Social Media is a Battlefield

Time and participation are the fuel that feeds social media, in the war for your attention there are a few weapons that are proven to attract the attention of early adopters.  In turn, early adopters become the foot soldiers in the battle for larger markets.  Functionality, ease of use, clean design, and an API are just a few items in the armory that can attract early adopters, who in turn can create the engaged community, enhancing scripts, and complementary websites and services that help pull in the larger market.  It’s rare for a startup to pull everything together and grow, and the ones that get it right still struggle with monetization.

There is at least one site that has done a good job in pulling together the weapons I listed, has monetized successfully, and it’s probably one you’re not using.  What’s their secret weapon?  Well… it’s weapons!  WeeWar is an in-browser, turn based, strategy game with a distinctly social twist.  Even of you have no interest in it as a game, there is real value in looking at the decisions that WeeWar has made for it’s community.

One of the founders of WeeWar, Alexander Kolhofer, took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions about WeeWar and social media:

To what degree was WeeWar and it’s features influenced by Social Media trends?

I always say WeeWar is a web 2.0 application that also happens to be a game. That distinguishes us from most other online games and informs all our design decisions. It also puts us into a complete different market segment than what most games operate in.  We are clearly focused on those early adopters who always try the latest applications. They go in first and they can function as “amplifiers”. They blog, they get others excited, they talk about what they do online, etc. There is a huge potential in appealing to them, not via some trickery or link baiting but with solid and honest dedication. WeeWar does that (and we work hard to make it so) and was hence featured on blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable first and only then got picked up by more typical gaming crowd.

We implemented an API early on, nurturing a very active development scene. We support these developers and they have created many popular Applications, Notifiers, Sites - even a Facebook application! Most of these are much more sophisticated than what we could ever create in house.

We have also enabled our users to create their own maps to play on. The map editor and map universe was extremely well received and we have since implemented means for our users to implicitly vote the best user created maps to the top. There are now thousands of exciting maps to choose from, which is especially great when you consider that we only provided some 20 before.

What have you done / do you do to foster an interactive community?

We take suggestions seriously and we make sure to recognize all contributions coming from within. We provide our users with the tools to reach out (API, Profiles), to connect (preferred players, favorite maps, discussions) and we very much take part ourselves - be that on site or by following up and showcasing what happens elsewhere.

The nature of WeeWar does help as well. WeeWar is inherently social by being a multiplayer game but the specific way that works - vie emails and on varying time frames - allows user to stay in touch and spend time with old and new peers. (see tour).

Can you describe your Pro vs. Free model? Do you think that a similar model would translate well to non-gaming social sites?

WeeWar clearly follows the Freemium model. We provide a great deal of value and entrainment for free. If you like you can opt in to access more advanced features for a small subscription fee. What sets WeeWar apart is that we do not give paying players an unfair advantage. They can still engage on the free level with all the same limitations, but much more importantly: if they set up a game and invite a free player that player gets all the benefits of the paid account for the duration of the game. There are a number of advantages to this:

• The system is fair (something many browser games do not get right)
• Free players get exposed to the pro level
• Pro players are more attractive as they can choose to share their benefits
• All players can still participate in the same exciting community that attracted them in the first place.

I think there is a huge benefit in not drawing a hard line between those who pay and those who don’t (yet). Ultimately those who do have at some point started out on the free site. So treating them consistently is critical to your product and your credibility. It also does not help to separate the two groups as it would be completely counterproductive for users to leave their established social network and entering a completely new one when upgrading.

I think this can apply to any social community product that has a subscriptions based business model.

I’d like to offer my thanks to Alex for taking the time to answer my questions and for giving such detailed and insightful answers.

This guest post has been written by a great friend of Profy, David Knight, who blogs at KnightKnetwork.com and also covers WeeWar at The WeeWar Times.