India, Meet GoCrossCampus.

It gets pretty darn cold in New Haven in January. Freezing cold. Below freezing. Superfluid-helium cold. Far too frigid for playing GoCrossCampus in the snow and ice. So, we decided it was high time to pack our (virtual) bags and head overseas for some (virtual) fun in the sun. Where are we (virtually) off to? Why, nowhere else but Hyderabad, India! (Seriously, it was like 85ºF there today.) That's right, GXC is overseas in our very first game outside of the ole' US of A.

We're launching two games in India this winter: the first at Muffakham Jah College of Engineering and Technology, and the second a few weeks later at Vasavi College of Engineering and Technology. Muffakham Jah kicks off on Monday (Jan. 7), and you can bet it will be quite a spectacle.

These two Indian games are our first shot at a more streamlined, bare-bones, and more efficient GXC marketing experience -- all underground, no bureaucracy, pure awesome. We're seeding the game via email, Facebook, Orkut. Even smoke signals. (Seriously.) (Ok not really. Come on.) Planting a few posters in key locations around the campus. Spreading the word-of-mouth as far as our non-native Hindi dialects will carry. Getting our whole 'viral media' carnival up and running. No campus-wide email from the student government, no administrative oversight, no official student group partnership. What are we thinking? Can it be done? Will GXC succeed without any top-down publicity, student committees, or any real on-campus organization at all? We think so, and we're willing to give it a shot. So then, why in India? Why not!

In all seriousness though, these two games offer a great new testing ground and expansion opportunity for GoCrossCampus. We'll be opening up to an entirely new continent, greatly expanding our user-base, working to prove our game as an international success for the college market, and testing out a very different style and methodology of in-house GXC marketing. The college-age population in India is an intensely technology-focused one. Students are smart, savvy, and yearning for every bleeding-edge trend after bleeding-edge trend in today's ever-expanding mediascape. Viral sociality is baked into every meal. Online interaction is in the water. And GXC is about to step into the limelight. (Yes, I know that was a horribly mixed metaphor, thank you.)

So, will the entire Indian subcontinent be placing armies and issuing orders by the billion(s)? Or will no one know, and no one care? We'll just have to wait and see. So keep an eye on the Muffakham Jah tourney come Monday... it's sure to be one crazy game.

And if nothing else, at least it's a lot warmer than New England right now.

Recruitment in Ireland, Competition vs. Cooperation, and Facebook

In addition to working on GoCrossCampus this summer, I'm living in Ireland with a day job at a specialist recruitment and consulting agency called Osborne Recruitment. I'm working as a consultant, creating new marketing and digital strategy solutions for the company, and also learning quite a bit about the recruitment industry in Dublin. The Irish recruitment industry is a interesting beast. Because the Irish economy has been rapidly expanding the past 10-15 years, an enormous number of Irish businesses are increasing their workforces and expanding their staff needs. Thus, there is a constant, ubiquitous need for the service of finding the right candidate (potential employee) for the right client (potential employer). In Dublin alone, there are literally hundreds of recruitment agencies working to attract qualified workers and place them in specific roles offered by employers. The thing is, it's an extremely competitive and quite saturated market, with almost no barrier to entry. Irish recruitment agencies come in all shapes and sizes, from multi-national behemoths to tiny basement-office operations. All are competing for what is essentially the same candidate market: Ireland has almost zero cyclical unemployment (and indeed, most recruitment services in Ireland deal purely in the realm of frictional unemployment), and the workforce has predictable immigration/emigration trends.

So what does this have to do with the web? Everything. While traditional brick-and-mortar recruit agencies abound in Dublin, there are only a few core online job posting sites that have worked to capture the market. High-traffic job portals like Monster.ie, IrishJobs.ie, and RecruitIreland.ie have all done well to create lucrative online businesses, attracting high candidate traffic and listing thousands of open job vacancies. These job portals are so successful because they capture two markets in one: first, they serve as an easy, low-cost way for employers to post job openings and attract candidates, circumventing the need for a traditional recruitment agency. However, these sites also serve as a recruitment agency's recruitment agency, offering a great job-advertising opportunity for recruiters to post their listings and attract high candidate traffic. This dual-market business model of job-post portals is an interesting phenomenon -- in Ireland, the whole idea of competition in the online sphere of the recruitment industry is breaking down, the line between competitor and partner becoming blurred. Online job portals serve as both a business opponent and a business cohort for physical, consultant-centric recruitment agencies. But while traditional recruiters constantly struggle against their fellow agencies to carve out higher margins, job portals are laughing all the way to the bank, capturing ad revenues from every recruitment agency in Dublin who posts on their site.

