Sunday, April 18, 2010

Using ROI in Business

We have been learning social networking and business. In this point, with my last posting in Social Networking & Business class, (but it will be continued, I’m sure!) the question is “: What’s next?” I thought about it while I watched a YouTube video and read an article about ROI.

In Social Media: Socialnomics, there are many numbers from several researches about social networking and ROI. Yes, it’s true. The Internet is the best way to promote and advertise a product, person, company, etc. Advertising through Twitter can bring 1,800 new customers with $0 of money. It is wonderful result in the marketing and financial department of the company.

I feel this effect when I am looking for my internships. I was surprised that many of companies noticed on the homepages that they want people who are able to use Facebook and Twitter for the job. I think it represent the flow of social networking in business well. And I think that’s because they know social networking on business is not always working in the positive way. Sometimes, customers with complaint make chains of furious consumers in the web sites. More and more companies are looking for employees who will control that kind of result.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The Evolving Social Gaming

* This is for the extra credit assignment, not the common post.



As social networking sites becomes more popular, now form of game is generated with the flow. According to the Wikipedia, Social gaming, which is played by interaction with other people, is played by people from all over the world, still now. People feel enthusiastic to the new concept of game, because they can enjoy game without feeling alone.

There are various topics of social gaming, and many of them are very funny things. The most important factor of social gaming is easiness to play. Different with other kind of games, it does not require too much function and understands. For example, Farmville, one of the most famous applications in Facebook, is a game making users’ own farm to do things from growing to harvesting. Another social gaming is Pet-society, which is also based on application in Facebook. People can grow pets and communicate with them. Also, they can let their pets communicate with other users’ pets. It seems like playing Tamagotchi on the Internet. I don’t have experience to play social gaming, but I referred to honestcake’s blog posting.

People who play social gaming are very different from other kinds of games. Usually, age between teenagers and twenties male are the main players of normal games. However, according to Who’s Playing Social Games? [STATS] and Social Gaming Defined, women in their 40s are the largest players of social gaming. The survey found that 55% of social gamers are female and 45% are male. Females are more avid gamers, too; 38% of females said they play multiple times a day, but just 29% males said the same. Women are more likely to play with people they know (68% vs. 56% for males), and men are more likely to play with strangers (41% vs. 33%) than women are. It is very surprising result, but it is understandable. This is because social gaming is very easy to play, so people can treat it regardless of their age. Also, people can meet many people on the web through playing social gaming. It makes housewives communicate with more and more people when other family members are working and they are in the home. Also, the players enjoy more than one game per day. As the survey suggested in Social Gaming Defined, 95 percent report playing multiple times per week, and 64 percent play at least once per day. Interesting result is that most people play social gaming not because of meeting people on the Internet, but because getting fun and relieving stress. When asked why they play social games, the most respondents answered that “to be fun and excitement" (53 percent), followed by "stress relief" (45 percent), and "competitive spirit" (43 percent). Surprisingly, less than one quarter of respondents cited "connect with others" as a motivation for playing social games.

In my opinion, social gaming is worth to be loved to the people. Traditional games have excluded users by gender and age. However, social gaming is not difficult to use, so it helps women in the house to spend their leisure time. As I commented to Social Games Nations, social games can make people feel like being the God of the world, because they can control the world and the virtual people respond to in process. It is not that serious like Star Craft or Lineage, so more and more people can access to the game.

I was worried about the game money when I read posts about social gaming. This was because it can make many problems about money in the real world. However, after visiting Massively and read a post, my concerns disappeared. Nowadays, companies developing social gaming are trying to replace the way deposit gaming money from real money to alternative things. For example, Nexon is in its way to make game money with advertisement profit. As my comment to the post, it will attract people who did not want to spend their real money to play social gaming. As the research from Social Gaming Defined, people are willing to gain game money with their real money. However, people prefer using another way to earn game money to spend real money. Therefore, it is the best way to make the number of players increased. The only thing to be careful is that the game should not be a commercial thing. If it happens, people will be sick to too many advertisements and they will leave the game.

Social gaming is evolving. The number of players is increasing, and the game is being developed. It has many unique points compared with traditional games, so it is the blue ocean of game market. Even though it is just for killing time, I think it gives people much fun than the time it was not developed.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Privacy: for Making Brighter Future of Social Networking

This is a generation of social networking. As I did last assignment, I could find many social networking web sites and so many people have been playing in the society. Travbuddy is a social networking site providing to help make travel mates. People fill out their profiles and find people who are planning to go on a trip. I was very surprised because it means social networking is turning its way from online to offline. In this situation, there is an important thing to concern about; privacy. The two articles I found are talking about these things.

According to The future of Social Networking, the sister of the writer found her new roommate through Facebook. She scrutinized people’s profile and selected one, and she could know that the girl was close to her family and she had great group of friends. It is rather stalking, because she could know even the future roommate’s boyfriend by looking at her Facebook photos.

The other blog I found is The future of social networks and privacy: A brief research synopsis. It is viewing recent social networking web sites are invading personal privacies, so there should be some legal regulation against the problem. United States is behind of Europe and Canada in terms of privacy legislation to protect private information.

By thinking about the future of social networking, the use of private information should be regulated by law. The systems of recent social networks show too many things of users, and sometimes people cannot control it. Even more, there are special applications to track people who visit some blogs. With this application, the user can know who visited my blog, which pictures s/he clicked, and how many pages s/he clicked on the lists. I was so shocked that I did not want to believe in the existence of this application, but it is. There is no way to know the owner of the blog is using that kind of thing. It is invasion of privacy, but there is no regulation against the use of that kind of things.

We have learned about the world of social media and networking by this class. We know it is useful, and we also know it will be used more and more in the future. However, the problem of privacy is the thing we should solve before occurring golden age of social media and networking, because we know what kind of problems will be happened, and sometimes, we cannot know what will be really happened by the problem.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

SEO and Business

If you are in ITEC 335 class in American University, you must have your account on Google Analytics. I also use Google Analytics, but this is the first time I figure out that it is a kind of AEO. After reading Davit’s article and a video about Search Engine Optimization (AEO), I thought that SEO is the real way to social networking and business.

I also have my private blog on Cyworld, which is a Korean social networking web site, and the site provides the function similar with Google Analytics. I can see how many people visited my blog, and which post was interesting to the visitors. I just use it for satisfaction, but from now on, I want to use it by another way; targeting. By exploiting SEO, I can analyze characteristics of the visitors and fit posts and tags to them.

If I have a company and sell something to anonymous consumers, I will definitely use SEO with blogs. The first step is making blogs and accounts on Google Analytics something. The second process is analyzing characteristics of visitors like gender, age, and districts. And third, applying them to the posts and searching sites to fit products to their desires. I think information is the strongest weapon for business. By targeting consumers by using SEO, the CEO of the company can have big opportunity to catch their customers’ eyes.