Smashing Magazine has a terrific guide to designing “call to action buttons.” Design and optimization can increase conversions dramatically – just ask (and study!) these conversion-focused leaders:
- Social gaming: RockYou, Slide, Zynga, etc
- Flash Sales: …

When Zynga launched Treasure Isle, I wrote about the economies of scale that enabled them to drive nearly 17,000,000 monthly active users in the game’s first 18 days… staggering figures. Zynga’s latest game, Frontierville, is …

Earlier this week Zynga launched their newest game Frontierville – it already has 1.3m monthly actives and 450k fans. While Frontierville’s gameplay inherits many of the best practices of its siblings, its domain behavior doesn’t. …

Thanks to the success of Foursquare, Booyah / MyTown and Zynga, “game mechanics”, “badges” and “leaderboards” have become cornerstones of any web marketer’s dialect and user-acquisition strategy.
What these three companies have done so well is …

There are two camps in the world of social gaming:
- One side thinks that it has been won outright by Zynga
- The other side believes that we are in the early innings of a nine-inning …

I encourage you to read Eric Eldon’s piece on InsideFacebook about how Facebook’s most popular game, Farmville, now defaults to Facebook Credits and Payments.
As location and geo dominate the blog headlines (Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla), …

As seen in the below screenshots, Facebook Widgets now feature and play video in-line (although I am not entirely sure that this is a new release – it is my first exposure to it). These …

In a recent New York Times article, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said that all employees need to “be a CEO of something.” Its a terrific mantra and speaks to the importance of ownerships, responsibility and …

I am late the Settlers of Catan rage, which according to the Wall Street Journal, swept Silicon Valley in December. But I uploaded a photo of Catan to Facebook (shown below) and got a great …

MyTown is best described as Zynga meets Foursquare. Take the best aspects of social gaming (Zynga) and combine them with location based networking (Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp) and you have MyTown: a game that awards points …

Before Apple enabled in-application purchases, the hot debate was whether or not revenue maximization came from charging for downloads (and limiting distribution) or through in-app advertisements (and hoping for continued engagement).
For game and music …

Facebook and Zynga in particular have become the center pieces for micro-transactions, social gaming and in-game purchasing habits… so much so that the activity on Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Playstation’s Playstation Store are often overlooked. …