Who else is sick and tired of marketers who view social media as nothing more than a source of free traffic?

You know the type.

• They have dozens of niche blogs, pumping out an endless stream of crap content they pay writers five dollars per post to produce
• They DM us all kinds of lame affiliate offers on Twitter
• They have a gang of buddies who help them push inappropriate content to the front pages of Digg, Delicious, and Reddit

No, they’re not going to destroy social media or anything as dramatic as that, but it’s still pretty ugly. These marketers have become like leeches, bleeding people of trust and contributing nothing in return. And it’s time for it to stop.

So, I decided to take a little time off from our usual marketing tips and write a good old-fashioned open letter (a.k.a. rant), telling them how it is. No, I don’t think it’s going to change the minds of any hardened spammers, but it might open the eyes of a few businesses who don’t know any better.

Let’s get started:

Dear Mr. Marketer:

The Social Web is not your "traffic honey hole."

Yes, we understand you’re just trying to run a business. Yes, we know social media is the biggest marketing opportunity in the history of mankind, and you’re just trying to get your piece of it. Yes, we are aware that social media marketing is endorsed by many top Internet marketers, and they’re making millions off it every day.

But we’d like you to stop, or at least change the way you’re doing it.

We’re not going to give you another self-righteous argument about how you can’t make money with social media. We’re not going to sermonize about the pitfalls of sleazy marketing. We’re not going to tell you you’re ruining opportunities for all of the other marketers out there who are trying to do things the right way.

You’ve probably heard enough of that, and it doesn’t matter anyway.

No, the honest truth is that it’s just a bad business strategy, and eventually you’re going to get burned. Sure, you can make a few quick bucks, but over the long term, trying to manipulate social media to get free traffic for your business just isn’t a sustainable strategy.

Here’s why:

1. Social Media Isn’t about Getting. It’s about Giving.

It’s tempting, I know.

Here you are, struggling to get anyone to pay attention to your product or service, and you hear that Facebook now has 500 million active users, twitter publishes over 2 billion tweets per month, and YouTube gets 2 billion views per day.

You think, "If I could only get a piece of that, my troubles would be over." You’d make a fortune, travel around the world, and enjoy the lifestyle of the New Rich.

So you design a marketing strategy around getting people to opt in to an e-mail campaign, friend you on Facebook, or follow you on Twitter. You dream about getting 5,000 Facebook friends, 10,000 twitter followers, 100,000 e-mail subscribers.

And when it doesn’t work, you wonder what you did wrong.

The answer: you’re trying to "get" with social media, and that’s not what it’s about. It’s about giving, about creating something stunningly awesome people can’t help talk about it, and then putting the tools in place to help them spread the word.

• Instead of jotting down a few thoughts for another quickie blog post, take several days and put together the most comprehensive guide in your niche for an important subject, and then give it away for free
• Instead of just talking about the theory of how to do something, prepare a video case study showing people in-depth examples of exactly how to do it
• Instead of just tweeting a few links to blog posts, set aside several hours each week to help anyone who asks you questions on Twitter, and then go out of your way to help them

In short, do something remarkable. Give people an experience they’ll want to talk about.

2. Social Media Isn’t about Algorithms. It’s about People.

Far too many bright people waste their time trying to figure out Google, Digg, and Twitter algorithms so they can game the system.

Sure, it might work… for a little while. Eventually though, algorithms change, and then your entire business falls apart. So then you have to find another exploit, another way to get around what it was meant to do, so you can resume making money.

It’s not sustainable. Every year, the algorithms get better and better, and it gets harder and harder to game the system.

If you’re smart, you have to ask yourself, "Is it really worth trying?" Why not just use the system the way it was meant to be used?

The purpose of social media is to give people information they want. If you understand the people, then you automatically understand the algorithm:

• Want to get to the front page of Digg? Watch it for a few weeks, get to know what the Digg community likes, and then submit something you know they’ll enjoy.
• Want to go viral on twitter? Browse around popular blogs, look at the posts that get more than 1,000 retweets, and then write content with a similar style, covering a similar topic.
• Want to release a popular product? Use social media to listen to what people want, and then create your product based on their ideas, not yours.

The data is all there, waiting for you to use. All you have to do is listen to people, and then use their feedback to guide your marketing.

3. Social Media Isn’t about Numbers. It’s about Relationships.

RSS subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook friends — when you’re just getting started, it’s easy to be obsessed with how many you have. You check every day, you brainstorm ways to get more, and you’re envious of people with a higher number.

But you shouldn’t be. Sure, numbers are important, but the real measure of influence with social media is the strength of your relationships.

You can build a following of 10,000 or more people on twitter, just by following everyone related to your subject, and waiting for a percentage of them to follow you back. The problem is, very few of them will remember who you are or actively watch your tweets, so it’s really like you have no one following you at all.

On the other hand, if you actively tweet great links and help people one on one, you may only have an audience of a few thousand, but all of them will know who you are, and all of them will be interested in what you have to say. If you have a new post, they’ll want to read it, and if you release a product, they’ll want to check it out. You’ll drive dramatically more traffic and sales.

And here’s the thing: relationships can’t be automated.

You can use different websites and software to artificially inflate your numbers, giving you lots of subscribers, followers, friends, or whatever, but there’s not a tool to build relationships for you. If you want to have influence online, then you actually have to take the time to talk with people, getting to know them and proving every day that you’re someone worth listening to.

You need to:

• Take the time to answer people’s comments on your blog. They’ll be grateful, and it’ll make them more likely to come back.
• Don’t just tweet about your products and services. Give your opinion on industry trends, tell stories from your business, and let people get to know you. They’re tired of buying from faceless brands.
• Actively listen to your most vocal customers. Follow them on twitter, subscribe to their blogs, comment on their posts, and do your best to keep up a dialog with them. It’ll pay off in positive press, and it’ll also help you build a better product.

Will any of it pay off in more traffic, followers, and subscribers?

Not immediately, no. Stick with it long enough though, and let people see that you’re serious, and it certainly can. You’ll get more retweets, links, comments, bookmarks — everything you could ask for to increase your traffic.

