If you have or are planning to get into social game development on a tiny budget, you need to get financially creative and learn to bootstrap. The practice of bootstrapping a startup is essentially an act of balancing costs against revenues, and it applies as much to a game development studio as any other business. Do it right, and your business will likely survive long enough for your games to have a chance of success — something that’s a necessity given how many small studios and bedroom entrepreneurs are jumping into the social game development space. Here are a few tips on bootstrapping as relevant to game development.
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While we’re always trying to cover the latest news in the social web economy, sometimes it simply isn’t possible to get all of our stories out. That’s why once in a while we will provide a roundup of some of the more interesting social media stories from around the web. Below are some of the more intriguing stories that took place yesterday.
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To be known as a “social game”, games need to have a number of elements that encourage player engagement amongst friends.   Players need to be able to interact with their real world friends in many ways: they want to compete, cooperate, show off to and taunt friends.  To better understand the ’social’ in social games, we put together a list of the 7 elements that should be included in every social game.
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According to four panelists at the FGS 2010 Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco, if you’re designing and developing a social game, there are a few critical elements to be considered if you want it to be a success. The panel, entitled “4 Keys to Successful Social Games that All Game Developers Should  Know,” was moderated by Sana Choudary of Traffichoney.
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A recent Forrester Research report suggests that career opportunities in Internet and Social Media Marketing could be opening up in the next few years. With job opportunities opening up and with people in need of work, we thought we’d take the time to highlight how to get your own job in the social media space.
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Recently, we noticed that RockYou had been promoting it’s ZooWorld application by using graphic ads on the Meebo chat service. This is certainly another sign of the growth of Facebook games, not only in reach, but in value to advertisers, as they pay to make placements on disparate networks or in this case, chat aggregators. We investigate how other game companies are attracting users to their Facebook games from outside of Facebook.
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With over 36,000 tweets being made per minute, there are loads of conversations about you and your brand taking place on Twitter. To keep up with this data, we are now witnessing the emergence of numerous tools, applications and services which enable you to analyze your twitter account and keep an eye on the competition. Here we look at 10 tools which can be utilized by advanced users for conducting focused research about brands and the tweets related to them.
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While big businesses such as Target, Coca-Cola, and Dell are already using social media effectively, small business owners are just starting — often “because they should,” not necessarily because they have a plan for generating business leads. Other owners who do have a plan don’t necessarily know how to measure social media ROI. If you’re still learning, pick a social medium, say Twitter, and consider the tips below.
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While companies are starting to adopt Social Media for online marketing campaigns, and even letting employees participate, the question of ROI (Return on Investment) arises, along with doubts about what metrics to measure. How do you know how effective your social media campaigns are if you’re not measuring any metrics, let alone an overall ROI? Below, we discuss ten important Social Metrics for companies.
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There has been a lot of discussion over the similarity & differences between status updates on Facebook & Twitter tweets and whether users should actually combine both of them. While there are a number of strategies for optimizing your Facebook and Twitter presence, we thought it would be useful to highlight the various ways in which you can connect the two accounts.
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