What does this mean for the nature of traditional competition in the increasingly online-focused world of recruitment? Traditional print/radio/TV advertising is still the bread and butter of Irish recruiters, but as more and more candidates are finding all they need on the web, recruiter focus is shifting along with the trends. Will brick-and-mortar recruitment agencies become an antiquated feature of Ireland's past, replaced by the all-encompassing and ever-increasing services of online job-portals? Not yet, at least as long as Irish employers stick to using the tried-and-true recruitment services of physical agencies they know and understand. (For example, Osborne has a wealth of clients who would never even think about going elsewhere.) But this is a good analogy for other web-connected industries to take to heart. While the 1990's saw many e-businesses competing directly against brick-and-mortars as equals (and failing), the 2000's have seen an extra dimension added to the playing field, with countless online businesses out-innovating traditional companies by both cooperating and competing with them simultaneously.

In this increasingly interconnected web-world, new online ventures aren't looking to strike out on their own in direct competition with preexistng businesses. No more will the "go it alone" mentality fly on the internet. Instead, startups are increasingly looking for ways to synergize their services with technologies, conventions, and mindsets already on the web, grappling for as much inter-connectivity they can get their hands on. Just take a look at the exponential success of Facebook apps -- developers across the web are building applications that integrate into Facebook's vast social media dominion, often plugging their own site's services directly into the Facebook platform. Facebook gets increased functionality and immersiveness from the new app, and the developer gets an awesome new avenue for connecting to users. Talk about a win-win.

Cheers,
-MOB

Taking MMOG to New Markets

If you haven't checked out Club Penguin yet, do it. It's worth dealing with the registration feature, which is (rightly) ultra-skeptical of anyone over fourteen attempting to sign up. In case you really don't want to bother, there is a great Wikipedia article here.

In case it's not immediately obvious, Club Penguin is the hottest site for kids aged 8 to 14. It's a great case study for a company marketing a game to a demographic that hasn't touched such things before. In Club Penguin's case, the effect is multiplied by the fact that not only have these individuals never played games, but their demographic has never played these sorts of games for a variety of reasons. Yet they seem to be doing a solid job of it. I'm going to assume that they foresaw the plethora of ultra-popular penguin-themed movies.

Further, Club Penguin illustrates a form of demographic arbitrage which is becoming increasingly common in the hardware industry. Simply put, it's a lot easier to get people who are doing something for the first time to adopt your way of doing it rather than win converts from another platform. The best example of this out there of this is the conflict between Linux and Microsoft over the One Laptop per Child program, which is planning to ship 5 to 10 million units this year, mostly to individuals who have never previously owned a computer. The OS shipped on those laptops, in all likelihood, will be the favored OS for those individuals for years to come.

In this case, the gameplay style and feeling of Club Penguin will be imprinted on these kids for years to come. I've been a strategy gamer for years, probably due to the fact that I spent the entirety of fourth grade playing SimCity.

Club Penguin is simply capturing a market by lowering the age at which people start playing multiplayer games. In my opinion, it was bound to happen, since the lower side of the 8-14 market has only been served by the "educational games" sector. This implies that gaming is entirely a purchase decision made for them by parents and educators. If a 10 year old girl can decide to wear makeup on her own, why can't she bug her parents to pay for a MMOG?

- Brad

The Art of Astroturf

Astroturf never got off easy. While it is typically associated with corporate dirty tricks at best and Orwellian propaganda tactics at worst, I feel that there are some benign marketing applications of Astroturf that remain to be explored.