They won’t be doing it because you offered them a gift certificate or some other incentive. They’ll be doing it because they know you, like you, and want you to succeed.

And you know what?

You can’t buy that type of marketing.

Isn’t Doing All of This A Lot of Work?

Sure, but when is effective marketing not a lot of work?

One of the greatest myths about social media is that it’s an "Easy Button" for building a business. All you have to do is start a blog, create a Twitter account, or publish a few videos to YouTube, and you’ll have millions of people beating a path to your door.

But it’s not true. Yes, social media is revolutionary, both in technology and concept, but at its core it’s really about one thing: creating genuine connections with people.

You have to set aside the time to find out what people really want. You have to work at building relationships with both your customers and leaders in your industry. You have to create genuinely awesome experiences for people to talk about, as well as put the tools in place for them to help you spread the word.

Do that, and you’ll have all of the free traffic you can handle.

Don’t, and you’ll be just another annoyance, ignored today and banned tomorrow.

Who do you want to be?

It’s entirely up to you.

Sincerely,

Jon Morrow

About the Author: Jon Morrow is the Editor of KISSmetrics and the Associate Editor of Copyblogger. Get more from him on twitter.

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube — they’re all powerful tools for marketing your business online, and you might be tempted to pursue them all. Before long, you’ll have half a dozen accounts, hundreds of people to respond to on each website, and a sense of dread about what’ll happen to your online reputation if you can’t manage it all.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

There are plenty of things you can do to simplify your social media marketing strategy. Here are eleven of my favorites to get you started:

1. Only Go Where Your Customers Are

There are so many social media channels nowadays that it can be overwhelming just trying to figure out which sites you need to participate on. The simplest solution: focus on the sites where your prospective customers are already congregating.

For most businesses, that’s going to include the two big social media sites of the moment: Facebook and Twitter. Beyond that, though, it will depend largely on the niche you’re targeting. Listen to your customers, and see which ones they talk about most, and then deliberately ignore all the rest.

Not only will it take less time, but you’ll be able to do it better. By limiting the number of sites you’re focusing on, you’ll be able to give each one the attention it deserves, and over the long run, that will pay off with much deeper engagement with your customers.

2. Take Advantage of Available Tools

There are hundreds of tools out there that can help you better manage your social media presence. Most of these let you update all of your accounts from one, meaning you only have to visit one site, rather than half a dozen.

A few tools you might want to check out include:

• Flock, a web browser with built-in social media and blogging tools.
• TweetDeck, a Twitter client that also has support for MySpace and Facebook updates.
• HootSuite, an online Twitter client with support for Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, MySpace, and others, as well as support for multiple authors and scheduling of updates.
• Ping.fm, an online tool with support for virtually every major social media site and blogging platform.

3. Share the Responsibility

If you look at the successful social media efforts of many companies, both large and small, you’ll see that they don’t just have one person in charge of their social media activities. They have multiple people all chipping in.

Companies like Wired magazine and Etsy use one employee at a time to update their Twitter feeds, rotating that employee on a regular basis. Some companies do it daily, while others rotate on a weekly basis. Either way, everyone gets to disconnect and take a break.

Other companies, such as MediaTemple and Comcast, have several people working at once. Employees may either update one account (often signing their respective updates with initials) or each have accounts that are then associated with their employer (such as ComcastBonnie and ComcastSteve on Twitter, both representatives of Comcast).

4. Enlist Help from the Community

Providing useful, relevant information to your social media friends and followers gets difficult after a while. When you’re immersed in a subject day after day, it all starts to sound the same, and you end up spending more and more time finding content to post.

The simplest fix: ask your community for help.

Let everyone know you’re looking for fresh, interesting content, and then let them send you ideas. You can also follow others who post relevant links and then repost it. No, you won’t be releasing totally original content, but most people won’t care. Chances are, they’re not following the same people you are, so they’ll hear it from you first anyway.

5. Schedule Your Updates

The best social media management tools allow you to schedule updates. This lets you batch your messages so they post regularly throughout the day. Rather than taking five minutes every hour to post an update, you can just take half an hour in the morning or evening to schedule all of your posts for the day.

6. Don’t Follow Everyone Who Follows You

It’s common to feel like you should follow everyone who follows you.

On sites like Facebook, following is a two-way street. You accept a friend request and they automatically see your updates as you see theirs. But on sites like Twitter, users can follow you without any technical requirement to follow them back.

A lot of people think it’s good manners to follow anyone who follows you, and when you only have a few hundred followers, that can make sense. But as your follower numbers grow from a few hundred to a few thousand or more, trying to keep up with all of those people is impossible, so don’t even try. Nothing says you’re obligated to follow them back, and most people won’t be offended if you don’t.

7. Organize Your Friends and Followers

If you just can’t bring yourself not to follow everyone who follows you, then take advantage of the organizational tools out there to filter your feeds.

Use lists on Twitter to categorize those you follow so you can make sure you’re getting the updates from those you care about most. Use friend lists on Facebook, and don’t be afraid to hide updates from certain people who tend to clog up your news feed.

With other sites, use the filtering tools built into some of the social media management apps mentioned above to organize everyone. You can create lists of most and least important people, allowing you to prioritize who you want to watch the most.

8. Stick to a Time Limit

Social media can be addictive.

It’s easy to get lost spending hours on sites like Twitter and Facebook. You find yourself popping over to check your new notifications every ten minutes, interrupting your other work.

The best solution: use a timer. Set it for 15 or 30 minutes, and when the time is up, make yourself logout. Or, if you’re managing multiple accounts, set the timer for 5 or 10 minutes, and then move on to the next account when it dings.

9. Use Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service from Google that keeps track of everything published to the web and sends you an email about anything containing keywords you specify.

Rather than spending hours looking for new content to post, set up Google alerts for common keywords and topics associated with your niche. You should also set up alerts for your company name and product names so you know what’s being said about you and your products and can respond appropriately.

