Farmville Success – An evaluation

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 14^th Oct’09) and it has been topping the list of social games ever since its launch on 19^th June’2009.

Image Source: Gamasutra

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?

I Wear Your Shirt: Social media using Tshirt

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 1^st 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 1^st Jan & on Jan 29^th 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.

The Great Driving Challenge: A perfect marriage between traditional & new-age marketing

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 22^nd June’09 and received 2.06 lacs unique visitors as on 8^th 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.

Facebook URLs – Good for personal branding

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 2^nd 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.

Why marketers should use Twitter?

Update on 30th May’09:

I had personally joined twitter more than a year & half back but was not an active user of the account then. Initially, I just used to read updates from the people whom I was following & then slowly got into posting my updates too. In fact I became totally active (rather addictive ) almost after six months of opening my account & the more involved I got into this the more I realized the power of it. Very soon I opened an account on behalf of the company where I work & started tweeting about the updates of my company. Well, what started just as an update mechanics is now converted into a full-fledged customer interaction medium. I’m totally amazed at the viral effect & the potential of this medium from promotion & customer engagement point of view. I occasionally keep on reading about twitter & it’s phenomenal growth etc., but based on my personal experience with twitter I think I have come to a conclusion that this medium is definitely a must for every new age marketer who wants to be in touch with his net savvy (or shall I say tweet-savvy) customers. Here is why:

• Creating & Tracking Brand Buzz: I have found twitter to be one of the best mediums for being updated with what people are writing about your brand. I’ve used  other popular alert services including the ones for twitter too but I find the “search” option on twitter to be really a smart way of being updated about “at the moment” buzz of your brand. It surely gives a real time insight into your customer satisfaction, dissatisfaction, needs & gaps of your service.

• Word Of Mouth (Or Tweet of mouth ) : While a negative tweet definitely harms your image but a positive tweet followed by different retweets surely leads to excellent word of mouth marketing. There is this one guy who was having problems with our service, I read his negative tweet which he had written just 2 minutes ago, I immediately escalated it to our internal service delivery head & in next 5 minutes the guy got a call from our service head. The guy got so impressed that he immediately tweeted about the power of twitter w.r.to. customer service. In next 15 minutes when his problem was solved he ensured to mention the prompt action taken by our company in so many tweets of his and was all gaga about the service attitude & brand promise of our company. Thanks to all his retweets which gave us a positive boost to our brand that day. After that my SD head ensures to search for keywords related to our service every 2 hours

• Competition Tracking: If your competitor is also active on twitter, then toh wah bhai wah! Isko kehte hai chandi ho jana! Easiest & fastest way to be abreast with what competitors are doing as well as how many customers are dissatisfied by your competitors is to search your competitor related keyword in twitter. I’m telling you it’s a very effective medium for competitive taka-jhaki

• Customer Feedback / Suggestions: It’s definitely a very quick medium to seek feedback before any new launch or for announcing any new update / feature / product etc. And thanx to tweet-savvy customers they give you some very genuine feedback immediately.

• Potential Targetting: Highly effective medium to reach out to potential customers too, check out who is looking out for your kind of service & reach the potential TG in a smart way.

Serious word of caution: When I say it’s an effective medium for marketers to promote & engage, this does not mean it should be used as a free tool for SPAMMING. Beauty of twitter is that twitter users till date DETEST spamming a lot. So, don’t go ahead posting only URLs or your service related promotions. You’ll only lose the interest of your followers & it just takes a few micro seconds to “unfollow” your brand. If it is fast method to engage, it is equally fast to un-engage. So, think again before you start abusing this medium. Key is to interact, talk, engage personally & tweet something which your followers can look forward too . If you’ve captured the attention, you can definitely promote your brand in a more involved way.

Chance pe Dance marketing: Bhajji blog at BigAdda

Looks like BigAdda has got this special fascination for the letter “B”, that’s why all their blog promotion strategies revolve around the famous Bs. Earlier they created so much of hype by launching the blog  http://bigb.bigadda.com & now it is http://bhajji.bigadda.com/. In fact blog of Mr. Bachchan became such a craze that it broke all records of comments received on single posts in India. Not only it gathered enough media attention, it also led to some phenomenal increase in traffic & hits of the website. Well, nothing to ponder over or doubt on those jump in traffic, I mean what else do you need than to have Mr. Bachchan blogging on your portal himself. Trust Mr. Bachchan’s fan to leave everything else & spend their whole time on his blog! We know it was definitely one of the marketing gimmicks of BigAdda but nonetheless a successful gimmick, in fact so successful that celebrity blogging became a fad in Bollywood with so many other celebrities joining the blogosphere suddenly.

And they have done it yet again, that too at the perfect time. This time they launched a blog of cricketer Harbhajan Singh Bhajji on their portal. The blog’s page title as well some PR coverage read as “Bhajji blogs at BigAdda”. Well, impressive & definitely an attention grabber. With IPL fever running across the nation, cricket & cricketers are definitely THE buzzwords of the moment. Launching a blog of none other than Bhajji at this moment is no doubt a great promotion strategy & this is what I really call a chance pe dance marketing strategy. With bhajji blogging about all details of IPL, I’m sure BigAdda is going to see a surge in its traffic. Let’s wait to see the number of comments on his posts, I am quite curious to see if the interactivity level & statistics of this cricket icon’s blog will surpass the figures of bollywood shehenshah  or not .

