I’ve written about the importance of using user-segmentation to deliver unique user / site experiences and email marketing. Here’s a brilliant example of Zynga’s Word With Friends (the mega-popular Facebook & mobile Scrabble game).
Obviously …

Last week I wrote about the “do’s and don’ts of gamification“… in other words, how to effectively add game mechanics to your site / service. Thanks to the success of leaders like Zynga and Foursquare, …

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 …