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Hey,

I talked to my community and the students from the USA didn’t have class because of Hurricane Sandy.
For that reason I decided to find out if Social media could play a Role in helping those in need of help.
And I did find an article. In the article social media is used to provide information on how to act in these dire times.
This article is interesting, because it shows how precious information can be. It might even save a life.

http://blog.hootsuite.com/hurricane-sandy-social-media/

 

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Once again I will be posting about the bad side of Social Media. People have a strong awareness in the gaming community of how they represent themselves. When I first started playing video games, it was all about investing time in your character to get the best items ingame. Nowadays, It is all about looking “kawaii” (cute). Companies adopted a different business model in which players can purchase items that will change their appearance. I was curious to see how far people would go to be unique within their online social network and how people would respond to this. Once a player is rich in game, that person can buy any item ingame and thereby have an influential position within their network. I know that people would engage in the act of “buying ingame valuta” for real money. But who do they buy from? I stumbled upon this article that might be of interest. In the following article,  people found out that prison wardens in China would  force their prison inmates to play games non stop to farm gold and sell it to other players. The prisoners would get physically abused if they did not reach their work quota. What bothers me here is that the money they earn through this method is more than manually labour. Is power within online social networks really that important? Do we have to behave unethically? The problem at hand is that the recognition of unethical behaviour is slowly fading away, because it involves digital acts. A lot of people download illegal, because they know they can get away with it. People cyberbully, because they won’t see the other person suffering directly. Social media revolves around the digital world and I just hope we can still retain our morals.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam

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The gaming community used to consists mainly of males that neglected their studies, or were unemployed. They were pretty much considered to be the rejects of society. However, the gaming scene has evolved. Nowadays more and more casual games are being released. This means that the diversity within the gaming community has increased.There are more people with different backgrounds and all of them use social media to interact with each other.

So, I was thinking of how easy it was do surveys within my community and it made me realize that the gaming community still has a lot of potential that marketing researchers might not be aware off. I came across this article regarding social gaming. The concept of social gaming is basically the use of both gaming and social media to tap in certain markets. Some of these idea’s were quite creative and if anyone has any ideas that could add value please do comment.

http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/social-media-a-new-frontier-for-gaming/3022558.article

 

Think of online games and you probably think of connected consoles, or role-playing games such as World Of Warcraft. You might not think of Facebook, yet 1 billion hours a month are spent playing games on the social network.

This is the world of social gaming, a sector of the games industry that has largely been ignored by marketers and the media in favour of console games, but which attracts huge numbers of devoted players. Playing games is the third most popular activity on Facebook, after chatting with friends and looking at their photos. And it’s growing fast. According to research by PopCap, the company behind Bejewelled, one of the most popular games on Facebook, six months ago one-third of social media sessions involved playing a game. That’s now up to half. It’s also highly engaging; two-thirds of social gamers play for half an hour a session, and 40% play several times a day.

It’s not just the scale of social gaming that is making marketers pay attention to the channel. It also opens up a very different audience to traditional gamers, one that is particularly interesting to FMCG brands.

“The core group is 34-year-old women, although some games, such as Farmville, attract an older female audience,” explains Rumbi Pfende, UK country manager for casual games portal Zylom by RealGames.

So what is social gaming? Aren’t all online games in some way social?

The basic definition is that social games are played in social media, which currently means on Facebook. The site dominates the social network space in the UK, with research carried out for RealGames by TNS Global and Newzoo last year showing 63% of people who play games or use social networks use Facebook. The next biggest sites are Friends Reunited, used by 16% and MySpace by 13%. This dominance leads Pfende to say that Facebook is the only place marketers interested in social gaming need to think about. The huge reach of Facebook also gives it a significant advantage over dedicated games portals offering similar casual games.

“Zylom does 10 to 12 million impressions a month,” she says, “but Scrabble alone does 20 million impressions on Facebook.”

But Pfende, with her experience of both casual games on dedicated portals and social games, believes what makes a social game is more subtle. For her, the key distinguishing feature is that social gaming is about how you are perceived by your friends, which in turn influences the types of games people play and how engaged they become. This is backed up by Sebastien de Halleux, co-founder of social games company Playfish.

“The real promise of social games is bringing games to people who may never have played before, by providing a utility beyond just the game itself,” he says. “That may be playing with friends, or it may be a game that touches on a particular passion, such as sport.”

Xbox is one brand that has worked with its media agency, Universal McCann, to use social games to reach out to this different audience.

