Social Gaming: A Review of Empire Avenue
When someone brings up social gaming, a few things may pop into your head: Angry Birds, Mafia Wars, Farmville…
What if social gaming wasn’t all about beating levels, planting crops or killing bosses? What if the players were real and their actions drove your success or failure? If that were ever the case, the social game you come up with might be called Empire Avenue.
Empire Avenue is a social game where you can buy stock in real people whose values rise and fall depending on their interaction. Think Klout meets SimCity.
Buy virtual shares in your favorite people on Empire Avenue.
While the idea of buying ownership in people originally gave me pause, I noticed that a TON of people were absolutely raving about Empire Avenue, so I decided to dig in and set up an account for myself. 
Social Influence: This Week in Social Media
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
Klout Comes to Facebook Pages: The social marketing platform Involver joins forces with the online influence measurement tool Klout to bring Klout to Facebook pages. This gives brands a new way to engage with their most influential fans, and to reward consumers based on their influence as measured by Klout.
8 Creative Ways Posterous Groups Can Bring People Together
Are you looking for an easy way to foster internal social communications at your company? Perhaps you’re seeking a simple way to build a community with your customers?
Here’s the good news: A new (and free) tool may be just the solution you’re looking for.
Looking for Something New?
Collaboration, innovation and communication—all three have become corporate buzzwords. But they are also critical components to any company’s success. These are three areas where organizations are constantly looking for new ideas and social media tools are increasingly playing a larger role in that process.
Businesses have a need to communicate. They’re always looking for new and different ways to foster collaboration among employees and ways to innovate—faster and more efficiently. “How can we come up with new ideas while using the least amount of resources?”
The list of tools that can fulfill these needs is long, but Posterous Groups, a recently launched social media tool (that’s free), should be considered as a way to meet these business needs.
This Week in Social Media News: 6 Items Worth Exploring
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
SlideShare Announces Zipcast for Live Web Meetings: This new tool allows you to run live video meetings alongside your SlideShare presentations. The video quality is basic but it’s easy to use. Zipcast is integrated with social media buttons, offers a live-stream chat feature and allows up to 5000 participants. Zipcast’s basic public meetings are free and there’s a paid ad-free version which allows password-protected meetings. This could be an interesting way for some businesses to start web broadcasting. How will you take advantage of this new platform?
Call a live virtual meeting to review your SlideShare presentation by video and use the chat feature to communicate with the attendees.
How to Create Your Own Social Networking Community
If you have a medium- to large-sized online network, you might have noticed some of your contacts have been developing their own communities in the form of private groups, forums or social networks that are a mixture of free or paid memberships.
The Pros of Creating Your Own Community
So with all of the existing communities out there, what’s the benefit of creating your own?
Driving Traffic to Your Site – Let’s say that you start a forum on your own domain. If you’re successful in creating a popular community, you’ll be driving a lot of traffic to your website. The traffic, in turn, will lead to the next benefit.
What Your Business Needs to Know About Social Graphs
Are you familiar with the term social graph? Can you easily describe what one is, and better yet, why they’re significant to the marketing of your business on the social web?
Understanding the concept of social graphs will not only enhance your proficiency with social media marketing today, it will also help you foresee emerging trends. This will significantly help you be fully prepared when new web technologies are launched.
The term social graph was first used a few years ago by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, specifically in reference to the Facebook platform. Your social graph is a digital map of your personal identity, your primary Facebook friends and everything you share with them.
5 Ways to Use LinkedIn Groups to Build Influential Connections
If you want to build truly influential relationships online, you have to find places where you can consistently add value, spend quality time and have engaging conversations with members of your target demographic.
LinkedIn Groups offers one of the best ways to make the most of your social media engagement time, but you must adopt the right strategy to be successful. This article will show you how.
LinkedIn allows you to join up to 50 groups, but you can’t possibly be effective and spend enough time to make a difference in 50 groups.
What works best is to focus your time and effort on a deep and narrow approach in order to build influence within LinkedIn Groups, enhance your credibility and generate new connections.
