Regardless of where you stand on Empire Avenue, there’s this to be said about it. Playing Empire Avenue provides some pretty interesting insights into your social media habits. Now, I don’t know how valuable it is for brands to be on Empire Avenue. That would involve a degree of forecasting and prescience I don’t possess. Empire Avenue is an investment of time and self and whether it’s a valuable use of time from a branding perspective is not for me to judge. But brand managers, and any other social media professional, can learn a lot from simply playing the game.
Now Empire Avenue says that it’s not about influence, or influence metrics. But we all know that it’s hard not to feel something about share price, and no matter how “accurate” share price is of online influence, Empire’s metrics offer insights you won’t gain from other metrics (Klout). Empire’s profile prints your daily activity on your connected services. And in the natural course of playing the game, I find myself changing up my use of social tools to see what difference they make in my dividend numbers.
Whether you think the platform has legs or not is irrelevant if you learn something about your own use of social tools through game play. And this is what’s been interesting for me. I’ve changed habits. Some forced, some by experimentation, and many by simply opening up some doors and trying things I hadn’t done before. And what you learn from doing this is that we’re all, I think, habitual users of social tools to some degree. By this I don’t mean addicts (although that is the case perhaps, for some). We are habitual users insofar as we have developed habits — habits that include a certain range of understanding and perception. Some of which are limited or shaped by our own sense of what social media and its audiences are about.
I have found it pretty interesting to learn by doing — and this after years of being online. And if a game can cause me to learn about the medium in which it is played, well, that’s worth something. Something that I think even many professional social media users would find edifying.
Carlo
June 24, 2011 at 3:26 pmYour insights line up about par with mine. I even ,find myself switching up where I go – when I go where I’m social networking AND I find myself now spending much more time at EAve (as I’ve heard other players say, some MAJOR) than I am at Twitter, where I often interact, and FB.
EAve has offered me the opportunity to actually connect with people that a.) I’d otherwise wouldn’t probably wouldn’t have known about and met (no disrespect, like YOU) and b.) people that I have have heard tons and bunches about (in different business niches than mine, which happens to be party and special event production) that I figured I’d never really get to or have a reason to want to “meet”, but wondered about.
I remember early on when Twitter wasn’t popular, but of course existed, that it too had naysayers who thought it would be a flash in the pan. But, now look. Twitter has climbed the ranks to become a force to be reckoned with, as everyone now knows. And, if we didn’t know, we now do know that’s true because Twitter often has technical user breakdowns due to so many people are interacting. Having said that, I notice that there have been periods when EAve acts “kind of funny”, which has me wondering if there’s something “technical” going on there too, because of so many people being online at their site.
Irregardless of anything… sure, we both know that the words still out about whether EAve will actually be an important part of our social networking. But, I’ll say this – I think there’s someting to it. I’m hearing rumblings about various App creators planning to “hold hands” with EAve (in fact, an App creator (with a pretty well known and used App) asked me what I thought about EAve just yesterday, going on to say that he plans to contact them real soon. Pretty interesting. But, I feel like this – from the connections that I’ve made at EAve, it’s worth been worth it for me to be there. For example, just this morning I was shocked when a MAJOR player (on and off the EAve site) asked if I wanted to take part in something he’s got going on, that’s by his personal invitation only, that sounds pretty cool. That would have NEVER happened otherwise. We’re in completely different business niches.
So, no matter what “they” say I believe that in a year, those who have shunned getting involved with Empire Avenue will find themselves in the midst of trying to hurry up and set up their accounts while “they’re” trying to understand exactly how to play the game.
Great post. And, by the way – thanks for buying shares of (e)CAYSP! And, I look forward to connecting with you there again soon.