“Social games are a great way of enabling more casual gamers to associate with Xbox and make our brand seem more relevant to them,” says Paul Evans, head of media, Xbox EMEA. “Typically, these new gaming audiences – broad family and female groups – are either not aware of Xbox, or are ambivalent towards the brand, so this kind of engagement is both beneficial and essential to making a compelling connection. Social games have allowed for interaction and play with Xbox properties without appearing to ’try too hard’, due to the integral fun component of the games.”

Xbox has also stepped outside Facebook to reach a new target audience for Xbox Kinect, young women between 16 and 34, via specialist social network Stardoll.

For advertisers, the high degree of engagement offered by social games, and the relationship between the games and social network within which they sit, is crucial, as Pfende explains.

“People are looking for a haven when they go online, away from the busy-ness of interaction. As a result, games are becoming their own mini world within Facebook, and gamers are 100% focused; they won’t shut down the game. This means advertisers get volume, but they also get reliability.”

There are a number of opportunities for brands looking to use social gaming as a marketing channel, of varying degrees of complexity. The simplest is pre-roll advertising that plays before the game starts, just as it would before a video clip. Then there’s game sponsorship; last year Mazda in the US sponsored Bejewelled Blitz on Facebook and offered prizes for high scores. But perhaps of greatest interest is in-game advertising, which can take the form of integrating the brand into the game, or of the brand enhancing the game experience for the players.

For advertisers, one of the great attractions of the integration route is that the players often actually want them to be there, rather than seeing them as an annoying intrusion.

“Brands have not had much role in social gaming so far,” explains de Halleux. “But they are becoming much more important as players seek more realism in games. For example, we have a game called Restaurant City, and there is a strong pull from the player community to get more brands involved. It’s similar to the development of video games ten years ago; as games evolve, brands tend to surface.”

De Halleux gives the example of a Coca-Cola campaign in Restaurant City just before Christmas last year.
“The week before Christmas, players had access to a Coke vending machine, so they could give Coke to their guests. For Coke, it was part of the holiday spirit. For players, it gave them a benefit in the game.”

De Halleux likens this approach, known as sponsored virtual goods, to product placement in films. And it isn’t restricted to the virtual world.

“For Valentine’s Day last year, we did a campaign in our game Pet Society in which players could buy a virtual rose for their Valentine. It was done with online flower vendor FTD, and it offered players the choice of giving someone a real flower and having the virtual flower as a by-product. We sold millions of virtual roses and tens of thousands of real roses, but you have to be careful to find the right, contextually relevant product.”

This note of caution is echoed by Adam Yates, sales director EMEA for games media company Wild Tangent. He points out that, although a number of brands have looked to integrate themselves into games, you can’t target your audience by location. This can be a problem with using social games to promote movies if they’re not released globally at the same time.
“The same is true if the offers you’ve got don’t match across the world. That’s the sort of thing that gets you burned in the blogs.”

De Halleux agrees.

“There are very few brands that can fulfil globally, although as a company we have global reach,” he says. “This means there’s a big opportunity for e-retailers to get involved, and also for anyone who’s got a product that can be distributed digitally.”

Yates is another who backs the sponsored virtual goods route for brands. According to him, it works because brands offer players items they’d normally have to earn virtual currency or complete tasks to acquire.

“The offer is made in the game,” Yates explains. “Players opt in, and to get the item they have to watch an advertising message, typically an interstitial ad, then they get the virtual item dropped into their game.”

But Yates warns advertisers against creating custom items for games.

“It’s better not to shoe-horn your brand into the game. Brands should only do custom items if they fit with the game, the way Green Giant did with Farmville.”

There’s another advantage for brands using social gaming, at least in its early stages – the fact that they exist in the social space.

“Social games get a lot of earned media attention,” says de Halleux. “Conversations happen outside the game in social media. They are very visible to non-players of the game.”

Evans at Xbox, too, sees this as a big advantage: “The viral nature of these games in terms of earned media from secondary exposure from status updates and ’shares’ means that doing it right reaps incredible return on investment for media spend,” he says.

“Our learnings for social games are: keep it simple, keep it fun, make it easy to share and make it very rewarding. More rewards means more updates on social site, means more earned media exposure.”

 

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Hi,
This week’s topic concerns online social networks. I will start with briefly summarizing the articles and what parts interested me and I will end with two social media platforms that I use on a daily basis to manage my own social network.