You can opt to have the information emailed to you as soon as it’s found, or on a daily or weekly basis. For alerts related to your company or products, immediate alerts are probably the best idea so you know as soon as something is said and can address it quickly. For everything else, a daily digest-style alert is more efficient.

10. Scan Instead of Read

Hang around social media long enough, and you become a master at scanning for relevant information. Reading every update that comes your way would take hours, but you can scan all of them in a few minutes, picking out what’s important and what’s not, and then spending your time where it counts.

The simplest strategy is to look for relevant keywords from your company and industry, and then focus on those. Or, if you’re looking for content to send to your friends and followers, most people will put the headline in their update before the link, allowing you to decide whether or not to click it.

In the beginning, it’ll be tough to figure out what’s relevant and what’s not, but give it time. The longer you are active in social media, the better you get at instinctively spotting things that are important. Like everything else, it just takes practice.

11. Measure Your Impact and Adjust Accordingly

Too often we make a plan for how we’re going to use social media in our business and then blindly stick to that plan for months or years, with little review or adjustment. But that leads to a lot of waste. Like with any other marketing channel, you should periodically review your social media marketing strategy and make any necessary adjustments.

For instance, you may find that you’re just not getting the results you expected from Twitter, Facebook, or one of the other social media sites you were targeting. If that’s the case, do your best to figure out if there’s something you’re doing wrong, and if there’s not, then ask yourself if it’s really worth your time to continue.

This simplifies things by streamlining where we’re placing our efforts. If a certain channel just isn’t working for your business, then stop using it. Refocus your energy into the channels that are working for you.

Social media marketing is powerful, yes, but at the end of the day it’s still just another marketing strategy. You expect it to produce results, and if it’s not, then something has to change.

That’s just smart business.

Whether you have already leveraged it or not, here are 41 resources that will help you on your way.

For Beginners

If you aren’t familiar with Facebook Connect, don’t worry because the resources bell should get you on track to becoming an expert. Just be careful though because reading isn’t enough, you have to actually dabble with it if you truly want to understand Facebook Connect.

1. Facebook Connect – Facebook’s page that explains the basics and advantages of Connect.
2. Facebook Connect: how to and why – Robert Scoble breaks down the how and why.
3. Why your website should be using Facebook Connect to attract visitors – a look at the traffic side of Connect.
4. Facebook Connect 5 Things You Wish You Had Known Before You Started – go through this presentation before you start.
5. 10 Great Implementations of Facebook Connect – unqiue examples of companies using it.
6. 10 More Great Implementations of Facebook Connect – more unqiue examples…
7. What ‘Facebook Connect’ Means for Corporate Websites – although this is an older article, it’s still a good read.
8. Why Facebook Connect Matters & Why It Will Win – here’s another old article that’s worth reading.
9. Facebook Connect tutorial – a good tutorial for beginners.
10. Facebook Connect Wizard – 3 easy steps to integration.

Tools for the Average Joe

If you aren’t a developer, don’t worry. You can still install Facebook Connect on your website. Through the following plugins and tutorials, it should be easy as pie. All you need is FTP access to your server.

11. WordPress Plugin – if you want to use it one your blog, this plugin should make life a lot easier.
12. Faux Facebook Connect Plugin Allows Facebook Users to Comment on WPMU Blogs – a must read for WordPress MU users.
13. Facebook Connects with Movable Type – you don’t have to have a WordPress blog to use it.
14. Facebook Connect Plugin for Drupal Launches – and if you don’t have a Movable Type blog, there is hope for you too. ;-)
15. Facebook Connect Plugin Directory – a one stop shop for your plugin needs.
16. HOW TO: Add Facebook Connect to Your Blog in 8 Minutes – if you have a blog and 8 minutes to spare, you should check this out.
17. How to add Facebook Connect to your website using the PHP API – step by step instruction for PHP users.
18. 16 Best Facebook Connect Plugins for Your Blog, Forum, Wiki, or CMS – there are way too many plugins for you to test out.
19. Facebook Connect Magento Module – if you are running Magento, you probably want to buy this module.

iPhone

If you’re into creating iPhone apps, here are some resources that are worth your time. Not only will they teach you how to implement Connect with your iPhone app, but they should also help spur some creativity that will help you create a better app.

20. Facebook Connect Wiki for iPhone – this is a good place to start if you have iPhone apps.
21. iPhone Implementation – here is a quick video of how you can implement it on the iPhone.
22. 5 Great Examples of Facebook Connect on the iPhone – examples of iPhone apps leveraging Facebook Connect.
23. 10 Fantastic iPhone Apps That Use Facebook Connect – 10 more iPhone apps that are worth checking out.
24. Marketing In Code, Part 1: Using Facebook Connect For iPhone To Increase App Visibility/Discoverability – a quick guide to increasing your discoverability.
25. Facebook Connect Software Development Kit (SDK) for iPhone – good news for iPhone developers, Facebook has released a SDK for iPhone that allows you to hook up your native iPhone applications with Facebook Connect and take advantage of the vast facebook userbase.
26. Facebook Connect for iPhone: Great, or Yet Another Privacy Threat? – with new technology comes more privacy issues.
27. Facebook Connect expands beyond iPhone to mobile web – there’s more to the mobile web than just the iPhone.

General News

News, news, and news! You can never get enough of it because the more up-to-date you are, the better you’ll be able to leverage Facebook Connect. Whether it’s old or new, here is some news that you should be familiar with.

28. Facebook Connect Growth and How it Pertains to New Privacy Policy – Brian Solis analyzes their new privacy policy.
29. 60 Million Users a Month – during La Web, Facebook released some data on how many users were using Connect.
30. Connect Sites – here is a list of sites using connect and they are sorted by popularity.
31. Facebook Connect + Facebook Ads = A Social Ad Network – what Facebook maybe doing in the near future.
32. Facebook Connect: One Year Later – over 80,000 websites and applications are using it.
33. Is Facebook Connect good for business? – if you own a business, you should watch this video.
34. Facebook Connect Live Sites – a thorough list of companies using Connect.
35. Facebook Connect: More Important Than SEO? – SEO isn’t the only form of traffic acquisition out there.