What if, rather than directly manipulating media to give the false impression of a grassroots movement, the mission was reengineered to inspire a well-orchestrated grassroots push that, while feeling amateur and genuine, was coordinated to feel as such? While probably overreferenced, the Swift Boat Attacks are a good example. The Bush campaign didn't make those veterans up -- it simply defined its mission in such a way to inspire genuine sentiments, which it then incentivized and captured. Obviously the ads were funded by the Bushies; however, the veterans and their feelings were real.

It may have been morally questionable on Bush's part, but it worked. And when it's two competing companies instead of politicans, the ethical questions are significantly less thorny.

How is this applicable to anything? First, it can change the way marketing is done, especially to crowds particularly sensitive to grassroots efforts. Instead of presenting a coordinated, Web 2.0 face to college students, perhaps subdividing the market and presenting a "localized" face to the audience is a better fit. Rather than appearing as a corporation attempting to market a product, acting as a behind-the-scenes technology provider and letting the local reps do the work as "fake grass" may be worth a try.

Depending on the implementation, branding could be nearly nonexistent. But when approaching cynical and anti-corporate markets, is this a bad thing?

- Brad

35 Perspectives on Social Networks

I'm sure historians will be analyzing and re-analyzing the social network phenom for years to come, so I thought I would pass this along as a possible preview of what's to come.

I'm fairly sure that most of those "perspectives" are little more than the musings of a researcher with a bit too grant money to go around. Some are downright over-the top and probably there for no reason other than to get bwoggers like me to link the article. For example:

The body and sex perspective
Social networking sites are sexual playgrounds for young people where they portray themselves in a provocative or soft porn-style manner. It is all about appearance and body making the youngsters superficial and shallow.

Keep that in mind when you're building your LinkedIn network, fellow entrepreneurs!

Others may deserve a second look. Check out:

The branding perspective
Social networking sites are places where young people learn the mechanism of branding and learn to sell and brand themselves in a positive manner.

The growing intersection of the individual and the brand will be a running theme in my writings here. Most humans possess some natural marketing talent... that which is needed to conduct normal social interactions and keep up physical appearance. However, online social networking presents the opportunity for the individual to coalesce into the brand through multiple sites, profiles and an expansive online presence.

Also interesting:

The surveillance perspective
Social networking sites are surveillance. Everything young people write online are saved and can be used (against them) by marketing people, future employers and so on.

While probably a bit narrowly defined, it is worth noting that individuals are getting increasingly adept at displaying more and more of their private lives. So on and so forth. If you're reading this blog, the trend is probably old news. But it's certainly one worth understanding.

- Brad

The Seven Wonders of Marketing

If you haven't seen it already, I encourage you to read up on the New Seven Wonders of the World, courtesy Swiss businessman Bernard Weber.

On the scale of Marketing Brilliance, this is up there with the Million Dollar Home Page. Although I haven't been able to find any data on the number of text messages sent, the business claims that over 100 million votes were cast. While this is somewhat lower than the SMS recordings of an average episode of American Idol, the SMS royalty revenue generated certainly recouped the cost of the website and marketing. And then some.

This post isn't about the quality of the new list. That being said, I don't think it demonstrates much more than the sheer number of cell phones in Brazil. Christ the Redeemer, while nice, is a dubious 'Wonder of the World' at 38 meters and a completion date of 1931. For comparison, the Colossus of Rhodes was 33 meters tall and completed in or around 280 BC. However, the Rhodesians must have less forgiving text messaging plans.

Regardless, this illustrates the fundamental power of competition. Regardless of how shoddy or corporate the poll was, it worked brilliantly. Not only did patriotic Brazilians, Mexicans, and Jordanians (among others) visit the site repeatedly to vote, national leaders endorsed the site and encouraged their citizens to participate.

Is mega-scale virtual competition the next worldwide sport? This poll hardly gives us the answer, but it does provide an interesting proof of concept for those wishing to capture the minds of nations and the advertising dollars of international brands. If the ancient Hellenic tourists, creators of the first List of Seven, were to see the statue of Christ the Redeemer, they would no doubt be awestruck. However, the very existence (let alone success) of this poll would be utterly inconceivable to anyone before, perhaps, 1990. Which brings up perhaps the biggest absence in the new list:

The Internet.

- Brad