BandwidthCamp

A few articles over the weekend touch on Facebook becoming more of a social gaming platform and trying to leverage that success into a subscriber number. You has The Star; Facebookers can now become virtual art dealers and AllFacebook’s; Is Facebook the Napster of the Games Industry?. Both articles are featuring Gabe Zichermann who was the founder of Trymedia and an early client of Napster. Now he’s involved with rmbr.com. He cites a few successful games on Facebook and most notable Scrabulous.

 Scrabulous took an established game and leveraged Facebook as a social utility to achieve a new level of success for the game Scrabble (at least its hard to believe that the board game would have over 600 concurrent users 6.22.08)

We’ll see if his own game, Prized Collection, is ready for prime time. You can check out some posts I wrote a year ago on Facebook becoming the next social gaming platform.

Facebook: The Next Social Gaming Platform Part 1
Facebook: The Next Social Gaming Platform Part 2
Facebook: The Next Social Gaming Platform Part 3
Facebook: The Next Social Gaming Platform Part 4
Facebook: The Next Social Gaming Platform Part 5
Facebook: The Next Social Gaming Platform Part 6

Here is the latest news and stories having an affect on our industry over the last week. Our readers share bookmarks with the BandwidthCamp community by tagging them BandwidthCamp on del.icio.us (a social bookmarking tool). If you’d like to participate, sign-up for delicious and share articles you think the community might find interesting. Enjoy some light reading over the weekend.

Guy Alex Bogusky Make Microsoft Cool?
CPB is trying to make Microsoft and all the products they own cool again. They did it for BK, Mini and Virgin Airlines.

From MySpace to Facebook to Flickr to LinkedIn, here’s looking at you
An interesting look at some of the top websites that people use to form communities and build networks of link minded people.

Become One With the Game
A look at using video games as a way to market your product to the world.

Tim Zuckert, president-CEO of Shift Control Media, has penned a piece over at AdAge; Become One With the Game. He gives a nice overview of gaming and why more brands, Geico and Aflac, should get involved with video games.

• Games are a reflection of your brand; they should be original and entertaining first and foremost.
• Just as marketers wouldn’t spend all their money to produce a TV spot and leave nothing for media, they shouldn’t just drop a games onto their websites with little or no media support.

With numbers like “62% of online consumers play video games each month, while only 11% of marketers employ game-based initiatives.” It’s still a great time to get involved in gaming and using it as part of your overall integrated marketing strategy. The Digital Design Blog from Avenue A | Razorfish gives examples from the consumer electronics, finance & consumer packaged goods industries. As long as it’s not H&R Block leading the way, then we’ll all be ok. We the year half over I hope to see some more great examples of brands trying to enter the gaming space.

Here’s a few of the things that caught my eye on the blogosphere this past week:

Reactrix has signed a deal with National CineMedia to create interactive displays in theater lobbies in the US. National CineMedia also developed a program called AdverGame that allows the audience in movie theaters to move as one fluid team and act like a human joystick. The program is currently available on 750 screens in 50 theaters in the top 20 markets. National CineMedia launched this with Brand Experience Lab, which is the same team who helped MSNBC.com launched last year with a RSS newsfeed on the big screen.

Eisner thinks the product comes before the audience. Not saying he’s wrong but maybe you need both to have a good execution. Branded Entertainment is only as good as when you target the right audience.

In fact, his company’s first major foray into branded entertainment, a web series for sports trading-card company Topps called “Back on Topps,” only came about because he acquired the brand last year. “We never thought, Who’s the audience? [People] are saying the internet is made up of 13-year-olds, so gear toward them. But I just don’t think you should. I like to make it, then figure out who to reach.”

A guy filmed his girlfriend using Wii Fit and uploaded the video to YouTube. After two million views and Nintendo PR getting wind of the video.. they had to come out and say they had nothing to do with it. The guys works in advertising and some people tried to put two and two together.

Tipster Thursdays is a monthly feature covering technology and how you can incorporate it as part of your marketing plan. We’re going to look at different pieces of technology like Twitter, Pingie, Prologue, SmugMug, Qik and delicious and show you 5 different uses for the technology. This weeks column is going to look at Flickr.

Flickr is an online photo management tool. I’ve been using Flickr for more then a few years now… mind you I need to reactivate my pro account. Flickr has always been about the community. I don’t think it would have gotten to where it is today if it didn’t focus on connecting like minded people.

DeSmogBlog put the power of the community to use for them in their Flickr contest; The Greenest Photo Ever Contest group. They have just over 140 people following the group. These are people who opted-in and wanted to learn DeSmogBlog and help climate change.

DeSmogBlog exists to clear the PR pollution that is clouding the science on climate change.

The key to using Flickr from a marketing perspective is to think about it as a community building tool. The question you need to ask yourself is “How can I leverage the community at Flickr”, which could be the following:

1. Employ Flickr’s mobile feature to upload photos from your events for the community.. in near real time.
2. Run a Wallpaper or screenshot contest like DeSmogBlog
3. Use the group feature to build a community and promote photos from the group on your website a la Torontoist.
4. Make use of the photos in your group to create a calendar/poster for Child’s Play Charity using Qoop. Have the dev team sign the poster(s).
   

Flickr is a great tool and one I use on a regular bases. Getting the most out of social media.. is more about giving your community what they want. What would you use Flickr?