketing gimmicks? Will they really act on their promises or will these remain as just promises once the elections are over? How much can marketing help them when the core product itself is not good? Would be good to know it from the readers of this post – do you really believe in current communications sent out by any of these parties? Personally speaking as a marketer I like their campaign & appreciate their effort but as a consumer, these communications are not impacting me much as somehow don’t have that trust left on the product itself.
Hitesh shared this video at a very right time today…with so much of focus on customer engagement in my organization these days surely this video acts as yet another confirmation on the mantra – “It’s not about listening, it’s not about monitoring, it’s about ENGAGING”. Thanks Hitesh for sharing this.
More to follow on this mantra soon based on my experiences, as of now I just wanted to break the stagnation of this blog, have not updated it since 5th Feb’09 (that fateful day!). Till then have a look on this video!
Celebrities using web 2.0 platforms is no new phenomenon now…we have seen lots of examples of Bollywood as well as Hollywood ones. From having their own websites, to blogging, to official presence on networking sites like Facebook and Orkut, celebs are doing it all to reach their audience and establish a direct connect with them. And as if these were not enough, now they are having their fan following on twitter as well. Yeah, celebs are actually on twitter now! And following this trend is none other than Britney Spears who has re-launched her website as well as an official page on twitter. Her official website www.britneyspears.com is having a video which says something like this:
“Hello everybody, welcome to the new Britneyspears.com. I want to thank all of you for all your support, it really means a lot to me. I’m going to take you where no paparazzi lens ever could”.
Well, looks like the lady who has always been in news of late for wrong reasons and who is trying to make a comeback with her album “Womanizer” has taken up her image building exercise quite seriously now. One can see Britney all over internet, she is trying to make her presence felt across different platforms – be it Britney TV Channel on Youtube or her revamped official website or her blog or her updates on Twitter. Have a look on these vibrant scrnshots
As I write this, her Twitter page http://twitter.com/therealbritney is already having 2901 followers (and still counting) and 22 updates! Great going lady! Hope social media helps her in revamping her image and she gets covered for the right reasons now. Just one thought – In this age of direct interaction and open communication, isn’t it bit weird that her blogs as well as updates are written by someone from her team and not herself? I didn’t find any post or interaction from her apart from that welcome video. Well, not every celebrity writes blogs himself / herself but at least they project to do so and direct contact via posts, comments or replies definitely gives a feeling of personalized interaction to the fans. Well, I think it would have been better if Britney would have written at least some posts herself (if not all), if not then maybe the language used could have been first person instead of third person. But overall, Britney’s presence on social media is receiving an overwhelming response from her fans and the figures of hits and views of her latest video are already making news in media.
Update: When I took the screenshot of Britney’s twitter page, her followers count was 2835, it took me approx 20 minutes to write and post this, that time the follower count was 2901. Now when I’m trying to edit this post a bit, her follower count is 3237! 402 followers in less than 45 minutes! Whoa…that’s some count I must say
Well, this news in ET yesterday caught my immediate attention which reads something like this – “Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people communicate, according to a Web guru. Bill Tancer, a self-described “data geek”, has analysed information for over 10 million Web users to conclude that we are, in fact, what we click, with Internet searches giving an up-to-date view of how society and people are changing. Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites. He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 per cent of searches from 20 per cent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.” (Source: Economic Times dated 22nd Sep’08)
Prima facie it looks like a good news, isn’t it? Atleast parents of growing kids and admin guys in corporates can heave a sigh of relief to read this, they need not worry about monitoring their kids and employees respectively and brooding over their wasting time on internet by searching and surfing adult contents. As per Tancer’s assumption, young people aged between 18-24 are spending more and more time on social networks and hence they are not left with much time to spend on porn sites… Hmmm interesting observation but is it the reality??? Don’t you think this is a very theoretical assumption? Well, we all know that almost all social networking sites are full of porn and adult content, infact I think its all the more easier to access such content through these social networking sites. I know of parents who have put filter for certain URLs in their home computers but of course have allowed sites like Orkut and facebook as that’s where their kids prefer to spend most of their times, now isn’t it true that most of the teenagers these days can access any kind of porn content on social networking sites like orkut or video sites like youtube? Infact finding girls / boys, contacting them, sex-chatting, dating etc have become so easy these days through these sites and almost all possible information are available at one place only. Now why will the searching of porn content not go down when everything is so easily accessible now? Social networking sites are definitely getting more and more popular day by day and yes youngsters are spending more time on such sites than specific porn sites these days but isn’t it because of apart from other X reasons like bonding with friends, finding old friends etc, youngsters are surfing lots of porn content on these sites itself? Well, atleast I strongly think so and feel porn is another spicy hook for social networking sites being so sticky apart from other reasons like friends, hobbies, games, applications, networking etc etc etc.
I still can’t believe this , quite interesting I must say. Initially when I had read this news in March, I just couldn’t believe that someone was actually thinking on this line and I was almost sure that it would be some sort of media rumor, but no I was wrong. It actually is true that now there will be a social networking site for ghosts and aliens! Oh yes, Steven Spielberg is actually launching a ghost / UFO centric social networking website which will be for people who would like to share and discuss paranormal and extraterrestrial experiences.
Speculations are still on about the name of the portal. Some say it will be called “Ghosts”, some call it as “Ghost Town”, latest update being that the site is perhaps going to be called “The Rising” or “Rising”. Apart from networking angle, the site will also have original video content focusing on alleged ghost and UFO stories. Now we all know the connection between Steven Spielberg and paranormal experiences. Who can forget movies like E.T The Extra Terrestrial, Close Encounter of the third world, Jurrasic Park etc which are one of the highest grosser of all times at box office! Steven at many occasions has also narrated some real life chilling experiences about his encounter with ghosts and supernatural forces. Well, don’t know to what extent his experiences are real but he definitely claims that ghosts and aliens do exist and because of some real life experiences, he got inspired to make movies on this subject.
After general networking, vertical specific networking was definitely slated to be the next big trend in community industry but being niche to this level following a specific vertical is definitely some disruption I must say. And though I don’t believe in such phenomenon (rather I don’t want to believe I guess ) but still there is a large chunk of people who believe in such clairvoyant experiences. And for such TG this kind of open forum will be definitely great wherein they can discuss and share their views with like minded people and know more about it. Hmmm, so looks like enough of networking sites for friends, dating, movies, music, college reunion etc etc, well now it’s the turn of ghosts and bhoooot!
