We have more FarmVille farms (30 million) than actual farms (2 million) in the United States. While many organizations struggle to develop online communities, FarmVille’s creator, Zynga, reaches 240 million daily players — earning a reported a $250 million in revenue in 2009.
Zynga’s creative engagement and business strategies can inspire online community builders for news sites to think differently about their approach to engagement.
FarmVille is Zynga’s most popular game. Players or “farmers” plant and harvest virtual crops to earn FarmVille coins and “experience points.” It’s free to play, but farmers unlock special items or get more gas (to harvest more crops) by buying credits with real money (like the 12-year-old who racked up a $1,400 tab on his mom’s credit card).
FarmVille is particularly effective in rewarding engagement in three areas: loyalty, affinity and visibility.
Loyalty: Building online communities requires constantly keeping your audience interested. FarmVille allows farmers to advance through levels, piquing their curiosity and providing new goals.
Planting seeds and planting trees are two fundamental actions that fuel FarmVille. Players plant seeds or trees and harvest them for a profit — earning in-game currency that helps them build their farms and buy virtual goods. Farmers can also purchase more of this in-game currency with real cash, one of the revenue streams for Zynga.
The “slow reveal” is something else that keeps farmers coming back. Certain items or seeds are only available after farmers reach a certain level. FarmVille also keeps farmers intrigued by adding seasonal items available for purchase for limited periods (Christmas trees during the holidays, for example). And farmers can unlock exclusive items by purchasing FarmVille cash with real money. To make it even easier to buy these credits, Facebook and Zynga recently entered into a five-year strategic relationship that lets Facebook users buy credits from Facebook for use in Zynga games.
Takeaway Idea: News sites could reward users for reading stories on their sites, or for engaging with content by doing activities like posting a comment. Readers would earn experience points based on how much they read or engage with the site. These rewards could, for example, potentially build competitive relationships between users so they read more stories or comment more.
Perhaps some content would be available only to those who have a certain number of experience points. Readers could also “unlock” exclusive items on a site by purchasing credits that could also earn them additional experience points.
Affinity: Collaboration is a social media fundamental. Social media users rely on friends to refer them to useful information. In FarmVille, activities such as barn building require players to develop reciprocal relationships: They ask friends for items such as boards and nails — and when friends need help, they expect to get items, too.
This is why you see (and have probably hidden) all those Facebook friends of yours who ask for crazy items for their games. However, by creating an incentive for farmers to post these requests to their pages, FarmVille gets them to do the viral marketing for the game in a more interesting way. Seeing that your friend wants to “share a Mystery gift” with you is a lot more interesting than a post that says, “You should play FarmVille.”
Takeaway idea: Many online news readers share information already. Facebook reports that users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month. Site publishers could reward their visitors for reading (or submitting) stories on a variety of topic areas each day. For example, after reading an article you could send your readers on a new “scavenger hunt” encouraging them to post a Facebook update that says, “I’ve read a great sports story today, but now I need to find a good breaking news story, a local story and an international story, so I can earn access to this site’s daily newsletter.”
Visibility: Integrate content where your audience is already engaging. People can’t pull up their news feed, or walk into a 7-Eleven, without seeing FarmVille paraphernalia. Players unlock exclusive bonuses by purchasing items from Zynga’s partners.
Earlier this year, Zynga began selling gift cards for game credits at gas stations and grocery stores. And this summer, any time you purchase virtually any food or drink item at 7-Eleven, you get a redemption code for more virtual goods (such as a pool with a cow that jumps off the diving board) in FarmVille, or for other popular Zynga games such as Mafia Wars and YoVille.
With a new partnership with Yahoo (and its 600 million users), Zynga will likely more than make up for any dip it saw in new users as a result of Facebook’s changing notification settings. Social gamers will be able to access Farmville and Mafia Wars from Yahoo’s homepage.
And Zynga players donated more than $1.5 million to Haiti during a five-day span in January by donating the proceeds from the purchases of exclusive virtual items (such as white corn seeds, which, when harvested, transform into virtual money that could be used in the game).
Takeaway idea: A local news organization could let its users unlock special content on its news site after obtaining a redemption code at local (or relevant) businesses when they purchase certain items (such as a newspaper). Or, when someone buys a newspaper subscription, the subscriber could unlock certain virtual news-related items in a Zynga game (such as a newspaper stand or a press pass). Similarly, Zynga could offer special virtual newspaper items in games for farmers to purchase, with the proceeds going to a nonprofit journalism organization (I have an idea for a great partner).
Some websites have tried similar community engagement strategies, such as giving site participants karma, granting them publishing access to an exclusive blog, or rewarding users for shopping with the organization’s partners. But the success of many of these projects paled in comparison to Zynga’s financial success and popularity. While Zynga provides fun games with clear and attainable goals that are integrated into users’ existing experiences, many sites’ engagement strategies are complicated and abstract.
These takeaways from FarmVille are just a few examples of how looking outside the traditional media world can inspire us to come up with new ways to create engaging — and sustainable — business models for content.
What are your takeaways? In the comments section below, share your ideas inspired from unlikely sources, or post your questions about what else we could learn from Zynga about community engagement.
We’ll discuss this more with Marcus Segal, Zynga’s chief operating officer of game operations, in a live chat Wednesday, August 11, at 4 p.m. ET.
<a href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=cd47be856c” >What Can FarmVille Teach Us About Community Engagement?</a>
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