Resources For Developers and Designers

Whether you are running into problems or you’re looking for some jazzy buttons for your website, the following resources should help you. Just make sure you take the time and fully utilize the resources below because there are a ton of hidden jems instead them.

36. Connect Forum – if you can’t find answers to your Connect questions, go there.
37. Facebook Connect Login Buttons – button options for your website.
38. How to Setup Facebook Connect for Your Custom Domain – a quick tutorial with pictures.
39. Facebook Connect: A Feature Walkthrough – in you want to learn the ins and outs, here is a feature guide.
40. Facebook Connect Logout – here is how you can add a logout button.
41. Dealing with multiple login systems (Facebook Connect, Google Account, and others) – an easy solution for multiple logins.

Here is the letter that was posted on the Pet Society Forum from the Mayor of Pet Society introducing the competition:

Dear villagers,

As part of our Pet Society holiday season celebrations, I thought it might be fun to create our own greetings cards to celebrate together… but not just any cards, oh no, I’d like YOU to decide how they should look!

Here’s what I had in mind. You draw a fun picture for a greetings card and upload it onto our specially made website. Let’s focus on everything that’s fun about the holiday season — snowball fights, presents, great food… but with a Pet Society twist.

I’d like to be as inclusive as possible so I won’t be able to accept anything which may offend anyone. Oh, and checking through all the entries may take a little while, so please be patient if you don’t see your image right away!

You’ll be able to rate every image you see on the site out of five. The top five images as voted by you by Sunday the 30rd of November will be edited by my art team and made into greetings cards which anyone will be able to buy in our village shops. Can you imagine? Your very own greetings card design in thousands of Pet Society homes!

But that’s not all. The five lucky winners will receive an exclusive Pet Society figurine and 10,000 coins, with 5,000 coins for each of the ten runners up!

Does that sound like fun? Then what are you waiting for, it’s over to you!

Most Sincerely,

Your Mayor

To take part in the competition, you needed to visit the Pet Society Greetings Card Competition website where you could upload cards that you’ve created and you can vote (on a scale from 1 to 10) on cards that others have created. The 5 cards that have the most votes by November 30th will be made available for purchase in the Pet Society village shops and the designers of those cards will receive 10,000 coins that can be used in the game as well as a Pet Society figurine.

Card submissions concluded on Wednesday, November 26th and voting ended November 30th. The winners of the Greetings Card Competition should be announced soon.

While the forum states that they’ve received “…tens of thousands of entries…” that have “…surpassed all of [Pet Society's] expectations,” the website was displaying just over 6,000 cards after submissions had concluded on the 26th. This may have been because they had already started to remove entries as they worked their way down to the top 50 cards, which were then voted on again between the 26th and the 30th in order to narrow it down to the top 5 winners.

This Greetings Card Competition is significant because Playfish has found a way to engage their users and promote their application in an unobtrusive and fun way, while at the same time potentially earning revenue from the sale of these cards through the virtual currency system in Pet Society. Perhaps other applications could benefit from running promotions similar to this. For example, Pieces of Flair or Bumper Sticker could run a competition to see who could design the best piece of flair or the best bumper sticker in a certain category, for a specific event such as a holiday, or for a particular purpose such as getting out the vote during an election year.

This isn’t the only way that Playfish is celebrating the holiday season–in addition to holding the Greetings Card Competition, they’ve also introduced “…all kinds of festive clothes, decorations, furniture and food” into the village shops. During Thanksgiving, for example, Playfish added food items like turkey and pumpkin pie to their village shops. The pumpkin pie became quite a hit as people’s pets “…managed to chomp their way through five million pumpkin pies during Thanksgiving alone!” This is a great way to motivate their users to make purchases–the items are festive and are only available for a limited time. We decorate our homes and eat special foods during the holidays in our everyday lives, why not extend this to our virtual lives as well?

While some other Facebook developers have incorporated holiday themed elements into their applications (YoVille, for example, offers holiday themed attire for a limited time to their users), Playfish is really taking things a step further, not only by incorporating festive items to be purchased in Pet Society, but by holding a competition outside of Facebook while promoting it from within Facebook and offering rewards that are really only useful within the game. This is a fun and unique way to engage their users and promote their application at the same time.

Playfish is a company that has consistently developed successful Facebook applications. While other successful companies such as Zynga and SGN have had both wins and losses, so far all of Playfish’s games have been successful. Combined, Playfish has over 15 million active users every month! They’ve also recently secured $17 million in funding to continue their successful venture into the social gaming scene on Facebook.

How has Playfish consistently developed successful Facebook applications? Let’s take an in-depth look at the games this company has produced in an attempt to figure out just how they’ve done it.

Looking at the Numbers

As of this writing, 5 out of 6 of Playfish’s titles are in the top 30 Facebook applications for the most Monthly Active Users (MAU):

Rank	Application		Monthly Active Users
22		Pet Society	3,409,366
23		Who Has The Biggest Brain?	3,257,457
27		Word Challenge	3,094,550
28		Bowling Buddies	3,048,313
30		Geo Challenge	2,799,507

Their 6th title, Minigolf Party, was just recently released and therefore hasn’t yet built up a large active user base (currently it only has 5,082 MAU), but be sure to keep your eye on this application to see if it will enjoy the same success as the rest of the Playfish titles.

Attaining Success

Playfish launched their first game, Who Has The Biggest Brain?, in January 2008, which became one of the top-10 applications on Facebook in less than 100 days. Perhaps even more impressively, according to Playfish, Who Has The Biggest Brain? generated “…more than 1 million games played per day, with active users playing for around 25-30 minutes per day.”

Their first three titles, Who Has The Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge and Bowling Buddies all attained success on their own, however, their next titles, Pet Society and Geo Challenge, may have benefited from a cross-promotion campaign that Playfish launched in August 2008 (they haven’t started cross-promoting Minigolf Party yet, but it will be interesting to see if it benefits from cross-promotion once they do it).

