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Empire Avenue adds support for FourSquare and Instagram #ea #eav #social #yam cc @empireave
Finally social media stock exchange / game, Empire Avenue, has added support for additional services that count towards your share price in the game. This morning EA announced on its blog it has added support for Foursquare and Instagram. If you have no clue about what Empire Avenue is, read this GigaOm article explaining the basics.
I've quickly connected my new accounts up, and I'm intrigued to see how EA rates my performance on FourSquare in particular.
There have been some early complaints from the community that adding Instagram gives an unfair advantage to iPhone owners (Instagram currently only supports iPhone), however EA confirmed that only your top 5 most active connections drive your share price. Whilst reassuring for non iPhone users, it does beg the question that if EA is aiming to rate and reward you (virtually at least) for your social prowess, why limit scoring networks to 5? I'll also be interested to see how FourSquare activity is rewarded and ranked in the game. Normally EA claims it rewards engagement, rather than quantity, but I think its fair to say FourSquare is more about checking in and leaving tips than driving conversation.
The update comes at a good time, as I was starting to get a little pissed off with the game. I've been playing for three months, and progress has been steady if a little unspectacular. My first month was a little random trying to get my head around the game. Month two was spent buying up all the highest dividend shares in the game. Month three I have switched tactics to buying new accounts showing promise of growth and ROI.
It takes days and weeks to move the needle on your scores. Twitter in particular is a mystery. I have been stuck on a score of 42 for nearly two months, despite adding followers and generating conversation, whilst in parallel I have moved from zero to 18 on Facebook with less conversation and growth vs Twitter.
Particularly annoying is how aggressively you lose connection scores and drop your share price if you take even a few days off from social activity. Weekends dent a lot of people's performance, and being the holiday season I lost over 2 points off my share price for taking a few days vacation. Seems a little harsh.
Anyhow, below are my two key graphs showing share price and wealth performance over the last 30 days. If you would like to try Empire Avenue follow this link (we will both receive bonus cash!) and if you have any questions about the game or strategy, ask away below.
Also, today's annoucement includes news that EA has raised $1.2m in additional funding from San Francisco-Based Crosslink Capital, iNovia Capital and BioWare Co-Founders Drs. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk.
Bedford Tweetup #3
Been a little busy this week, so only got time to jot a few thoughts down from this weeks meet up for tweeps local to Bedford.
It was the third Bedford Tweetup Eric and I have organised. The first was encouraging; small but well formed. The second was a disaster (!), so we put a little more effort in for the third. I've been keeping a rough ad-hoc list of local folk I spot on Twitter, and reached out to all of them to promote the event. Thankfully no one saw it as spammy, and we got 15 to turn up, the majority of which were new faces.
[caption id="attachment_679" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Bedford has a river, now it has a Tweetup!"]
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If you are not on my list, please shout and I'll add you!
Anyway apart from the improved marketing, we also introduced a little more structure to the night, but don't worry we will keep it free flowing and informal. That is the essence of what makes a Tweetup different from more traditional networking events.
Star of the show was Jo Dring, PR manager from Wells & Young who gave us a fun but informative beer tasting. I brought it back to the social networking world by introducing the group to social network slash game, Empire Avenue. Now EA takes some getting your head around, and I could see a few faces glazing over as I tried to explain how a social stock exchange works :-) Still if any of you are brave enough to give it a whirl use this link to sign up and it will get you an additional 2,000 eaves to spend ;-) You can also read my EA tips here (for what they are worth!)
We have already formed a mini Bedford exchange between us: (e)JPUK, (e)STEWPOT, and (e)ERICSWAIN so get on there.
So we need ideas for the next one, and please don't feel this is Eric and James's gig - anyone is welcome to help organise, just shout!
My first month on Empire Avenue
Have you discovered Empire Avenue yet?
If you haven't I'd really recommend you give it a try. Its different to anything else out there on the social media spectrum. It successfully combines rewarding you for your social media activity, with a stock market style gaming mechanic. If that was not enough, what has been most surprising is the third element - Empire Avenue is actually a social network all of it's own. (more on that later)
How do you get started?
Simply you register and create yourself a stock ticker symbol. I'm JPUK. Next you connect up all your social media accounts and blogs. You have a share (or stock) price. Your share price rises and falls based on three elements:
So there you go, that will do for my first ever EA post. If time permits I may do more.
My first couple of weeks were basically me flailing in the dark trying to get to grips with the game, I feel I have only started to understand what I'm doing for about three weeks. However by following the 6 tips above I've started to see a steady growth in my share price, portfolio value and dividend - the last one is key to attracting more people to buy into you.
