Evolving Web

Evony – Thoughts on a Business Model and a Community

As software as a service becomes mainstreamed, I’ve been watching how startups monetize their applications. The straight subscription model is the default. However, the recurring costs of a subscription model seem to annoy people as time goes on.  If you aren’t using too many SaaS products, one or two subscriptions are tolerable.  When you move up to 5 or 6 products you begin to get subscription fatigue.

In-game economies is one answer to subscription fatigue. Evony is a massively multiplayer real time strategy game that’s made a quiet entrance, but has amassed an impressive user base.  It’s “always free” motto promises complete game play, but monetizes objects in the game. This gives the game player the freedom to buy into the game as much or as little as they wish. For Evony, the price can be free to whatever they’d like to spend.

Individual players in the game can join alliances which provide mutual support, protection and reinforcement in battle.  As the communities solidify, Evony has made several game elements exchangeable, but several others are not. This creates an internal economy of need. If your team needs your participation and that requires an object you might be able to find, that puts creates a social need for that object.

Playing alone, the gamer might wait for a few days or even weeks until they find that object. The social need becomes a powerful element in the Evony business model. In light of this, it seems that Evony would benefit from creating functional groups of their buyable objects. 

For example, when starting a new city in Evony, players need to quickly establish a lot of easily constructed structures and populate the city. Some of the things you can buy are “guidelines” that hasten construction and “boxes” or “packages” that can have people or resources.  A “new city” package that included people, resources and guidelines would be what I’d expect to come next.

The communities grow quickly in Evony and can determine whether someone will make it in the game at all. They should be the first aspect of the game to leverage for Evony success.  So, the next area I’d go for if I were Evony would be to provide community discounts.  So if you are part of an alliance that spent a certain amount on Evony, the entire alliance gets either a kickback of game currency, a discount or a package of some type.

The next thing I’d do is monetize game participation. If you have a 100 member alliance but only 10 of them actually participate, that’s not worth much.  But 100 members where 80 regularly participate is impressive and should be rewarded.

SaaS products outside the gaming world can learn from this as well. It’s not necessarily the software that is being monetized, it’s the performance of the user. Counter-intuitively the product becomes more valuable to the individual as their usage increases. This value increases exponentially as the network of users increases (Reed’s Law).

We’ve seen that networks don’t make an application sticky, but the activity of a network does. Evony has been interesting to watch as the activity of the alliances have brought people back to the game. This makes it “coopertainment” – entertainment that required cooperation in order to enjoy (and monetize) fully.

Quietly Letting History Write Itself

From the “while we were sleeping” desk, the Obama administration has been quietly making good on their promises for a more open and transparent government.

Part of this can be seen on the cover of Today’s NY Times.  The press can now cover the return of war dead from the Iraqi and Afghani theatres.  Prior to this, the press was prohibited from directly photographing the return of dead soldiers. 

As we’ve seen, it’s the policy reversal that’s covered more than the caskets themselves.  The actual daylighting of government actions, is the story here.

In the recent stimulus package, projects included needed to meet specific requirements for transparency.  How the stimulus package was being spent was at the top of that agenda.  It was merely philosophically important to the administration that this money be spent properly. It was actually codified into the package that if you received that money, you needed to make the public aware of how much you spent and how you spent it.  And you needed to make that, and other information, available via RSS so that the public had a better chance of collecting and analyzing that information.

The White House has an official photostream which is creative commons licensed.  What does this mean for bloggers and the general population?  We now have a set of constantly updated photos of what’s happening in the White House to use when writing about what’s actually happening in the White House.

We also have an official glimpse into what goes on in the White House and with key cabinet members daily.  Major news sources will still provide us with details, surely, but the stream is simultaneously a good will gesture, an inexpensive resource, and a catalyst for conversation.

There is certainly a long ways to go.  Information sharing in more complicated (and more vital) areas will certainly take time.  The FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse is taking some time to find its place in the post-transparency world.  And that certainly isn’t the only area needing an overhaul.

But, to a very real extent, the entire labyrinthine world of the government needs this overhaul and that’s going to take more than a couple months of figuring out.

Technorati Tags: transparency,obama,white house,flickr,new york times,electronic frontier foundation,FBI,IDW

Dreams Deferred

Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes

Years ago, I was sitting in a very posh restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District with a friend of mine.  He was a very wealthy programmer, working for an incredibly prestigious financial company.  We were talking, eating, laughing and having a wonderful evening overall.