Aside: My inquisitive mind wondering if Bhajji is really having time amidst all the matches to come & blog minute details about IPL :O

Myspace’s new marketing / engagement strategy: Black Curtain

Now this is one such marketing cum engagement initiative which I’m sure can’t be missed. Myspace has launched this initiative known as “Black Curtain India” where its Indian users get to watch new releases for free and that too before the public release of the film! The initiative starts with an exclusive screening of four golden globes winner and one of the most awaited movies of recent times – “Slumdog Millionaire” on January 23 at Fame Theatre in Mumbai. Movie screening FREE & that too of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE? Yet another interesting example of marketing with entertainment content. I am sure this will grab lots of eyeballs for myspace.

All you need to do is following (as mentioned in their website, click here to visit the page):

• Add Black Curtain India profile to your friends
• Include Black Curtains India screening profile in your top friends
• Print out your profile with Black Curtains India in your top friend
• Show up at the theater with the print out

After Slumdog, Black Curtain has plans to do more free screenings like Ice Age 3, Valkyrie etc. Now this seriously sounds very tempting to me as a consumer! Even though I am not regular on Myspace but still this made me stick to their website and surf some more content on their pages today. Myspace India had already started focusing on Indian entertainment content by associating with programs like Nach Baliye but getting associated with movies and arranging free premieres like these will give them an edge now. At least they will get to see some more traffic and bit more engaged visitors. But hope they do it on a continual basis and not as one of those engagement strategies, else like many other promotional campaigns of other social networking sites, this will also act as an initiative which will lead to one time positive spike in their pageviews graph.

Twitter launches “suggested users”

Today morning when I logged into my twitter account, I found this new tab “suggested users” in find people section. It has to be a development between yesterday to today as it was not there two days back when I had clicked “find people”. But what is interesting is that there was no formal announcement or whatsoever on twitter main page about it, quite a silent launch of a new feature from twitter! Though there are lots of external tools and apps for twitter but twitter on its own has hardly launched anything in recent times. So, when twitter launched something on its own I must say I was having somewhat high expectations from it but when I used this tool I didn’t find it much useful. In fact I can’t understand the logic of this recommendation at all. So, is twitter recommending these users to me based on my profile or my friend’s list profile or the nature of my updates? The algorithm is not at all clear. And to add to that what disappoints me further is that I am getting quite common suggestions for my both accounts – I maintain two accounts, one my personal account and second on behalf of my company where I work. There is hardly any similarity between these two accounts, neither in terms of following / follower list nor in terms of updates or profile. So, how come the users suggested are having so much similarity? So, is it just a set of some users which twitter is recommending to everybody in different permutations and combinations??? And some of the other recommendations are absolutely bizarre, have a look on the two scrnshots:

Political Advertising: Advaniji on web!

Just last week itself, I wrote about Political Advertising in India for 2009 elections and here comes another surprise of the same. Now after celebrities it’s the turn of Politicians looking up to the mighty web world. Joining the league is none other than L.K. Advani whose website http://www.lkadvani.in/ got launched on his 81^st birthday on 8^th Nov’08. BJP launched this website for their Prime Minister candidate Advani with an objective to reach out to the young and first time voters in India. As per BJP, this is the first website of its kind by an Indian Political party and is yet another step towards reinforcing the forward looking and futuristic attitude of their party.

The site opens up with an intro note and welcome message by L.K. Advani and is available in two different languages – Hindi and English. It’s an interactive website with loads of photos, videos, speeches and forums wherein visitors can participate and post their comment / suggestion / grievances. Overall the site looks neat and very 2.0 types except for the first landing page after home page. I think it’s too boxy, maybe they could have used some tabs and made it less cluttered. But content wise I liked the site. In fact to be honest I never expected it to be this deep esp. their “issues” blog section…quite nice and interesting posts there, though I think there should have been a section for users’ comments on each of these posts in order to make it truly interactive. I’m sure they have not allowed comments to avoid nuances and mud-slinging by opposition parties but then if you want it be interactive you need to provide the facility of comments and expressions, see some cool examples of Bollywood celebs like Big B or Aamir Khan. The forums allow posting and comments but as of today I don’t see much participation from external people over there. The home page content is definitely getting updated as I can see a difference between yesterday’s and today’s content, have a look at the scrn-shot:

Overall a neat website and considering the fact that most of the first time and young voters are digital natives it’s definitely a good step and modern approach towards reaching out to Indian youth. It’s good to know that Indian Prime Minister candidates are going high-tech, but wondering is it their own thought or is it Obama effect ?

Also my fundamental question about Political Advertising in India remains the same – is it worth spending so much money before the elections in communication campaigns when most of the Indians know the realities of Indian Political scenario? It’s good to see such interactive platforms getting launched but is BJP going to take any step to solve the real-time issues or grievances being posted on the website or will these just remain as comment counters to prove that the website was a successful strategy with X number of comments and Y number of hits in Z number of days? Will it actually help in a building a “Strong, Prosperous and Self-Confident India” or will it end in just being yet another marketing gimmick?

 

 

Britney 2.0!

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