Dr. Amy Vanderbilt

CEO & Chief Strategist

The TrendPOV Show

http://DrAmyVanderbilt.com

Dr. Amy Vanderbilt is the Founder and Chief Strategist at TrendPOV.com, next generation social omni-media that over 600 thousand executives call GPS for your business strategy. She is an award-winning author, show host, executive coach, speaker, and commentator.Her career has enjoyed a fast climb through the ranks of academia, large business, small business, and even the Government by harnessing the power of emerging trends and her unique ability to understand where they are going, and how to use them for competitive advantage.

Just when you thought you had the complete marketing package together for your business, the new era of social media and mobile technology has spawned an exciting new form of inbound marketing that engages customers rather than targets them—social gaming. The potential for increasing brand awareness through social gaming is huge because the games are free and easily accessible to the users and the fun, memorable setting of the message leads to greater retention and recall of information. Beyond the fun element, clever techniques are being used to lead players through a series of hoops that increase engagement with products and promote brand loyalty. Social gaming has mixed origins: video games that first emerged in 1967, mobile phones with pre-installed games and social games like “Dungeons and Dragons” that integrated storytelling, role playing and tactical combat. These developed into massively-multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) that attracted a secondary market for trading items. The resultant business model is the one seen on today’s social network games. Popular games like “Farmville” on Facebook caught on quickly. Neil Davey noted on mycustomer.com, “According to recent research from Nielsen, online gaming is now the second-most popular activity among US web surfers, behind social networking.” Steve Peterson said on industrygamers.com, “The worldwide social gaming market has grown from $1.84 billion in 2009, to $3.65 billion in 2010, to an estimated $4.94 billion in 2011.” Problems with this form of marketing are few. Converting gamers into customers requires ingenious game design with different degrees of brand integration: light, medium and deep. There is also a three-to six month lead time required to create an effective game and the games are only valuable within the gaming community. If user engagement is not nurtured or sustained, loyalty may fade and revenue may decline. Worldwide revenues from social games are still growing. If Business Insider intelligence is correct and gamers grow to 75 percent of social network users, it’s time to get in the game. To turn this trend into an advantage for your company, consider the following. Social gaming is a trend in stage one; that is, first prototypes. Most social games today are fads. They will fade and soon be replaced with the next generation which will last longer. Social gaming is great for brand awareness. Social gaming is not for directly affecting sales. Lastly, align with the hot games of the day to reach your audience before you try to create your own.