He looked up at me and told me he was going to go back on drugs.  About 7 years previous, he had kicked heroin.  He’d gone from shooting up in dirty houses to having a comfortable townhome in Noe Valley.  He’d built a lot in a very short period of time.

While giving me his reasoned rationale for wanting to go back onto heavy drugs he said, “I’m just not happy now. With everything I’ve achieved I’m just never happy.  When I was using, I was happy for very short periods of time.  I want to be happy again.”  By the time I left him that night and went back to my hotel, he’d already scored and started his slide back to his previous life.  Within a few months, he lost everything he’d worked for.

Happiness is elusive. We chase it, we want it.  Life seemingly conspires against it.  We mask our need for it by watching sitcoms that make us smile for very short periods of time – the over-the-counter version of heroin.

Over the last few years, I’ve met a long string of people who have gone through the 80s and 90s and now almost all of the aughts and have come up empty.  Whether they have money or not, whether the recession is felt by them or not, there is a measurable exodus from lifestyles that fundamentally work at cross-purposes to happiness.

Thankfully, very few of them see drugs as an acceptable solution.

This isn’t drop-out happiness people are seeking.  No communes, no great-american-novels, no buy-a-wineries (well, okay, two people bought wineries)…. This movement to happiness is pragmatic.  People understand that they are better family members, they are healthier, they can help others more, they are more productive team members, etc. when they are happy.

So .. why not be happy?

The Infrastructure of Happiness

Happiness is a construct and a really ethereal one at that.  It is often confused with states it is very similar to like gratification, placation, contentment, etc.  Happiness can be self-serving or it can be effacing and humble.

As managers or business owners or team members, we ignore happiness at our peril. 

Why?  Because there appears to be a tacit assumption that work and happiness don’t go together.  Happiness comes later.  When I retire, when I can take vacation, when I’m … not .. at …work.

In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses the tension between our individual drives and social pressures:

Submission to genetic programming can become quite dangerous because it leaves us helpless. A person who cannot override genetic instructions when necessary is always vulnerable. ….

A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around him have agreed he should long for – rewards often grafted onto genetically programmed desires.  He may encounter thousands of potentially fulfilling experiences, but he fails to notice them because they are not the things he desires.

Professional fulfillment is part of happiness.  It has to be.  We all know it.

So, if we’re setting up a team for a project, why not have happiness be a primary goal of the team’s infrastructure?  Maybe even THE goal.  Product second, remuneration third.  Happiness first.

After reading about our endless quest for happiness by neuroscientists, orchestra conductors, Buddhist monks, psychologists, philosophers, humorists, management theorists, and everyone in-between, I’ve come to one conclusion.

People are happy when they know what they’re doing and aren’t offended by it.

There are very few reasons why we would ever do something we were offended by or without cause.  At work, people feel obligated to do what their employer requests – even if they find it offensive, demeaning or perplexing.  Depending on their situations, they may feel that they have no choice but to do as requested – with even quitting being out of the question.

Unenlightened employers may feel this is a position of power and rejoice in the entrapment of such people.  However, if your goal is to have a business that grows and innovates – this mindset is not going to help you.

Business cultures that strike a balance between business and personal health should engender a happier workforce.  People worry a great deal about what happens at the office.  They take that stress home with them.  That stress can negatively impact home life.  This creates more stress, which is in turn brought back to the office.

In 2001, the Seattle Mariners won 116 games, tying the all time record for wins in a single season.  They were mostly the same team they were the year before and the next year when their records were nowhere close to 116.  In 2008, the Tampa Bay Rays went to the World Series after being dead last in 2007.  Again, with roughly the same line up.

There is an attitude of winning that can float or sink a team.  If your team is committed to being happy first, its chances of winning will be bolstered.  True commitment to a healthy culture creates momentum.

In The Art of Power, Thich Nhat Hanh describes this momentum in his monkly style:

In your professional life, there may be other people you have to be in touch with and work with.  You may be working as a team to make a film, design a produce, or complete another kind of project.  Each person on your team has his own difficulties , his own suffering.  but because you are open, happy, fresh, and concentrated, you can help all of them touch their freshness.  you don’t care only about their work performance, because the quality of their work depends on the peace and well-being inside each of them.  You come to the business as a friend, helping everyone transform, bringing peace, harmony and well-being into their lives at home and at work.

