Game Mechanics

06 · 30

#EAv: New Empire Avenue posts - community and more

A couple of folks from the Empire Avenue social media network were kind enough to quote me in articles about the site today. Lisa Loeffler wrote about EA for business value and her personal experience with the site. "Empire Avenue has made meeting people from across the world extremely easy," Lisa writes. "And it has benefited and increased my social and technology mindshare as well."

Damond Nollan wrote a guest post on ManagingCommunities.com about community building on Empire Avenue, looking at three of the sites largest communities and how they recruit and share across other social platforms. "Building communities on, or around the topic of, Empire Avenue is similar to building communities anywhere," writes Damond. "For me, it has always been about the connection."

Sexy Social Media also wrote about Empire today - here's their piece.

06 · 27

RZR Schools Us on Dividends and Buy Backs

Bill Pitcher, RZR, on Empire Avenue, is old guard. He's been blogging free and excellent tips about the site for close to a year, well before any significant portion of the "social media expert" crowd knew what it was. So when he really digs in, it's worth paying attention.

Bill's latest at his Empire Building blog breaks down the math on why a singular focus on dividends is a losing wealth-building strategy. Now, I'd argue that it's a global losing strategy, but for now let's turn our attention to Bill's excellent post and the math.

06 · 25

Rise Together - Don't Be A Lemming

It's fake currency. That's the first thing to remember.

It's real people.

With community improvements going live across Empire Avenue, it makes sense to assess goals and strategies. As I've written on V3 and CMSWire, Empire has had significant ROI for me. And I'm not talking about fake currency.

My tribe on Empire is XBAR, a moderated community where stock self-promotion is discouraged and where we care for and amuse each other.

That's enough.

06 · 20

Down with the ROI Cult

A sickness has taken hold on Empire Avenue. It's a sharp departure from the kind of share swaps that have long been a fixture on Empire. This sickness says that if someone doesn't have strong dividends - the fake currency payout each virtual stock generates on a daily basis - they aren't worth buying.

Buying shares is the measure Empire Avenue uses to fill in for the faulty computer algorithms used by most "influence" grading sites across the social web. Share buy volume is designed as measure of someone's network value and the quality of or interest in their digital footprint. Buying shares had for a year been the chief mechanism of forming tight networking connections on Empire.

That changed with the rise of the ROI Cult. The Cult has people saying insane things like, "I like you, but you've got to admit your ROI sucks."

Down with the ROI Cult.

02 · 22

#EAv: Measuring Your LinkedIn Influence

Empire Avenue, the social media stock exchange, just went live with LinkedIn scores. Unlike Klout, which provides an aggregate score for users Twitter and Facebook "influence," Empire Avenue has a large range of individual scores plus an aggregate "price" that heavily favors its more active users who buy and sell stock in each other. EA had already scored YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook profiles and pages.

The addition of LinkedIn could be a game changer, as that mature social network has quite a community of networkers who'd benefit from seeing relative scores. LinkedIn has a relatively limited API, but based on the scores released tonight, Empire Avenue's developers seem to have heavily weighted recommendations over number of connections. I've taken a look at a few people with more than 500+ connections (the maximum shown on a LinkedIn profile) who have barely broken 20 for an EA LinkedIn score.

Like many of the other scores on EA - or Klout for that matter - it appears it would be pretty easy to game a LinkedIn score. In this case, it would be done by cross-recommending friends on EA. It will be interesting to see how that dynamic plays out across EA junkies and LinkedIn "Open Networkers," or LIONs, as they are known. EA weighs only the top 5 scores in it's price algorithm, so juicing a LinkedIn score may or may not help overall valuation on the site.

If you're on LinkedIn, feel free to connect with me here, and if you're an EA fan, join the Empire! group.

- ADRIEL

12 · 20

#EAv: Controversial Cage Matches, a New Adrielhampton.com and More

First, I want to thank all my shareholders on Empire Avenue. It's a rare chance that I get to buy back your shares in volume (once you reach a certain level, you only make 10 percent back on sales), but more than 1,400 of you have stuck with me as my share price see-sawed and finally stabilized once again at No. 1 in global share price. Thank you!

I also want to express my gratitude for all the new friendships that have formed and grown through the EA platform. You make it fun.

This week, I'll be relaunching my website, adrielhampton.com. I'm taking off the Wordpress.com training wheels and moving to a self-hosted site where I can have more flexibility with video and interactive features. Helping me in this process is Oscar Gonzalez, a Wordpress pro I met on Empire Avenue. Anyone who says EA doesn't have business value might want to take another look.

EA has made a lot of changes since I joined in the spring, but despite some personal growing pains with this beta, I've got to say that the site has developed very nicely. Its increased focus on the rich Twitter API is right up my alley, and I love the new "Cage Match" feature pitting Twitter celebs and popular brands against each other. In the latest match, I'm picking Wikileaks over my friends at USAgov - press freedoms first, Google over Facebook - lesser of two evils, really, and TheAshCloud over Heathrow Airport. That last one will be a real challenge, as the airport has a significant baseline lead over the floating ash. I hope you'll join me in flexing some EA muscle and backing the underdog with some big buys.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year, e(ADRIEL) out.

10 · 04

Klout, Grader and Empire Avenue

With the latest iteration of influencer scores, Empire Avenue has taken another step into the social media metrics marketplace of Klout and HubSpot's Grader product.