How did these applications become so successful? There isn’t any magic behind their success, but there is certainly a formula that Playfish seems to follow with all of their games:

Fun, Engaging and Real-time, Interactive Gameplay

This is probably one of the primary reasons Playfish has enjoyed so much success with their games–they’re fun to play! Playfish’s games are also Flash-based which allows the user to interact with them in real-time as they would a traditional video game. This differs from some of the other successful games out there such as Mob Wars, which is a text-based game that requires the browser to refresh the page for interaction to take place. Fun and engaging gameplay is a necessary requirement for success, but it certainly isn’t the only factor that determines a games popularity.

High Production Value

Bret on Social Games has argued that high production value isn’t necessary for success, however, there is no denying that Playfish has some of the best looking games on Facebook. While it may not have contributed heavily to their success, high production value certainly didn’t hurt it.

Social Gameplay

This truly is a key ingredient in creating a successful game on Facebook–a platform that is completely social in nature. Building social game play into your games allows them to spread quickly and become viral. A game that is fun and engaging and built around a viral model is an incredibly powerful combination that can lead to a great deal of success in a short amount of time.

One way that Playfish helps spread the word about their games is to make the invitation process as accessible as possible. In nearly all of their games there are at least 3 links to invite your friends to start playing:

Playfish doesn’t just allow you to invite your friends to play their games, they allow you to challenge and taunt your friends to come and try and beat your high scores. For example, when you set the highest score during a week amongst your friends in Who Has the Biggest Brain? you can send a taunt to your friend:

Social Status

Bret on Social Games discussed how social status and leaderboards can help lead to a successful Facebook game and Playfish is certainly utilizing both of these techniques with their applications. In Bowling Buddies, for example, you’re challenged to attain certain achievements such as scoring more than 100 points in a game, getting 5 strikes in one game, keeping your average speed above 40 km/hr, etc. When you attain one of these achievements, you’re rewarded with “Bowling Bucks”–the virtual currency used in Bowling Buddies–as well as a trophy:

Achievements like this also result in a story about your success being published to your friends’ news feeds:

Playfish also incorporates leaderboards into all of their games. By default you see how you compare to your friends, but you can also choose to see what the standings are for all users of that game. Take a look at the friend leaderboard for Who Has the Biggest Brain?:

You may have noticed that there is an image of an animal associated with each of the players shown on the leaderboard–this is another way that Playfish uses the psychological affect of social status in their games. The animal associated with you is supposed to be a representation of the size of your brain. Do you want your friends to know that you have the mental capacity of a goat?

You may have also noticed that Playfish has built invites into their leaderboards, making it easy to invite your friends and challenge them to see, for example, who really has the biggest brain.

Effective Notifications & Feed Stories

Notifications and feed stories are essential for keeping existing users engaged and for acquiring new users. Playfish’s games generate very well thought out notifications that include clear calls to action:

Feed stories are important because they have the potential to introduce your application to new audiences. Playfish’s games, again, generate appropriate feed stories that serve to intrigue new users:

It’s interesting to note that the first Geo Challenge story includes a call to action–”Try now!”–that the other feed stories seem to lack.

Cross-promotion

While cross-promotion isn’t a necessary requirement for success, if you’ve already built a successsful game, there isn’t any harm in trying to leverage the success of that application to build an audience for your other applications. This seems to be working for Playfish, but not everyone is as successful with cross-promotion as they are.

Sweating the Details

There are few small touches that Playfish adds to their applications that show they are paying attention to the details. One of these touches are splash pages–when you click on a cross-promotion link for one of Playfish’s other games, you’re taken to a well-designed and inviting splash page with a large call to action. Here are two examples from Geo Challenge and Word Challenge:

While this has been discussed in a previous post, it is worth pointing out how Playfish presents their tips for bookmarking their applications and how they highlight how to get started with their applications on the application information page:

Playfish presents a similar tip to bookmark their applications on the loading screen of all their applications.

Playfish uses an arrow like this to point out how to start using their applications.

Monetization

While Playfish still has yet to turn a profit with their games, they’re spending a good deal of time and effort monetizing them. They’re currently doing this in the following ways:

Google AdSense

In all of their games, when you complete the game you’re presented with an advertisement from Google AdSense. They do a great job of integrating the ads into their games in a way that is obvious, yet unobtrusive. In fact, Playfish has added a nice touch to their ads in their new Minigolf game: when your player walks in front of the advertisement, they pause and say “Cool!”:

Virtual Goods

In some of their games, namely Bowling Buddies, Pet Society and Minigolf Party, you can customize your character with new clothing, hair styles, etc. You can earn the points necessary to purchase these goods through gameplay, however, they tend to accumulate very slowly. As an alternative you can buy points using PayPal or TrialPay–a service that allows you to earn points by completing advertising offers.

Minigolf Party allows you to use PayPal or TrailPay to purchase credits for use in the game.

Pet Society also allows you to use PayPal or TrailPay to purchase coins for use in the game.

Subscription Based Services

The other way that Playfish is monetizing their games is through subscription based “Pro” accounts that offer more services, levels, puzzles, etc.

Playfish introduced these types of services for the first time in Who Has the Biggest Brain?, but they have since incorporated it into Word Challenge and Geo Challenge.

Who Has The Biggest Brain? Pro Players Club

Playfish is an accomplished Facebook game developer that has created and followed a formula for success. Perhaps you can use some of the elements of the Playfish formula in your applications. You can learn more about Playfish’s games by looking at some of their application flows in Product Planner that can be used to build your own flows.

The usual flow for adding a new application in Facebook goes something like this: You find an application, you click on “Go to Application” and then you’re asked to give the application access to your profile. Once you click on the “Allow” link, you’ve given the application permission to access your profile information, the application has been added to your application list and you’re taken to the application dashboard or main page. Some applications, however, take you directly to the application dashboard or main page and you are only asked to give the application permission to access your profile if you wish to engage in some action with that application.

Take a look at these flows for Pieces of Flair and Bumper Sticker:

As you can see, there are only two steps: 1. going to the application and 2. being taken to the main page of the application.

