I recently wrote that one of the trends in social media for 2010 was to be games and entertainment. The fact is that there are now at least 8 Facebook games with over 18 million players. In comparison, the game that’s ranked as the biggest online game in the world, World of Warcraft, has only 11 million players.

According to the Swedish news magazine, Fokus, here are the most popular Facebook games:
- 1. Name: Farmville.
What do you do: Grow plants on your farm.
Number of active players: 73,7 million.
- 2: Name: Cafe World.
What do you do: Run your own café.
Number of active players: 30,1 million.
- 3: Name: Happy Aquarium.
What do you do: Take care of and decorate an aquarium.
Number of active players: 28,4 million.
- 4: Name: Fishville.
What do you do: Basically the same thing as Happy Aquarium.
Number of active players: 24,6 million.
- 5: Name: Texas Hold’em.
What do you do: Play poker.
Number of active players: 23,7 million.
- 6: Name: Mafia Wars.
What do you do: Build a strong mafia family together with Facebook friends.
Number of active players: 22,7 million.
- 7: Name: Pet Society.
What do you do: Get a pet to play with.
Number of active players: 20,6 million.
- 8: Name: Petville.
What do you do: Basically the same thing as Pet Society.
Number of active players: 18,2 million.

Most of the popular social games listed above have a caring and nurturing dimension (taking care of plants, fish, pets and a family). The fact that the Facebook audience differs from the regular online players have made game developers adapt their games to fit this new target group. These social games are made very simple to get started with as a lot of players on Facebook have no or little experience from TV or computer games. They need to be rich in awards and news in order to become popular.

This flexibility and constant flow of new stuff is probably the explanation to the quick success of these games. For instance, only a couple of days after the earthquake in Haiti, a special white oat was made available for purchase. The profit the game developing company behind Farmville, Zynga, made from selling this oat was sent to the earthquake victims.

The possibilities of engaging users on Facebook are huge. This is also relevant for companies who have Facebook Pages, i.e. relevant, interesting or plain fun applications make the users come back. If you haven’t already, also reed: Why should companies be present on Facebook?

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According to Global Language Monitor, Twitter was the hottest word 2009. An automatic analysis program was used to find out the most popular English word on the Internet. The same method was used to find the most popular name, Barack Obama, and that “The King of Pop” (Michael Jacksson’s nickname) is the phrase that best characterizes 2009.

According to the Swedish magazine, Språk, Google’s top list over the users’ search words is another good method to find “the word of the year”, then the list looks like this:

1. Michael Jacksson

2. Facebook

3. Tuenti (a Spanish speaking network site)

4. Twitter

In Sweden, the most popular search word is Facebook and Spotify is the search word that increases the fastest in popularity.

A bit of pop, social media sites and the US president… 2009 in a nutshell.

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As you may know we have many well known DJ’s at Cordovan (and of course a couple of DJ wannabees).

So we thought it would be a good idea to let you all in on our playlists.

So, here’s the playlist for February 2010 - Enjoy!

Ad-ology’s study of 1100 small business owners, Small Business Marketing Forecast, shows that 50 % of small businesses think that lead generation is the biggest benefit of social networking.

Percentage of how useful the most popular benefits were perceived:
50 %: Generating leads
45 %: Keeping up with the industry
44 %: Monitoring online conversation
38 %: Finding vendors/suppliers

Even though 67 % stated that social media is a good way to increase business, 39 % of those surveyed said they did not plan to use social networking in their marketing plan in 2010. Why? Well, I guess it’s quite common to think that our customers aren’t computer savvy, not online and have no clue when it comes to social media. But is it really so? I think it’s time to stop thinking that our target groups are on a caveman level. It’s neither fair nor true.

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Not only is social media a great way to create a better relation with your customers, it can also be a powerful sales tool. Here’s a perfect example:

Stena Line’s Christmas campaign for cosmetics and perfume 2009 included a Facebook application in the form of a quiz, called “The Christmas gift quiz”. After having taken the quiz, the user was matched to a specific profile. Each profile was linked to a list of matching Christmas gifts.

6000 people took the quiz. Through social ads (“Person X has taken the Stena Line Christmas Quiz – he’s a Gentleman | Comment | Like | Take the Quiz”) the quiz was also visible to all their friends. A Facebook user has in average 120 friends. This means that 6,000×120=720,000 users were exposed to the Stena Line brand. This, in turn, means a cost of approximately 1 Euro per person in brand acknowledgement

This was an integrated campaign combining both print, e-newsletter and PR 2.0, i.e. reach out to shopping and make up bloggers with an offer to run competitions on their own blogs with Stena Line products as prizes.

Stena Line used Google Analytics to follow up the statistics regarding the campaign. Here are the results:
13% sales increase in cosmetics and perfumes.
100% increase in visitors to the Stena Line shopping pages.

Why was this campaign so successful?
1. It was a relevant – timed with Christmas shopping
2. The element of game/entertainment was included
3. Background research was made regarding which bloggers to talk to, to help spread the message
4. It was an integrated campaign, on-line/off-line combined

As you might have noticed, I love social media whether it sells or not, but it is so much easier to motivate to other people with this type of statistics!

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