You can now click on the price of any Empire Avenue member and see how their share price breaks down - how much of it is from their social media rankings and how much is from moving shares on EA's virtual market. This data was already there if you read between the lines, but now it breaks down very easily in a nifty graphic. This feature enhances the usefulness of the numeric scores already assigned to Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts linked to EA profiles. Breaking it down, we can see that the top stock on EA, presently at 101.57, derives 57 percent of its value, or 57.73 "eaves," from EA's social media influence algorithms. As of today, here's how some big names shake out if you break down their value by EA social media valuation alone:

Chris Latko - 56.82
Tara Hunt - 53.8
Kim Sherrell - 43.3
Loic Le Meur - 39.5
Chris Heuer - 39.1
Jason Calacanis - 32

Empire Avenue CEO Duleepa Wijayawardhana recently told me the secret sauce that sets his platform apart from other metric products is the share-buy mechanism. Other tools can measure indicators of network influence, but the ability to move shares on EA is the kind of follow-the-leader influence that advertisers are looking for. I suspect Empire Avenue - it's in beta - will continue to tinker with its algorithms, which right now weight engagement very heavily. It's also notable that the site says it uses the top five networks to determine the social media portion of the share pricing - and that means that highly active EA players (all of the top 10 by share price) - get much of their value from high EA network scores while the Twitter and Facebook stars often have very low EA scores and are riding on just one or two high network scores. Additionally, some of the folks listed above have not fully integrated their networks with EA.

09 · 25

Should Facebook Pay Its Superusers? #EAv

An interesting bit of philanthropy news and a searing blog post about the state of Web 2.0 fused for me this week. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged $100 million for Newark, NJ, schools, as disaster capitalism blogger John Robb was writing about “Cognitive Slaves,” the population of hyper-active social media users that create (and are) the value for multi-billion dollar companies like Facebook that provide very few jobs in relation to their capital value.

“The distressing part is that in reality these companies actually employ hundreds of millions of people, particularly young and otherwise un or underemployed superusers,” Robb wrote. “People that work for them day in and day out for free: finding, sifting, sorting, connecting, building, etc.”

…

“If we awarded 4/5 ths of the value of Facebook … to its superusers, leaving the tool managers $5 billion in value, each superuser would now be worth $200,000 from their contributions to this tool alone.”

After writing his post, Robb kept up a dialogue, suggesting user-owned social networks as a response to this modern intellectual slavery. “Social networks could be platforms for societal and economic renewal,” he tweeted. “Instead, they’re only vampire squids.”

Robb’s essay focuses on Facebook as an example, but the same can be said for Google. Just as I was leaving the journalism field, way back in 2005, I bemoaned the “vampire squid” effect of the search engine during a Webzine panel. “The problem you have right now is you have people making huge amounts of profit off of other people’s content.”

Today, Google, Zynga, Facebook and other large (in market value) corporations continue to profit heavily from the social and intellectual contributions of their millions of users. Some, like Google, “give” back with useful free services, though there is no altruism in both Facebook and Google coaxing their co-creators to use more and more services and to share more and more information. Advertisers pay well for access to more and more accurate profiles of the psyche.

So now, Zuckerberg is starting early on a path of major philanthropy. But I can’t help but draw a comparison to Andrew Carnegie, the great builder of libraries whose hands were covered in the blood of steelworkers who demanded a fair share of the profits of their labors. Facebook and Google co-creators, though, are a more passive bunch. The loose credit of modern society hides the true poverty of the masses, and we lionize the new titans of industry just as we’ve done their forefathers.

Robb struck a pragmatically hopeful note in his thoughts on the digital future, tweeting a suggestion that massive multi-player online games might serve as a vehicle for building a user-centric busines ecosystem, and that a Wikipedia-like model could create financial security for the builders of public goods: “It’s that hyper-revolutionary?”

It is, Mr. Robb. It is.

09 · 12

#EAv: Branding and Business Community on Empire Avenue - Scuba Diving

There are a number of very successful business-related communities on startup social networking site Empire Avenue, from The Lab to Inspiration Hub, but who would have guessed that one of the early businesses to rally members to the site would be scuba diving?

Darcy Kieran has been on EA less than three weeks, but the active social networker and his friends have already asked the site's developers to create a community for them and Darcy's own stock has risen far beyond many EA members who've been on the site since early this year.

Folks sometimes ask me to prove the value of a social networking tool, and it can get tiresome pointing out that these tools are only as good as the effort you put into them. There is no magic to networking - it takes cleverness and hard work. The early successes of the scuba diving community on EA prove that kind of work and the right social tool can create a big splash.

In addition to Darcy, check out The Business of Diving Institute, Total Diving, Beuchat in Canada, Scuba Luv Hub, Oceans HQ, and a new and interesting member of the scuba community, Xtreme Second Life Real Estate (promise of a new blossoming community?).

- eADRIEL

09 · 09

#EAv Why We're Not Likely to See a e100 Share This Year

First, let me say thanks to all the folks who've left supportive messages following the Great Erindale Leaderboard Crash. And thanks to Empire Building Network publisher Bill Pitcher for his clear explanations of what happened and why.

Here's the way I see EA moving forward:

Share sales have been sharply curtailed as a source of growth. I have the most shares outstanding, and even before this week's update, sales had ceased to have any significant impact on my price. Without knowing all the internal metrics EA is using, I still expect I would have to nearly double my shares outstanding to reach 100 again. This would be an amazing feat, nigh impossible until the site has many more members.

Any influencer with more than 20,000 shares out will see their growth stalled, and those with more than 30,000 are going to be pretty much treading water. This is where I have to depart from Bill's analysis of post-Erindale strategy. The leaderboard is about top social media influence, but share price growth is all about new. The leaders are largely stalled out in audience growth in percentage terms. Newcomers with growing Twitter and Facebook audiences will fare far better in growth than established site members. I can easily show a new member how to double their price, but I can barely hold mine steady, especially at times like a long weekend when much of my normal audience is offline.

I doubt that we'll see another e100 share this year, and I suspect the leaderboard will be more stable from here out as well.