This allows the visitor to see what the application is about before they give it access to their profile (some more cautious users may be weary of giving an application access to their profile) and since visitors are only asked to give the application access to their profile after they’ve decided to engage with the application, it may increase your chances of converting a visitor to a user.

Bret used the example of a very popular Facebook game, Scrabulous, who unsuccessfully cross-promoted their game Chess Pro. He attributed this, in part, to the idea that most Scrabulous players probably wouldn’t be interested in playing a chess game.

Not all cross-promotion strategies end in failure, however. Let’s take a look at how cross-promotion is working for some other companies.

Playfish

Playfish started cross-promoting its games in August 2008. What’s interesting is that the two games that were released after they started cross-promotion—Pet Society and Geo Challenge—both experienced a spike in Daily Active Users (DAU) within about a month after their initial release. Pet Society (released August 8, 2008) more than doubled its DAU in a single day, jumping from 126,469 DAU on September 16, 2008 to 310,413 DAU on September 17, 2008.

Their latest title, Geo Challenge, debuted (in beta) on September 22, 2008 and the DAU grew to 131,430 by October 27, 2008. The next day it jumped to 458,783 DAU!

Compare the above statistics to those of their other titles, Who Has the Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge and Bowling Buddies, all of which were released without cross-promotion and experienced more of a steady climb in DAU over time. Take a look at the DAU graph from Adonomics for Word Challenge as an example:

As you can see, while DAU increased over time, it didn’t experience a significant spike like Pet Society and Geo Challenge did. While this certainly isn’t hard proof that cross-promotion works, its an interesting observation nonetheless.

The Blood Games

Playfish isn’t the only social gaming company that uses cross promotion, The Royal East India Trading Company has produced four games called The Blood Games that they cross-promote with each other. However, they’ve take cross-promotion to a different level by incentivizing it. Shortly after you begin playing Elven Blood, for example, you’re taken to a screen that informs you that you will be rewarded with “3 Blessings from the Elder Tree” (these blessings can be used to increase wealth, life, stamina or add a new member to your party) if you try all of the Blood Games. They also make it clear that you need to try all of the games immediately, stating that “You won’t be able to do this mission again.”

It isn’t clear how well this approach is working: as of this writing Elven Blood has 1,040,243 Monthly Active Users (MAU) while their other games (Blood Lust, Skies of Blood and City of Blood) are seeing MAU in the range of 460,000 to 550,000. Whether or not this turns out to be an effective cross-promotion strategy (The Blood Games are still fairly new), it is still an interesting and unique approach.

As Bret points out at the end of his article, cross-promoting your games, even if they are promoted within a highly successful game, doesn’t necessarily guarantee their success. No user acquisition strategy can be successful if the game just isn’t engaging. But, if you’ve created a successful game, cross-promotion may prove to be a great way to acquire users for your other games.

“…a section of text which tells the user to do something. For example…the famous ‘click here’.”

Used within Facebook applications, CTA’s are small additions that may very well have a big impact on application adoption and user retention because, as you’ll see, some of the most successful applications on Facebook are using CTA’s.

Click to Play

The first type of CTA that we’ve noticed is adding a flag on the application information page that points out what the user needs to click in order to start using the application. Playfish uses this type of CTA with all of their applications along with SuperPoke!:

Playfish’s Geo Challenge includes the CTA “Click here to play!”

SuperPoke! also uses the (now outdated) CTA “Click ‘Add Application’ to install!”

The examples above are subtle, but they still help to convey what the user should do in order to start using an application on a page that is somewhat complex.

Bookmark this Application

The next type of CTA that we’ve seen is important when it comes to helping users find your application quickly and easily the next time they login to Facebook: bookmarking your application.

Playfish, again, is using this call to action in all of their applications along with SuperPoke!, Pieces of Flair and Texas Hold’em Poker:

Playfish’s Geo Challenge bookmark CTA

Playfish places this image at the bottom of their application’s loading screen (it goes away once the application has fully loaded). As you can see, they’ve placed it directly above of the actual bookmark bar (obviously the position of the image is dependent upon the size of the browser window, but most of the image seem to match up fairly well in a 1024×768 browser window).

SuperPoke! bookmark CTA

SuperPoke! includes the above CTA in Step 1 of how to use their application.

Pieces of Flair

Pieces of Flair includes the tip above at the top of their application.

Texas Hold’em Poker

Similarly Texas Hold’em Poker includes a tip to their users at the top of their application, however, they take it a step further by including a short animation showing how to bookmark their application (a still shot of this animation can be seen in the center of the image above).

Add to Profile

Another CTA that we’ve seen is to add an application to the user’s profile. Bumper Sticker uses this type of CTA and it is really an essential part of keeping their application visibility high within the new Facebook design:

Bumper Sticker’s add to profile CTA

CTA’s like the examples above could prove to be an important part of creating a successful Facebook application. While designing your applications, you may want to consider including some of the CTA’s we’ve looked at above.

Planning & designing your Facebook application

Product Planner is an ideal place to further develop, analyze and perfect your application flows, but here are some more resources for planning out your application.

