The Social Networks Games Company Clubv3 prepares for the launch of the initial line-up of games for Facebook

Isle of Man-based clubv3 is a new social network games company founded by veterans of the video games industry, concentrating on making top quality and branded games for social networks, such as Facebook and Hi5.
With over thirty years’ experience making video games between the company’s two directors, clubv3 has a wealth of experience in making mass-market appeal games, integrating brands and localising products for multiple languages and territories.

Clubv3 has a complete system in place for social network games with an integrated micro-transaction system, full 3D avatar system and a highly flexible and dynamic development system, allowing long-lasting playability and adaptability of games.

“After initially developing and integrating our various technology platforms, we have started working on the initial line-up of games which will be going live from June on Facebook,” stated Dominic Mason, Director of clubv3. “Thanks to our platform-led development approach we can bring products to market quickly and effectively. This allows us to concentrate on ensuring the design effectivly in attracts players and is easy to adapt and expand after launch.”
Clubv3 is working on its own product line-up as well as working as a third party developer on a number of high profile products. The company has a consultative approach allowing partners to benefit from very high value team and rapid development time ? critical for bringing products to market rapidly.

Fellow director Richard M Holmes added “Clubv3's management and development team have vast experience in handling brand integration and brand promotions within the games segment on an international level. The opportunity offered to brands as well as license properties on Facebook and other social network platforms is huge. At clubv3 we are looking forward to bringing our wealth of experience to social network games.”

For additional information on clubv3, in-depth information on its technology and its upcoming range of products, please email info@clubv3.com. Clubv3′s website is live at clubv3.com.
ABOUT CLUBV3 ? Club v3 Ltd is based in Douglas, Isle of Man. Clubv3 develops for all the major social networks.

Curs Open Social Media pentru companii 21 mai 2010 - slide-uri

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Advertiser vs Consumer: How can we bring the love back?

Is the relationship between advertisers and consumers hitting a rough patch? As any good marriage counselor will tell you the root to a good marriage is communication, communication, communication.

With the introduction of Web 2.0 and social media, we have entered an age where the old methods traditionally used to define and place consumers in the appropriate demographic is increasingly becoming obsolete.The introduction of newer technologies has seen the well known ‘tick-a- box consumer’ of old evolve into a more sophisticated, computer savvy demanding breed .

Consequently, the use of these technologies has had a dramatic effect on how advertisers and audiences interact with one another. An effect, which we as advertisers need to take on board. We need to start opening dialogues with our consumer. This is because if there is little or no satisfaction, the’new breed’ will be direct in telling us so and will more often than not give us suggestions for improvement,on both our products and absolutely on our ability to communicate. We need to make sure there is an open forum where conversation is possible. Either that or face an unhappy crowd that’ll leave us high and dry in this big old cyber world.

It is no longer enough to know the consumer, we need to dialogue with them.

So how do we get to know them beyond the old tick box -- age, sex and location…and bring the love back?
Guest post by blur-marketing.com

Australians are the most active social media users

A December study by Nielsonwire shows the worldwide annual increase of 82 percent of time spent on social network platforms, and an astounding average 5.5 hours per individual per month. When making a global comparison, it was concluded that Australians spent a jawdropping average of 6hours and 52 minutes per month, as an active ‘Socialmedia-ite’. Americans came second in this race, who spend an average of 6 hours and 9 minutes per month.

Other statistics were as follows: (H:M:S)

Australia – (6:52:28)
United States -(6:09:13)
United Kingdom – (6:07:54)
Italy – (6:00:07)
Spain – (5:30:55)
Brazil – (4:33:10)
Germany – (4:11:45)
France – (4:04:39)
Switzerland – (3:54:34)
Japan – (2:50:21)

So, why exactly are Australians slightly more atuned to social media than us? Ross Dawson gives us a fantastic insight. He introduces us to famous Australian culture, known as ‘tall poppy’ syndrome, where one’s opinions are dying to unleash, stand tall and be shouted out.

