Shivaji Sengupta

Social gaming is no more limited to Facebook, other social media platform like MySpace are rapidly looking to enhance their social gaming experience. The social gaming market has matured quickly over the past three years, and the features & dynamics of online gaming are reaching out to the entire gaming landscape.

Game developers for social websites and other online platforms develop certain practices when designing and delivering new game:

1. Game definition

The initial phase of game development or game definition is the phase where developers identify the client’s goals, objective and budget. Using these three factors as benchmarks, developers design a theme for the application in accordance with the given budget.

2. Marketing

Marketing the application is vital, since it defines how the application will be positioned and how successful it will be. The marketing best practice revolves around identifying the target audience, choosing different platforms to release the game, monetizing the success, social network dynamics and the action plan.

3. Research

In the research phase of a new game, developers examine target audience expectations and their overall requirements. This practice ensures that the game is suited for their target market, there are delighting elements in the game and that the application is profitable.

4. Monetization

The monetization strategy of a game should be developed before application development begins. Unless a game is free, there should be defined guidelines for advertising, payments, offers etc.

5. Specifications

Developing a detailed functional specification of the game is the next best practice after understanding the business, marketing, research, and monetization strategy. A detailed game specification is developed accordance to the client’s goals.

6. Storyboard & Script

Defining a basic story and developing a full range of game play options are the first steps in arriving at the script. The script governs all the game play and activity a user can conduct during game play.

Upon script completion the developer creates a storyboard. The storyboard organizes the game in sequence, displaying illustrations, videos and images in order of the script.

7. Social game development

Completion of the concept, script and storyboard marks the development of backgrounds, characters, models and produce audio. When developing social games an array of polls is used to make sure the game is executed effectively and user expectations are met.

8. Quality assurance & Compatibility testing

To identify bugs and glitches a comprehensive testing phase is performed to ensure that all eligible platforms support the game. The testing assures platform compatibility, game play consistency, compatibility and usability of the application.

9. Hosting

Usually, best practices for game development end at quality testing. Some developers are also able to offer clients shared or dedicated hosting services and where required manage the game for the client. This provides professional monitoring and support to clients and provides control over errors.

10. Distribution

Social media networking allows gaming companies striking opportunities to distribute social games over social websites where users can return daily. Game development companies can also undertake distribution of games over social media networks allowing brand marketers to release their service to millions of users worldwide. Developers also adopt the best practice to manage low cost PPC advertising to supplement and accelerate distribution through social media.

Today in this recession filled atmosphere more than ever, it is important to have good relationship with your customers. Placing your customers at the heart of your business is the core of sound customer relationship management. Customer relationship management needs to ultimately be a win-win situation for both the customer and the organization.

CRM best practices are followed at various levels in any organization. Ideally, they can be implemented at the organizational level or the customer service level. Therefore CRM includes everything that deals with customer interaction, sales promotion, marketing and other services.

At the core, customer relationship management is not very different than developing customer loyalty. The aim of CRM best practices is to take a customer from a routine interaction to a poignant relationship. This goal is realized by many organizations yet the two most important parts of customer relationship are often found missing:

1. Technology

2. Managing customer relationships with the help of other members like employees, affiliates etc.

Being a customer relationship manager, you wish to develop a sound relationship with your customer. Determining what your customer needs is what separates you from others in customer relationships. It is the primary goal of an organization to utilize CRM for acquiring, and then retain better customer relationships for getting competitive advantage.

If you have customer loyalty by your side, it will drive profitability. However, before you have a strategy for CRM; it is essential to determine what actually drives customer loyalty. Your first step to determine this is to devise some way to measure customer satisfaction. This way, you will be able to understand better customer retention or customer acquisition success rates.

While you define your business objectives, the CRM strategy needs to be devised along with it. This will help you place the customer needs on the table when the business goals are decided.

The next step is to identify your customers. The customers for different organizations tend to vary. For instance, in an automobile marketing company, the car dealer happens to be your customer but the call center department of the same company will target the drivers. Through the different contact points, like call center, retail, web, e-mail etc. your customers need to be defined. At this stage, you might also want to segment your potential customers into high value and low value customers and then find out what the customer wants and how you can serve him.

Your next step is to aim for an integrated customer strategy. At present, the interactive form of marketing exists in a fragmented form. Here the marketers have to co-ordinate with various vendors in order to develop and execute marketing plans. Usually, the business managers use tactics to address the products rather than the customers.

In the next stage, you have to identify and plan data requirements of the customer. You have to find out the relevant data that is required and from which source you can achieve it.

When you interact with your customer, be very clear in defining who you are, what product or service you are promoting and how you can gain the trust of your customer. In fact, all your CRM strategies and best practices come down to this one step when you have a dialogue with your customer. You can further ask the customers about how they wish to interact with the company. Try to stick to the promises and when they are kept, remind your customers about them.

Try to get a little personal with the customers. They won’t like the idea that you are just reading out to them from a sales pitch. Understand each and every customer separately and then target your service. Make the client feel that he is important to your organization.

Design metrics to find out whether or not your CRM best practices have been a success. For this, the involvement and feedback from customers is important. But this is an ongoing process and you alone have to determine at which stage you want to test the rate of customer acquisition, growth and retention.