1. Planning Your Facebook Application – Part one of what is going to be a series of posts on the technical how-to of creating Facebook applications. This article, however, focuses more on the planning phase of application development. It is also very current–focusing on the “new” Facebook.
2. Is your application doing all of these? The list of Facebook integration points – A great checklist of Facebook integration points that can help your application achieve viral growth.
3. 7 essential planning tips when developing your application on Facebook Platform – A list of things to consider before you start coding your application, including tips & tricks for successful development.
4. How to Design the Perfect Facebook Application for the Users and You – Introduction – A four part series that presents 3 strategies for creating an application that users will want to use and share. (Part 2, Part3, Part 4)
5. Product Development 101: Designing & Optimizing the DNA of a Killer App – A presentation at the Startonomics conference where Dan Olsen discusses how to use metrics and optimization to build a better application.
6. Game design tutorial at the GDC – A quick review by Andrew Chen of the Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics (MDA) game design framework proposed at the Game Developers Conference. Its not an in-depth review, but it gets you thinking about user behavior and emotion and how the mechanics of your game can affect these things.
7. How to Create a Facebook Application – A primer on Facebook applications and the Facebook API.
8. What Stanford Learned Building Facebook Apps – A very brief, yet informative, list of 10 tips that Stanford students learned while developing Facebook applications.
9. What are game mechanics? – Described as a “unified definition of game mechanics that gives [developers] a base upon which to build great games.”
10. Does High Production Value Matter? – Bret takes a look at whether or not high production value in social games is a necessity for success.
11. Seven Steps to Graphing Your Facebook Strategy – A detailed article by Dave McClure on creating a Facebook Strategy. The articles serves as an introduction to Facebook as well as covering the Facebook Platform, monetization within Facebook applications and virtual currencies.
12. Tips for Building Your Facebook App from the Maker of “Quizzes” – Inside Facebook talks to Joe Winterthaler about the success of his application “Quizzes.”
13. Tips for Developing a Successful Facebook App by Zachary Allia, Maker of “Free Gifts” – Inside Facebook interviews Zachary Allia about developing successful Facebook Applications.
14. Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software – A slide presentation by Amy Jo Kim talks about “using game mechanics to create applications and services that are fun, compelling, and addictive.”
15. Industry Leaders: In-Depth Interview with Playfish CEO Kristian Segerstrale Inside Social Games interviews Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of one of the more successful Facebook application developers today.
16. Q&A with RockYou—three hit apps on Facebook, and counting – Lance Tokudoa, CEO of RockYou talks to VentureBeat about their success on Facebook.
17. Q&A with Max Levchin: Slide more than a widget-maker – Max Levchin discusses Slide.com’s success on Facebook with VentureBeat.
18. Ypulse Interview: Max Levchin, Founder of Slide – Ypulse interviews Max Levchin on Slide.com’s success on Facebook.
19. Facebook Interviews: RockYou CEO Lance Tokuda Part 1 and Part 2 – A 2-part video interview with RockYou CEO Lance Tokuda.
20. A Case for Cloning Games – Bret on Social Games argues that cloning successful games in big markets like Facebook makes sense.
21. Game Design Lessons From Evolutionary Psychology: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 – Bret on Social Games applies his knowledge of evolutionary psychology to game design and makes some very interesting points.

Marketing your Facebook application and User Acquisition

If you want your Facebook application to be successful you’re going to need to acquire a large amount of users. The following resources will provide you with tips on how to market your application and acquire users.

22. Arch Viral: Creating Social Apps for Social Platforms – A presentation at Startonomics in San Francisco by Lance Tokuda of RockYou that “talks about the essential ingredients for creating a viral application on social platforms.”
23. What’s your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption – Andrew Chen looks at what viral loops are and how you can build them into your application to (hopefully) lead to exponential growth.
24. Viral Facebook Apps: Going from Zero to 1 Million Page Views in One Month – In this video presentation, Siqi Chen talks about how his application “Friends for Sale” grew to 1 million page views in just one month.
25. Rethinking Facebook’s “Daily Active Users” – Andrew Chen warns against relying to heavily on Daily Active Users (DAU) as a measurement of your applications success.
26. Viral marketing, activation, and retention metrics – Commentary on one of Dave McClure’s presentations regarding “Acquisition, Activiation, Retention, Referral and Revenue.”
27. Viral marketing is not a marketing strategy – Andrew Chen argues that you should build your application around viral principles, not the other way around.
28. Facebook Users Just Want Entertainment – A look at usage trends on Facebook applications and conclusions that can be drawn from the data.
29. User retention: Why depending on notification-driven retention sucks – Food for thought regarding applications that use notifications and depend on them for user retention.
30. Q&A with two Standford Facebook class teams who reached 1M users in 30 days – Inside Facebook talks to Stanford students about their experiences creating Facebook applications and acquiring a large number of users.
31. 10 tips for releasing your Facebook application, and maximizing growth – An in-depth look at acquiring users and what kind of user base your application might need to sustain it.
32. Facebook Application Marketing – A set of slides that looks at the various communication channels available within Facebook and how they can be used to promote your application.
33. Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO – Looks at how to take advantage of the most important marketing channels on Facebook: the News Feed, Notifications and Messages.
34. Make Your Millions with Facebook Applications – Despite the title of this post it mainly focuses on how some of the more successful Facebook applications have acquired their users and the lessons that can be learned from the tactics they’ve used.

Monetizing your Facebook application

Monetizing a Facebook Application can be tricky. Check out the resources below for tips on how to successfully make money from your application.

35. What every Web 2.0 entrepreneur should know about virtual goods – Andrew Chen looks at how to use virtual goods, how to monetize these goods and how they can be used to acquire users.
36. Social Networks Part 3: How To Maximize Your Facebook Application’s Profit Potential – Looks at “how to maximize your application’s profit potential by incorporating some tips during the development, marketing and monetization phases” of application development.
37. Making money off facebook – Looks at the challenges of making money with Facebook applications.
38. The Internet Wants to Be Free, but You Need to Get Paid – A presentation at the Startonomics conference where Andrew Chen talks about understanding your traffic sources and how to monetize them.
39. Counting Your Big Pile of Benjamins: 5 Startup Tips for Maximizing Ad Revenue – A post that covers “some of the key milestones that any ad-supported startup will have to face.”
40. What CPM is your app making? Data from Facebook Developers – Briefly discusses trying out different ad networks and gives you a general idea of what some other developers are making from some of those ad networks.
41. 5 factors that determine your advertising CPM rates – A brief write-up on how to determine how well your site will monetize with advertising.
42. How much is a Facebook user worth, anyway? – Andrew Chen looks at the reality of making money from advertising within Facebook applications and make some suggestions on how it could potentially be improved.
43. 5 things that make your social network monetize like crap – Andrew Chen takes an in-depth look at the challenges that affect social network monetization.
44. Virtual goods starting to pan out for Facebook game app developers, and not just the venture-funded ones – VentureBeat looks at applications that are making a lot of money with virtual goods.
45. How are facebook applications making money? – A brief list of the ways that Facebook applications are able to generate revenue.
46. Slide’s Levchin on making money in social media – A video interview with Max Levchin that looks at how his company, Slide, makes money on Facebook.
47. Monetization Options for Facebook Application Developers – Andrew Wee looks at ways to monetize your Facebook applications.
48. Facebook Monetization Service $uper Rewards Officially Launches – A look at $uper Rewards, a “Facebook Application monetization widget” that many of the top Facebook developers are using to monetize their applications.
49. Business Models for Social Networks: Monetizing Social Capital, The Long Tail of Cool & The Friends List – Dave McClure of 500 Hats takes an in-depth look at the strategies that can be used to make money on social networks.
50. Virtual Goods: the next big business model – Susan Wu look at the success of virtual goods on social networks and why people choose to purchase virtual goods.