With the emergence and growth of social media, these stand out opinions are allowed to blend in with the soul purpose of social media in the first place; getting your voice out and heard. Twitter has also been most favoured by Australians since reports have shown that Sydney is one of the lead twittering cities.
With further explanation in his report, Dawson’s report is definately worth a peek.
Source: blur-marketing.com

Social Media Framework

Have you ever thought about your social media framework?

Social media framework aids comprehension of workflow experiences by describing their components, it also optimizes social media workflow in an easier way since a framework may include components that are applicable to them all.

Why is it crucial that we care about this? Simply because badly designed processes lead to the slow and inefficient response of your audience, ineffective communication, wasted time, disappointing experiences and poor degree of engagement. (Not to mention driving yourself to nowhere) Here is how I do it:

Word Sharing: Share news resources, tools, best practices, tips and guides through social bookmarking platforms.
Twitter: Use it heavily for different purposes such as, RT useful links, WOM, spread the news, share insights with professionals, learn what is hot now, real-time conversations, gain more affluence and traffic in your social networking platforms, support interesting initiatives, building an outstanding reputation being taken into account in the field I work on, promote your blog, look for trends topics, getting ideas and enlightening tips from brilliant people.
Your effort and sacrifice deserves being showed and shared for the benefit of others: Posting papers, concepts, frameworks, reports, projects, strategies, marketing plans or campaigns I’ve developed, so the job people can get insights from them.
Knowledge don’t belongs to you nor me, but to the universe: Spread what you know, share what others shared with you, teach what you’re good at, learn from everybody, write about how you put in practice these campaigns or explain how you reached that conclusion, which made you successful, but above all, quote your resources!
LinkedIn: Use it insistently for giving and receiving feedback, reading interesting posts, and comment on them. Find your key connections and engage with them, share ideas in the groups discussions, also participating in Q&A (either giving advice or receiving it). This should increase your visibility and it will improve the chances of being contacted.
Facebook: Aim it to talk and engage with your friends. Create lists, giving a different degree of permission to your crowd and segmenting the information according to the content you usually share with them.
The Wave: Use Google Wave for collaborative tasks, developing projects, exchanging ideas, brainstorming, conceptualizing campaigns and seeing how others can enhance your work.
Timing: Your blog, Do you love it? No? You must, because it’s the place where all your efforts, time, money and even romantic relationships are going to end up. All you do on Social Media has being meaningful to your blog. If not, I suggest you may want to reconsider your strategy. Give him a personality, a sense of humor, a purpose, a regularity, a bottle of Möet if he wants it and you’ll have your reason to give the very best of yourself in this URL.
Managing and optimizing: It is essential to define your strategy, set your goals and to monitor your results but, it is vital not to be overwhelmed by its magnitude. Hence, write down every procedure, pattern or system you follow to implement your social media workflow and start developing a schedule with all the tasks you performs every day, together with the time spent, the activities, the allowance, restrictions, and of course, deviations.
Plan for failure: If it doesn’t work, try changing and adjusting things to your needs. I know how it works to me, for you instead it can be slightly different. Be aware that you need to have hundred of bad ideas to have 1 or 2 great ideas. Do you get the idea?
Guest post @Israel Garcia blur-marketing.com

How Search Work

You see it and use it multiple times throughout the day, but do you know how it works?

Surprisingly, many webmasters severely lack knowledge about one of the most important aspects of the internet - the search engines! We all know they exist, we know people use them, and we know that they drive traffic to our websites. But few people actually carry an understanding about how they work. If you can educate yourself about the way search engines function, you'll be more capable of optimizing your site properly. Search engines send automated "bots" to "crawl" the web through hyperlinks.

Without external hyperlinks to your website, the bots really have no way of finding your website. It's still possible that they'll discover your site eventually, but without some kind of effort on your part, it may be unlikely. Only about half of the existing pages on the internet have been crawled by the search engines, if that gives you any indication of the importance of backlinks.

