Seattle Solutions

I had occasion recently to evaluate FarmVille - one of a growing number of phenomenally successful social-media-based games from Zynga - and somewhere inside that jumble of infantile graphics and activities, annoying messages, terrible UI and seriously buggy and lag-prone software, I discovered what I believe are the reasons for Zynga's success in pushing past the hype and harnessing social media for real gain.

What's more, these lessons can be applied to almost any business or organization looking to use social media to increase its impact and/or revenue.

Of course, the only way to properly evaluate a game is, well, to play it. (No, there really was a professional reason for this, honest!) Up until this point, I had avoided FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars and all of the related time-sinks for three reasons:

1. Lack of time (self-explanatory, really)
2. Lack of trust (in Facebook's management in particular and the companies behind Facebook-enabled apps by extension)
3. Annoyance factor: I'd like to keep the friends I have, not all of whom have figured out that you can block those annoying messages from apps once they start appearing in your feed.

For reasons I won't go into here, my need to actually know something about how these games worked finally trumped the first reason (no time). However, trust and annoyance were more serious factors, so I created a new Facebook account (using a technically legal alias but containing absolutely no personal information and with no real-life friends). I then allowed the application access to my empty profile and started to play.

At first, I played alone and ignored the social media aspects of the game, but it quickly became obvious that I wasn't going to get very far without "neighbors," as Facebook friends who are also connected to you in the game are called. I resolved this by joining a Facebook group for people looking for neighbors, and quickly found myself a small crowd of them. I don't know anything about any of these people, nor they me, but we're all "friends" on Facebook and "neighbors" in FarmVille.

There are two types of in-game currency: gold coins and "farm cash". You can easily earn gold coins by harvesting your own crops and animals. Farm cash is trickier - you get one farm buck for each level you reach (which buys all of one nail), or you can buy lots of farm bucks with real-world money.

While you can use the gold coins to buy the basics (seeds, etc.), there are a lot of things that you can only buy with farm cash - especially building materials, which you need unless you're satisfied with plowing, planting and harvesting seeds and missing out on much of what the game has to offer. If that were all there was to it, the game would have little staying power as most players would become bored with their farms long before they felt the need to shovel any real-world cash into them.

Now, here's where it gets interesting... With most games, it's all about competition. In FarmVille, it's all about cooperation, or, more accurately, it's all about enlightened self-interest. No, you can't buy all the bricks, boards, nails, and other things you need to expand, but you can gift them to others at no cost to yourself. All it takes is a little of your time and effort (a few clicks of the mouse and waiting for the frustratingly slow pages and messages to load) and your neighbor has the item they need. You do this, of course, in the hopes that they'll do the same for you.

It works.

Additionally, you are encouraged to visit and "help out" on your neighbors' farms to earn a few extra gold coins, experience points, and an occasional prize like fuel or feed, and to leave them "gifts" before you go. A new feature, which I haven't had the time to try, allows farmers to form co-ops and perform assigned tasks toward a common goal.

All this helps keep the game fresh and interesting, not only by giving those with the spare time something to do besides watch their crops grow, but by providing inspiration and incentives to players to spruce up their own farms for company, maybe even to shell out for some farm cash to buy those things that aren't available as gifts, like a nice castle or a cute cottage.

Now, a lot of players still cringe at the thought of paying real money for virtual goods, but Zynga also offers gift certificates - farm cash clearly falls into the category of things people want but would never buy for themselves! Regardless of how the money is coming in, the fact is that Zynga's estimated total revenue for 2010 is at least half a billion USD. That's a good indication that they're doing something right.

FarmVille is also very successful in terms of bringing users back. Each type of crop takes a certain amount of time before it can be harvested - anywhere from 2 hours to 4 days (at least, that's true for the crops available at my level). Once the crop is ready, you have to harvest the crop within the same amount of time, or it withers. This is really a brilliant strategy on Zynga's part, both because it encourages users to come back soon and because it allows players to plan their crops to accommodate their own schedules.

Now, lest it appear that I'm gushing, I should mention that the company is also doing some things badly, and I think that will hurt them over time, but let's get to the "lessons" I promised first...

1. Keep the content fresh, interesting, and varied. Don't let your customers become bored.
2. Get customers as involved with each other as possible, in as positive a way as possible. Create a sense of community around your brand.
3. Use crowd-sourcing whenever practical.
4. Make sure customers have all the information they need to make a purchasing decision.
5. Give people solid reasons to come back often.

Zynga does all of the above exceedingly well - although with reference to point #4, they start the push to get users to buy farm cash too early (immediately, in fact) and probably frighten a few people off because of it.

I do have some problems with the company in terms of ethics. For one thing, they allegedly sold users' Facebook data to 3rd party advertisers and marketing companies. For another, they have applied for a broad patent for the concept of virtual currency. Even setting aside the valid argument that these types of internet patents harm rather than encourage innovation, the truth is that Zynga did not by any means invent virtual currency. (Linden Labs has been using that type of virtual currency in Second Life since 2002.) The patent would be completely indefensible in a court of law, but Zynga could still use it to cudgel vulnerable start-ups without the financial means to fight them in court, and that is most likely the intention.

Aside from the ethical considerations, Zynga needs to address some serious usability issues. Some of the problems are obviously due to limitations in Facebook's API, but others seem to be of their own making: a clumsy, click-heavy in-game user interface and slow servers are the worst offenders. As I haven't played any of the newer games (the current up-and-coming powerhouse is FrontierVille - which on the surface appears similar to FarmVille in most respects), I can't say whether they are actively working on fixing these problems in more recent releases.

Because of these ethical issues, I won't trust Zynga with my real personal information, nor will I buy anything from them for whatever reason. (That won't stop me from learning from their success, however!)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some tomatoes to harvest.