Mob Wars is a wildly popular Facebook game that is rumored to make upwards of $1 million per month, making it the most profitable game on Facebook. How did they do it? Let’s take an in-depth look at Mob Wars and how it’s gotten to where it is today.

A Brief History

Mob Wars was developed by David Maestri (a.k.a. Jason Gilbert) and launched in January of 2008. According to statistics collected by Adonomics, Mob Wars has grown at a fairly steady pace from 331 daily active users on January 27, 2008 to 449,057 daily active users on September 27, 2008. That’s a 135,566% increase over a period of just 8 months! (As of this article, there are currently 505,178 daily active users.)

Growth & Retention

Mob Wars has achieved tremendous growth in a fairly short period of time. How did they do this? The entire Mob Wars game is built around a viral invite model—a user invites several friends, each of which will (hopefully) invite several of their friends and so on and so forth resulting in exponential growth.

While the game isn’t impossible to play as a single user, your ability to complete certain tasks and to become successful in the game will be limited.

Prior to Facebook prohibiting incentivized invites, Mob Wars was able to offer users rewards such as (virtual) cash, health and energy for inviting their friends to play. However, even with the removal of incentivized invites, there are still plenty of reasons why users would try to invite as many people as possible to the game: you need a certain mob size to complete some tasks and there is strength in numbers. The question has been raised as to whether or not this means that Mob Wars is using forced invites—another prohibited practice by Facebook.

Getting users to invite their friends and have them install your application is only one small part of the growth equation. If you really want your application to grow you need to keep your users engaged and wanting to come back for more. And guess what? Mob Wars seems to have this part of the equation down pat. According to Developer Analytics:

“…[Mob Wars] has one of the longest average user lifespans we’ve ever seen on Facebook.”

Why does Mob Wars have such a high engagement and retention rate? Bret Terrill of Bret on Social Games has recently written several posts that may give us some insight into why Mob Wars is so successful.

In two of Bret’s more recent articles, he uses lessons from evolutionary psychology to look at Social Status and Leaderboards as reasons behind successful social games. Brett says that:

“Competing for social status is the core activity of all humans, even if we do it in incredibly indirect way.”

He goes on to say that:

“Social games, by their virtue of being embedded in a social environment, offer players the opportunity to compete for social status.”

Mob Wars definitely allows you to compete for social status by recruiting mobsters and building the largest mob possible (currently 500 mobsters plus yourself), attacking and killing other mobs (you can even taunt other mobs by punching them in the face), and by competing for a spot on the leaderboard where you can gain status as “Most Deadly”, “Top Fighter”, “Top Bounty Hunter”, “Top Tycoon” (the richest), “Most Notorious” and “Most Wanted”. The link to this leaderboard is titled “Made Men” and has a description next to it that says:

“Pay your respects to the top mobsters on Mob Wars.”

In another article titled “How to Build a Successful Social Game: Design for Play with Strangers“, Bret argues that:

“If you’re only building for interactions between friends, then you’re not leveraging a significant chunk of the interactions on Facebook.”

Furthermore he states that:

“Mob Wars is the prime example of this…competition is focused on strangers, and cooperation is focused on friends.”

These are some of the reasons that Mob Wars is enjoying such a high level of success, but it is still only part of the equation.

Monetization

What makes Mob Wars stand out from the crowd isn’t how many daily active users it has (many applications have more), rather the amount of money they are reportedly making from these users. How is Mob Wars making money?

Mob Wars uses two different strategies to monetize the game:

1. Banner advertising
2. Cost Per Action (CPA) Offers

The first way that Mob Wars has monetized its game is through banner advertising by placing a banner advertisement at the top of each page in Mob Wars. Advertising isn’t all that profitable unless you have a serious number of page visits. Mob Wars may be successful with advertising because game play often involves visits to many pages by a single user. In fact, according to Developer Analytics:

“…each unique user generates over 60 page impressions per day…”

Combine 60 page impressions per day with over 500,000 daily active users and you’ve got a pretty good formula for generating a descent amount of revenue from banner advertising.

The second, and perhaps most profitable way Mob Wars has monetized its game, is through Cost Per Action (CPA) offers, partnering with companies such as Offerpal Media and Super Rewards. In an Inside Facebook interview, Super Rewards CEO and Co-founder Jason Bailey stated that:

“Developers come in making $100 a day and we can take them up to $1000 a day in short order.”

Mob Wars is reported to be making $22,000 per day and they have done it, in part, by integrating these CPA offers directly into the game without making gameplay dependent upon them. In other words, you don’t have to participate in these offers to play or even be successful in the game, but there are incentives to taking part in these offers.

For example, after completing an offer such as getting a free auto insurance quote or signing up for a free trial of Netflix, you can redeem the “Favor Points” you earn to accept offers from the “Godfather”. These offers include things like cash, more mobsters (hired guns) or full energy.

These two monetization strategies combined with explosive growth and a very high rate of user engagement and retention have made Mob Wars perhaps one of the most profitable games on Facebook today. You might want to think about integrating these strategies into your applications.

You can learn more by taking a look at the Mob Wars application flows in Product Planner.