If you would like to try EA out for yourself, follow this link
- Your activity across the social media accounts connected to your EA profile (offsite)
- Your activity on Empire Avenue (onsite)
- People buying you
- Use the Leaderboard feature and invest in the leading players. It took me a good two weeks to figure this out. When I first joined I was taken in by all the offers to "invest in me, and I'll buy back" - My performance has only really started to kick in after I stopped with a broad diversification strategy with small holdings in lots of people, to piling all my money (the virtual Eaves currency) into the game leaders. Naturally the share price of the leaders is very high so this approach means less trading volume, but in a mirror of the real world stock market, pick blue chips over junk. The Empire Avenue index doesn't seem very volatile, so once a player has made it to the leader board they get all the love which fuels growth for your investment. The added bonus of this strategy vs investing in the "unknown" players, is because the leading players are cash rich, some will return the investment favour in a big way. A couple have brought into my stock at either 200 or even 500 in some cases.
- Look for the dividend. You earn Eaves back on the investments you make in other players. These earnings help provide the virtual cash to invest = a good thing :-) Therefore when picking who to invest in make sure you check their dividend ratio. You can do this from the leader board by selecting 'weekly dividends' on the left hand side. Also ensure you toggle between 'My country' and 'Global' at the top right to ensure you are seeing the full story. I'm still developing my technique for this myself, but I plump for anyone paying over 1.00
- Quality vs quantity. Empire Avenue claims to reward quality over quantity on external social media services. So for instance you will earn more points for a Facebook post that generates likes and comments, rather than just spamming your Facebook account with 20 posts per day. There is no real way to put this to the test, but that is what they tell you. You may be a little confused by how they come up with your score for each of the connected accounts, I know I am! My Twitter and Linked In scores have not really moved in over a month, despite frequent activity.
- Use the lists feature. There are already a lot of players on EA. Use lists to track and recommend stocks you see and like. I use this to ensure I don't forgot who I want to buy into once I get more cash into my account. In addition, the "recommend' feature is a nice community tool which often resorts in making a new connection or even an inbound investment in you as a thank you.
- Remember to do stuff! On site activity seems to be one of the key drivers of your EA score. It seems to track just about everything you do on the site, so make some time every week (or day) to carry out a few simple tasks. Endorse the blog feeds of people in your portfolio, "like" activity on your account (e.g. when someone recommends you or buys you). Note I seem to only be able to get the "like" feature to work when viewing my activity stream from the "Home" tab. It never registers when I click "like" from my profile page view. Also if you are feeling brave, drop into the chat rooms, which are accessible from the tool bar at the bottom of your browser window.
- Use it as a social network. I've found that EA has been perfect for connecting me to new people I would have never met through my existing use of Twitter, Linked IN or Facebook. On those sites I tend to connect to people in my industry. EA introduces you to pretty random people which is actually really refreshing. Ensure you join multiple committees (accessible from the 'Community' menu option at the top) to start mixing. By default you can join two city communities, two interest based communities, and two private ones. Experiment by joining and leaving a few - the quality is very variable. Some are infested with "buy me" style spam posts. The one I would personally recommend is 'No spam thanking you' found in the private community listing. Here you get high quality debate and networking. Of course active participation in the communities also achieves tip number 5 ;-)
I Beg Your Parton gets a spring clean
So the eagled eyed amongst you (or just outright sad) may have noticed a few changes on the blog this week.
I launched the site back in January 2009 and the design hasn't changed since then, so a little spruce up was long over due. Thinking about what has changed is a mini commentary in itself in how things have developed over those two years.
Stuff that has gone:
- The link to my Digg account. I was a late adopter of Digg, but having used it for a while I just think it fails to deliver on it's core promise of personalised news. I just have crap in my feed all the time, and now my account is pretty much dormant.
- My Delicious feed. I love Delicious but kind of just lost interest, so I have not been keeping it up to date with coverage. My apathy is similar to its fortunes over the two years, having struggled to find a buyer, but has just recently changed hands. Lets see if that re-ignites some interest.
- My Flickr stream. I'm really only a mobile photographer, so I found myself using Twitpic, and more recently Instagram. Flickr is a bit of a non event for me now, although I carbon copy all my Instagram content to it.
- Last FM is back! I've been signed up since 2008 but never really used it, as my primary music service was Napster which didn't support scrobbling. Having dumped Napster and switched to Spotify, my Last.FM feed has suddenly sprung into life again!
- My Klout score. Analytics around social have certain moved on over the past two years
- My Empire Avenue share price. If you haven't yet discovered EA then check it out. It's a little daunting at first, but persevere with it. Your activity across various social platforms feeds your personal share price, and you can buy and sell other people on the "social stock exchange". Activity on EA and external social sites then drives your share price, so it is a game and social platform all rolled into one. I've become surprisingly addicted. The two things I really like about it are: a) If you are active on social then you just keep what you are doing and you will increase in value regardless b) Treat it as a social network in its own right. My other social network friends and followers are largely clustered around work interests or sports teams. My EA network is much more diverse as I'm connecting to people investing in me that have no other connection to me. It's a really nice way to diversify your social interactions.