Once the bots crawl your website, it becomes indexed in a huge database along with all the other indexed pages on the internet.

There are literally billions of pages stored in this database. Yet, as you've probably noticed, it takes barely a second or two to get results after performing a search.

When searches are made, the engine quickly scans through relevant documents and provides results based on the most accurate possible matches.

Generally a match is determined by the presence of that particular keyword on the webpage. Thus, on-page optimization is extremely important. Google and the other search engines will provide differing results depending on whether you type the phrase as-is (purple umbrellas), in quotes ("purple umbrellas"), with the + symbol (purple + umbrellas), or other variations. After the SE has found matches for the search query, a special algorithm scans each of the results to determine relevance to the keyword phrase. Results are provided to the user in order from most relevant to least relevant. So what can you learn from this information? A few things:
1. Your page must be relevant to the search term (listing the keyword several times throughout the course of the website, on-site optimization)
2. You need external hyperlinks (backlinks) pointing to your website to act as a "gateway" for the bots to access your site. As far as relevance goes, Google and the other search engines take all of these into consideration:
a. On-site optimization
b. Age of the domain (the older the better)
c. Page Rank (PR)
d. Alexa ranking (the 'popularity' of your website based on the amount of traffic it gets)
e. Number of backlinks, particularly from high PR authority websites that are related to your website (if you have a blog about real estate, a high PR link from a real estate website will be more valuable than a high PR link from a website about dog grooming)
f. Linking structure of the website (easy navigation)
So looking at all of these factors, you can see why Amazon.com would take the #1 spot for "buy books" rather than your three-week-old Blogger blog with 4 backlinks.

The article comes from an ebook - SEO for Busy Marketers is an ebook which can be found here.

The Facebook history

Here is the short history of Facebook, the biggest social networking site from the planet. What begins as an online place for college students to know each other has been transformed into a global online phenomenon.

Facebook, or TheFaceBook as it was called at the beginning was launched in 4th of February, 2004.

Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard University student started the site as a way for his fellow students from Harvard to get to know each other. At that time, the site was opened only for certain students and it wasn’t perceived as a business even it has funds at disposal. Mark saw this website as an alternative to spend more wisely the time after school. Mark was still in the school when the site started to grow at an incredible rate. As to discuss the initial funders, they received money from individuals like Peter Theil, Accel Partners, Greylock partners and from the advertising deals with Microsoft and iTunes.

The students which were members started to recommend Facebook to other students and the fellows from other universities started to have possibility to join the site. Until 2006, Facebook was not open to the public.

After the site was live for a period, Mark brought for helping to grow the site Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. A fem months later, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped Harvard to concentrate on growing Facebook. Facebook, as we know it today was started in August 2005 when the company bought the domain Facebook.com with 200,000 USD from a company called About Face.

In 2006 we find Facebook facing a tremendous growth. Many more school, universities and businesses started to be part of the network. Starting with September 2006, anyone above 13 years old is eligible to have an account on Facebook. Being part of na network wasn’t a requirement anymore.

In March 2006 there were rumours about a potential acquisition of Facebook by Google. They made an offer for 750 million USD but the Facebook management dropped it because they thought of 2 billion USD.

Microsoft was also on the short list of potential acquisitors, but in the end they just bought 1,5% from shares and started a huge advertising contract with Facebook.

When things started to look tremendous, ConnectU, another Harvard based social networking site claimed that the founder of Facebook stole some of the codes from their software. In the end, the lawsuit was dropped and Facebook started to move forward.

The idea of community was at the base right from the beginning and it is also now, even if the
site is much, much bigger. All players, the developers, personal users and business users understood how important is to keep the spirit of community alive both for Facebook success and their own.

The Facebook team is very interested to make their community happy and that’s why they add new features all the time and if they identify new needs from customers, to fulfill them.This web 2.0 site is a great resource for your social media marketing efforts so include it in your marketing weapons.