The first article written by Boyd and Ellison addressed the definition, history and scholarship of Social networks.  The writers provided good examples of how organizations that successfully integrated a social media strategy gained an advantage over other organizations. The section on scholarship however was limited and contained only information on how organizations that use social networks could improve the network itself and not as much on how companies could use social media to leverage benefits. This understandable considering that the article was written in 2008 and the potential of social media was still unknown. The article abruptly ends with how scholars have a limited understanding of how social media can be utilized and by whom. A suggestion would be to include a section which contained information on which industry sectors would benefit from social media or existing ideas in progress. It is very unlikely that four years ago, no one had any idea of how social media could be put to use.

The second article written by Borgatti, Mehra, Brass and Lianca is a review of how networks are analysed in social sciences.  The article starts with a brief history of how social sciences tried to map out networks and analyse them from an objective point of view. The use of mathematical formula to understand social networks is a good start. However researchers should keep in mind that not all factors can be included and that their research should be viewed from an objective point of view as well as a subjective one. Scientists are researching patterns in structures and how structure influences the behaviors and relationships of the nodes, individuals within that structure. It would be also interesting to conduct research on how to manipulate structures. What factors influence structures? How does (ex)including a factor affect the power division within a structure and how can benefits be leveraged from this.

The final article written by Kauffman, Li and van Heck concerns value creation in electronic commerce through business networks. The article consists of three propositions and theories and cases to support them. An interesting proposition concerns the process standards support (P1b). What are high business standards? Why these standards? Being able to answer these questions could help companies connect to even larger networks or become a bridge between networks.

The platforms I picked out are, Raidcall and Steam. Raidcall is a solution for group-based voice-chatting the program might be still unknown to a lot of people since it has only been around for two years. However within those two years, Raidcall has gained over ten million registered users and it is still growing. Steam is an online digital distribution platform for games. As of 2011 Steam has over 40 million registered users, their year-over-year sales increase by a hundred percent and they distribute over 1500 games and these numbers are still increasing as we speak. I will provide a comparison based on why social networks are formed within these two platforms, the complexity of a network, the frequency, the quality of information that travels and how the companies leverage benefits from this.

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More than 70m users of Sony’s online gaming network have had their names, e-mail addresses and passwords stolen by a hacker in one of the largest privacy breaches to date.

Sony announced on Tuesday that the information had been taken – six days after it closed the PlayStation Network – as it began e-mailing users of the free service with warnings to be on the lookout for scams.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment powerhouse said it was possible that credit card information had been taken as well, recommending that customers who had supplied those numbers online should review their bills carefully.

The breach is troubling because many Sony gamers are likely to have used the same passwords for e-mail and social networking accounts. The hacker could resell user name and password combinations to other criminals, who could take control of those accounts and mine them for bank account passwords or send bogus e-mails to friends’ addresses.

Sony said information taken in the breach included birth dates, home cities and possibly security questions and answers.

Security experts said PlayStation Network users who reused passwords should immediately change their login details on other sites.

The cache of e-mail addresses is one of the largest collections ever stolen, along with those from a breach disclosed last month by marketing firm Epsilon, said Jay Foley, executive director of the non-profit Identify Theft Resource Center.

E-mails alone can be valuable to criminals. In the week of the Epsilon hack, some users received messages directing them to a website where they could download an application that would supposedly help them track if their information was being misused. In fact, the application was a “keylogger” that recorded everything they typed on their computers, including passwords.

As the payments industry has increased security, scammers have turned to e-mail and other means as a stepping stone to win financial data, Mr Foley said.

Many Sony customers were outraged that the company had failed to warn them earlier that passwords might have been lost and had not encrypted them to begin with.

“If you have compromised my credit information, you will never receive it again,” one user wrote on Sony’s PlayStation Network blog. “The fact that you’ve waited this long to divulge this information to your customers is deplorable.”

Sony officials said on the blog that they hoped to have the service at least partially back up and running, with increased security, within a week – at which point users should immediately change their passwords.

Sony declined to answer additional questions.

The original article can be found here

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/f4026292-7053-11e0-bea7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz25jqyWYz7

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As mentioned during class,  there has been a surge in the usage of social media. The mainstream ones such as Skype, Facebook, Sony and other social media networks require you to log-in and create a user-profile.  These companies keep data banks of your personal data. The Sony case is a prime example of the financial and privacy risk we are truly facing.

Most people would perceive a world in which everything is connected to be a haven of endless possibilities. Sadly that’s not how I see it. If a large corporation such as Sony can be breached. What about the smaller companies? You may put your trust in the security-level of Sony, but the possibility still exists that your Sony account and other accounts could be at risk.

Are you a victim of identity theft? If so, how did you deal with it? And how can we prevent such an occurrence?

Do share your point of view 🙂