Yes, Master Hahn is a bit beyond what HR might be comfortable with.  The point, however, is that teams made up of happy and psychologically healthy individuals understand that they are working with other human beings.  We are working with people who have lives outside of work and that they are living inside work too.

We are still alive while we’re at work.  We aren’t purchased work-robots who have deferred our dreams to times of not-work.

We have goals and, more often than not, those goals are good for the company.  We want to complete projects.  We want to understand the flow of work.  We want to do what we can.

In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi’s description of what makes people feel happiness is very much in-line with understanding your company’s value-stream.  While there’s deeper issues at play, from a work perspective the value stream is vital.  Understanding the flow of work through your organization satisfies some basic needs to making your workforce happy.

Creating a lucid value stream and expressing people’s places in it gives workers a lot of power.  They can optimize their place in the value stream based on their current skills or skills they wish to acquire.  They can optimize the value stream itself by pointing out areas of improvement.  In short, the clarity provided by understanding what the heck is going on is instantly gratifying.

What is also interesting is, happiness as described by most of these authors is not a static state.  Happiness is, rather, an aesthetic or an amalgam.

In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert starts a long chapter about what happiness may or may not be with this point:

The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness and judgmental happiness.

When all these authors get down to it, they end up describing self-rewarding systems that seem to result in rolling series of Maslovian peak experiences.

A-ha!

Business then, which is loathe to really get into matters of personal mental health, can actually do a few things here.

1. Make business explicit to those doing the work. 

The value stream, the fiscal health of the company, people’s roles in the organization, corporate ethics and goals – should all be made explicit so workers can choose to improve, innovate, and participate.

2. Decisions are free

Free your managers and you from top down decision making.  Give people the freedom to do their jobs.

3. Information Hoarding Will Not Be Tolerated

The fastest way to threaten anyone is to withhold information from them.  Want to kill productivity?  Keep secrets.

4. Make Work a Healthy Game

The goal of work is to create things. Rewarding people for creating things is a healthy game.  Avoid zero-sum games like promotions or winner-take-all prizes.  Incentivize your value stream and not end-goals.

--

Happiness is not fluff and it’s not a “nice to have”.  It’s a central component to a functional team.  Put a little thought into it and see what you come up with.

Technorati Tags: happiness,management,thich nhat hahn,daniel gilbert,abraham maslow,mihaly csikszentmihalyi,lean,langston hughes

Blogged at my house in Seattle, WA

Vision Makes Policy – Collaboration in the Obama Administration

During the Clinton Administration, I had the good fortune to be a certified National ITS Architecture expert.  That meant I could travel around and help local, state and regional governments build their regional Intelligent Transportation Systems architectures.  At the center of this was a cooperative element: regions needed a cooperative regional architecture that had at least a modicum of information sharing in order to get federal ITS dollars.

It worked like a charm.  I saw regions that previously and pervasively were at each others’ throats come together to create partnerships.  When the Clintonian soft-fuzzy handcuffs were taken away by the subsequent administration, many of these partnerships predictably fell apart.

Why? Because it’s hard to collaborate in a combative environment.

Policy, in corporations or business, isn’t a neutered word.  Vision, policy, and culture are often as easy as stating an intent and then putting some good rules behind it.

For Clinton, it was to make money contingent on good regional collaborative governance.

For the Obama administration, it is transparency, collaboration and participation.  The stimulus package has ample hooks in it to support these goals. 

The Obama Transparency and Open Government memo defines the benefits as:

Transparency: Promotes Accountability

Participatory: Improves effectiveness and decision making

Collaborative: Engages the general public in public sector work

I will add a few outcomes I can see here:

Introspection: Government and the public will become less hostile because information and respect is now a currency.

Cost Cutting: Procurement inefficiencies, poorly understood value streams and duplication of effort will become much more visible and less tolerated.

Grumbling, Bitching and Contention: Yay! When you discuss some things they can really annoy you.  Government is huge and it does a whole lot.  If you think you are annoyed at some of the policies of the company you work for … well, this is going to be like working for 30,000 companies simultaneously.  Prepare to have an opinion and for others to have one too.  In short, it’s politics!

