Noticeboard: AlphaMapper Facebook Contest!

Clear out your schedule for this upcoming Saturday, because you'll need the free time for a new contest coming to the AlphaMapper Facebook Page!

Sometime after 12:01 VRT on Saturday, an image will be posted on that Facebook page.  The image will be a screen capture from AlphaMapper itself... and once it is up, the game is on!  It will be up to fans of the page to scramble to find exactly what part of Alphaworld that the image came from!  If you're unfamiliar with AlphaMapper, it is a great utility that you can use to see 'satellite images' of Alphaworld.  The utility allows you to find coordinates in the world and save a web link that you can use to visit the location again on the map!  These web links will be used in the contest -- when you find the correct coordinates, just navigate to the top of AlphaMapper and click 'Link to Location.'  A link will appear, and you can submit that link to win the contest!

The winner of this contest will recieve a one month citizenship.

You have to be a fan of the AlphaMapper Facebook Page to participate in the contest, so get to it!  Byte keeps the page updated often, and he's made some really exciting progress towards the next update of the AlphaMapper!  So as I said, get to it, and good luck everyone! :)

UPDATE: You no longer have to be a fan of the Facebook page to participate, and Byte has added Twitter to the mix as well!  This forum thread has all of the details -- submission will be handled by e-mail now, and the content will only be posted to the Facebook or Twitter pages.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/AlphaMapper/159877450713342
Twitter: http://twitter.com/AlphaMapper

A Closer Look at Advertising: Utilizing Twitter

Let me just get it out there now: I have a history with this idea.  Active Worlds doesn't have a very big presence on the Twitter scene, but I think we get fair use out of it. Flagg's twitter feed, for example, currently boasts 77 followers as well as having the feed displayed on several websites, such as this one.  SW City Interactive has had its own 'Switter' feed integrated for a couple of years now that is actually fairly popular around town.

Twitter gets a bad rap sometimes for over-emphasizing the insignificant, but when you're dealing with virtual worlds the potential for rapidly changing or spontaneous events makes a quick and easy solution like Twitter a desirable tool to keep on our belt.

SW City Interactive users can post messages to @SwitterSWI via kwout

Content creators in Active Worlds stand to benefit from the use of Twitter in a couple of ways.  The first is its ease: everything has been done for you.  You don't have to design a website, you don't have to pay anyone; you've just got to set it up and go.  140 characters or less, preferably.  Twitter, or any social media situation really, is a quick platform for providing quick updates to people who are interested in the same things you are.  If you already have a good following, this is cake!  If you don't, it isn't to hard to spread the word. :)  Read on!

A Closer Look at Advertising: What should activeworlds.com represent?

For all of the points I hit on yesterday concerning advertising, it completely slipped my mind to mention the recent changes to activeworlds.com -- the first impression of Active Worlds to most new users.  After years of a stagnant and static front page, activeworlds.com finally received a face lift several weeks ago. Surely the community would be esctatic!  An update, finally!  Well, it certainly got a lot of feedback... most of it was pretty negative.  For the forum community, at least, no failure was too minimal to drag out and beat to death... and then some. There are spots to improve on, certainly, but yeesh! I'm still not sure who is responsible for the updates, but I'll take this time to commend them for continuing to apply minor tweaks since the initial update.  The flaming forum barrage surely would have driven off a lesser person.

At any rate, I'm not going to use this as a sounding board to pass judgment on the site as is -- I think we've covered that well enough.  Rather, I'm more interested in the potential of what Active Worlds' homepage should be; what it should do, and what it should represent.

Is grassroots advertising the answer for Active Worlds?

Of the things I would say that I am not, a social builder would be one of them.  This is probably perplexing if given any thought, because I enjoy building towns and even the occasional collaboration -- but that isn't my preference.  To be honest, I feel that I've come to a compromise with townbuilding because the projects I like to build are so massive -- mountain ranges, neighborhoods, cities -- that it would be impractical to have a single builder on the project.

This may explain some of my more recent projects, such as incentive neighborhoods in the Southern Highlands and Builder's Challenge. I tend to set up a context as a larger, pre-existing environment that builders come in and fill.  Still social in a way, but I'm never building alongside others -- I'm a before and after thought.

Either way, the challenge and experience gained by working with other builders in this way has been invaluable to me personally, so I'm always glad to see new builders coming through.  New builders have new ideas, and that can inspire all sorts of things in a project.  This sort of truth is behind my approval of a trend that citizen Urbane Chaos has taken to lately -- writing articles about Active Worlds around the web.  And what an article! Most everything I'd want to tell someone about Alphaworld is nicely formatted and ready to go on that page.  This should bring in new builders by the truckload, right?

Well, maybe.  I've dabbled in a bit of this myself -- with limited success.  If you follow the forums you may remember that we made FARK.com last year during the There fiasco, which drew a few older members out of the woodworks.  I'll occasionally spread links on social networks and have taught others how to use them effectively, and personally I feel that this as a method of advertising has a lot of potential.  If you'll notice, Flagg has picked up on it in the past few months... utilizing re-tweeting to spread his message and starting a Facebook Fan Page to get the userbase mobilized in advertising.

Twitter / Flagg: AWI's ONE-DAY SALE Announc ... via kwout

Active Worlds hasn't really had any sort of advertising for years, and I think this may as well have been their un-official policy all along.  Word of mouth; if it's a good product, you'll tell your friends about it.  Before social networking, this was unreasonable... and the Active Worlds Universe has really suffered because of it.

These days... I don't know, is it?

I feel like a lot of us have given up on that route some time ago, but it may be worth it to revisit the idea.  In Urbane Chaos' example, I had never heard of hubpages before visiting... but they seem to have it all right there.  The method here is to write and article, and use their tools to add some pictures and make it visually interesting.  There are numerous feedback options -- including facebook integration -- that then allows readers to take the article and share it how they will.  In this particular case, some AW citizens have done so by sharing it on their facebook feed.

Other avenues have also seen success -- Flagg's retweet contest drew 12 retweets (about 7 more than I had anticipated), and reached at least a few hundred additional people because of it.  He threw in a prize for incentive, but I really see potential there.  A good number of tweets can get passed over before something really sticks, and it only takes one to get the attention of hundreds.

As social networking outlets gain in popularity, it seems that this idea that was once asinine and destructive may actually be viable now.  Given the current situation, I'd say it is worth a shot.  At least with these few anecdotes, I see the potential for a successful advertising campaign.

What do you think?