Does Grumbling negate Introspection?  Nope.

Collaboration isn’t easy, especially in a political world with hundreds of years of historic drama.  We are bringing in as many people as want to participate, many of whom have felt disenfranchised, have agendas of their own, and are generally undereducated about what they are complaining about. 

There will be growing pains. 

Today’s communications technology gives us a new and unique ability to have an actual participatory democracy.  Recent advances have led people to gravitate to camps of like-minded individuals, creating camps of group think and spin-up.  This is natural.

Government 2.0 initiatives could well be the place where people of differing opinions can come and have good and vital conversations.  Whether Government 2.0 sites will have the savvy community management to foster productive conversation remains to be seen.

Technorati Tags: Government,Government 2.0,transparency,collaboration,participatory government,obama,clinton,intelligent transportation systems

Voting With Our Feet – The Ethics of Sponsored Conversations

Today, Jeremiah Owyang posted “A running list of sponsored conversations”.  He has a laundry list of sites and products that engage in various forms of advertising and paid content. 

The article and its comments bring up the ethics of paying for supposed user-generated content.  With user-generated content, the assumption is that objectivity comes from personal experience unhindered by conflicts of interest.  If someone pays for a post, there is an immediate and obvious conflict of interest.  As a reader, you start to lose trust in the blogger and her content.

This ethical question isn't a new one, to blogging or any other form of communication.  All writers and all media have found themselves dealing with this.

Pick up any magazine and there's a good chance you'll find an article that turns out to be an advertisement about half way through.  Other publications run press releases, slightly edited, as stories.

Watch the morning “news” and you’ll find your NBC news staff telling you about new NBC programming.

I agree, Jeremiah, this is growing - it is an obvious win for both marketers and bloggers.  The bloggers are the ones who have the questions to ask of themselves.  How far along the shill-line are you willing to walk?

This is a personal question. 

As readers ... do we wish to read these? If not, we'll vote with our links and our attention.

Update: Read Write Web has an excellent response to all this.

Marshall says:

We respectfully disagree with Forrester's recommendations on this topic. In fact, we think that paying bloggers to write about your company is a dangerous and unsavory path for new media and advertisers to go down. We recognize that it's a complicated question, but we don't feel convinced by Forrester's conclusions regarding those complications.

Defenders of the tactic argue that it doesn't differ substantially from traditional advertising, that it's effective for advertisers, that bloggers want to profit from their writing and that with proper disclosure there's no loss of credibility for either party.

Technorati Tags: Jeremiah Owyang,conflicts of interest,blogging,shilling,shills,spam,splogs

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi, in Seattle

Why I Plurk, Again

I’ve discussed this before, but there are inherently different social interactions that happen in different social media tools.  These are facilitated by the differences in the user interface.

Yesterday, Brian Kerr posted this little thing on Plurk (source).  Plurk’s UI allows you to post pictures that are actually visible.

What came next?  A nice little discussion that took 24 hours to mature.  The threading and alerts in Plurk made that possible.  With Twitter, the value-add of the conversation would have been lost.  Twitter is such a temporal tool, without conventions like @ or # tags, threading is impossible.

Here is the Plurk discussion:

Context is often driven by the circumstances in which the context itself is generated.  Your User Interface, like Twitter’s, may have marvelous impacts on how certain types of communication are conducted – but they do not help with all kinds of communication.

There is no Tower of Babel User Interface.

In this thread, the context starts with a pesky cat looped cartoon and ends with a discussion of non-attachment. What @mitten dubs the “kitteh paradox” after Brian defines the core issue – happiness is transitory if you are attached to a certain definition of happiness (cereal or sitting on the table). 

This contextual evolution is primarily due to the Plurk UI which allows this thread to maintain itself over the course of hours or days.  I still use Twitter every day, but I also use Plurk – simply because these fundamental UI differences yield fundamentally different types of conversations.

Technorati Tags: twitter,plurk,brian kerr,laura fisher,non-attachment,user interface,user experience,social media

The Cloud is The Community is The Individual is Life

Yesterday was Halloween. Halloween, frankly, bums me out. 

It bums me out because I almost had three daughters, but none of them made it to term.  And at Halloween, we see an awful lot of really really adorable little girls. 

So I was bummed and at home working on my book.  Some nice people on Plurk started a very silly conversation with me that ended up taking all night.  It was silly, but also personal.  And by the end we were friends.

This morning, I was musing about this while planning my day.  And, on Twitter, I sent out this message:

You see, our interaction on Plurk was not confined to Plurk. As we talked, we exchanged artifacts through Flickr, blogs, Facebook and other tools.

The presence of our artifacts, made short work of explaining complex things.  We very quickly understood each other as real, authentic people.  They understood my pain and helped with it, and I helped them.  I went to bed happy.

So, while I was Twittering the above tweet, my friend Giyen in Seattle was home putting the finishing touches on a wonderful blog post about living openly and authentically.  It’s a very personal post.  I find it very moving.

She says at the end:

So I’m here.  At this quiet juncture in life where I have decided to choose ‘life’ over everything else. What good is social and economic stability when you feel all dead inside?  I want life to be extraordinary.  It doesn’t have to be easy, but it does have to be good.

We all have life’s battles and our internal struggles. But in the end, we learn from each other, we live for each other.  That makes life extraordinary.  It isn’t easy.  But, with each other and a bit of imagination, it will be good.

Technorati Tags: giyen kim,bacon is my enemy,social media,authenticity,interaction,live dammit live

An event or object of awesome social value.

Social Media is social.

Games, contests and fun are also social.  In the social media world, they are commonplace.  They serve as a means of harmless communication, ways to network, and ways to collect valuable information.

So part of your social capital is how you respond to games, contests and fun.  For example, This week Web Ink Now has an interesting little contest.

They want to know what people’s definition of cool is. 

In order to enter the contest, you need to define “cool” in your blog or web site and link back to The Cool Factor context post.

And give your personal definition.

Mine is:  Cool: An event or object of awesome social value.

What does this do?  Well, several things.

1. Gets people talking about David Scott’s blog
2. Gives a fun little creative puzzle to solve
3. Gets a bunch of Google juice by making people link back to the blog and the page.
4. Raises awareness for the book “The Cool Factor”
5. Sends information out through the social media sphere.

So number 5 is important. I learned about this through a tweet on twitter.

Look at the buzz!  There is no shortage of people posting about it.

Good job on the viral marketing, David.  It is certainly an event or object or event of awesome social value (cool).

Technorati Tags: The Cool Factor,Web Ink Now,David Scott,Social Media,Viral marketing

Forced Feeding

To all my social media readers, I'd love to know what you think of this.  Many studies have shown that people expect businesses to be on social media, including twitter.  They don't just want it, they expect it.

Here we have a tweet from Popeye's Chicken.  The tweets from Popeye's tend to be fairly silly, folksy humor.  They often announce things going on with Popeye's. 

Here we have a silly one during the presidential debates. 

What I'm curious about is the "#debate08" hash tag.  It is used here complete legitimately.  But otherwise, @popeyeschicken is read by people who opt in and follow the business.  Here, @popeyeschicken is using a hash tag to insert itself into a conversation.

(A hash tag allows people to follow public communication on twitter that identifies itself thematically.  So in this case #debate08 can be searched and all tweets about the debate can be read.)

So I'd like to know what my readers think of this as a precedent.  Now advertising can be (funny or not) inserted into ongoing conversation.  I'm not saying this is good or bad.  I just want to know what others think.

Technorati Tags: Twitter,social media,popeye's chicken

Your Message is Your Message in the Medium

Laura Fisher posted this on Jing today.

This is a great example of how to utterly destroy yourself with social media. 

What we see here is a guy who, apparently, wants to be your (the plural your) personal brand strategist.  Insodoing, he has spammed everyone he knows at Twitter, not realizing that everyone who follows him sees his spam fly by in real-time.

The delivery of your message is key.  In this case, Hajj Flemings' message was that he was there to help people with branding strategy.

The medium he chose (Twitter) was apparently one he didn't know well.  Twitter, being a broadcast medium, broadcast a series of identical messages everyone subscribed to Hajj's feed.

While the specifics of this are interesting - more important here is the understanding that the Medium may not be the message, but it sure influences they formulation of the message.

When any business steps foot into the social media sphere, they need to understand the mechanisms being used and the structure of the community behind them.  I'm sure more than one person stopped reading Hajj's post after his spamfest today.

Technorati Tags: twitter,social media,laura fisher,mitten,focused social media