Collaboration Lessions from Zynga

If you’re on Facebook, then you’re familiar with Zynga the ubiquitous Facebook game creator responsible for Yoville, Farmville, Mafia Wars and Café World – just to name a few. Zynga, whose mission statement is “Connecting the world through games” has capitalized on the success of  Facebook and other social media platforms with a group of games that vary from the simulation games like Café World and Yoville to role play games like Mafia Wars to traditional card games like Poker or puzzle games like Scramble.

But Zynga’s  games all include a specific hook – they enlist you to invite and involve your friend in the game.  Through regular game play users are urged to collaborate in order to maximize their game play experience.  

As Café World has been my addiction, I’ll use examples from it to illustrate my point but I’m sure the many of the same functions carry over to other games.

In Café World you begin with your own small café, a few tables, a stove and a serving table. You also have a beginning bank of Café Coins to buy items or food to operate your café. As you work through the game, you choose items to cook and serve and then receive Café Coins, Café Points and a Buzz Rating as computer based characters come to your business.  You strive to grow your business, gain and keep Buzz and increase your Café Coins or Café Bucks, while building Points and unlocking additional features – stoves, tables, and recipes you can cook. Zynga’s goal behind all this is to encourage you to spend money. They offer items for the game that can only be purchased with “real” money using Café Bucks.  While there are occasions in the game to earn Café Bucks, they’re usually not big opportunities.   While you can theoretically play Café World all on your own without other people, you will hobble yourself, or wind up spending  money by overlooking opportunities to work with others. 

Be Inclusive – You generally get introduced to Zynga games by invitation from someone in your social media circle.  This personalizes your entry to the game and increases the likelihood that you will at least give it a look – you know that someone you know is in the game and thinks it’s worth sharing.   

Be Accessible on Many Levels – With Café World you can randomly choose foods to cook and serve or you can use the information provided on cooking time, number of servings, costs and selling price to determine the items to cook that will maximize your profits.  As you get more money, you can expand and decorate, hire staff, change your layout and tweak the geography to maximize profits and buzz.  You can also figure out hacks in the game that allow you to speed up the process of getting items started and served.  The game design allows you to quickly learn and enjoy basic game play but the and interface gives you enough information and offers new challenges to allow you to continue to enjoy and participate in the game at whatever level fits your interest.

Provide Immediate Feedback – Café World provides multiple levels of feedback, Café Coins, Points, the above mentioned Buzz and also medals for specific sets of tasks like cooking for five consecutive days.  Buzz ratings determine the number of people who will come into your place. They’re affected by the quickness of the staff, the arrangement of the furniture and doors and the food you cook.  The feedback provided by the buzz ratings gives an up to date reading on how well you are playing the game.  Leave customers waiting too long for food and your buzz rating plummets,  provide a efficient layout for your chef, staff and customers and keep food provided and your buzz rating maxes out -  keep customers waiting because you don’t have food available, or your staff can’t easily reach customers with food and buzz plummets.

Encourage Users to Ask for Help – a core value of Café World is encouraging users to ask their friends and neighbors for help.  At times tasks come up for which there is no easy solution – you can spend money or you can ask friends to give you things.  This can get annoying if you send to friends who don’t play the game but it does encourage you to reach out and others are rewarded when they provide help by the game. 

Provide Rewards for Helping Others – Café World encourages you to send gifts of food or drink – or accessories like stove parts and spice bottles – to your neighbors. It also encourages you to visit neighbors’ cafes.  When you respond either the game or your neighbors generally respond in kind and you receive points or coins or food or accessories.

Provide Public Recognition – Café World attempts to share all your accomplishments with your entire Facebook group.  The game offers to post to your wall every time you move to a new level, cook the dish of the day, win an award, etc.  This can also get annoying to your friends if you don’t watch out –but the important take away is that the game attempts to share your accomplishments with your peers.

Keep Things Fresh – Zynga ensures that players will not get bored, or get every possible item by making small changes throughout the year.  Special dishes are introduced and removed based on holidays and themes, new furniture, fixtures and design elements are introduced with different themes. This encourages players to keep their design fresh – and to spend Café Coins or Bucks.

Encourage Coopetition -   Zynga allows you to compete with your friends. It ranks all the players within your Facebook circle of friends and shows you how far ahead or behind you are, but through encouraging you to work with others by sending gifts and visiting their Cafes, it demonstrates the ideals of coopetition – cooperating while competing with others.  

The Myth of Computer Productivity

Many studies have been done on the effect computers have had on productivity in the office, with mixed results.   Is the idea of computers improving office productivity a myth?  Or are businesses overlooking an important factor in getting the most out of their investment in technology?

When I entered a new job in a Microsoft Exchange shop – after 15 years working with Lotus Notes – the first thing I did was familiarize myself with the features in Outlook.  I have to admit that most of the features I was used to in Notes were available in Outlook.  By pouring through the help files, trying options on the menus and a few Google searches I had a pretty robust knowledge of the functions in Outlook.  I set up categories and color coded calendar items and tasks, I figured out how to set follow up flags, merge multiple calendars.  I set up folders in Email and organized data to keep my inbox down to just the top items I needed to act on.  Looking around the office at my fellow employees I noticed some of the same problems I’d seen with the bulk of the my Notes users at the gas company.

• Users ,  especially top managers who never delete anything from their inbox

• Managers who print out emails, hand write instructions on them and put them in subordinates physical inboxes or on their desktop or chair instead of forwarding or assigning as a  task

• Administrative assistants who don’t know how to create a meeting request and instead email memos around to set up regular staff meetings.

• Users  who don’t know how to add email addresses to their personal address book and instead use the addresses cached in the email client.

• Users who have no idea how to use their contact or calendar information on their blackberry or iphone.

• Departments using  a paper calendar to schedule the use of resources like conference rooms instead of adding the resource to the system.

• Users emailing the same document to the whole department  rather than storing it in a common place and using a link.

The problem is a lack of training. While companies may spend time and money training employees on ERP applications they fail to provide training in using collaboration tools. Managers seem to think “hey, it’s just email how hard can it be to use”.    

• Users trained on all the calendaring, scheduling and contact management features included in their email application can better manage their time and locate the people they need to work with.  

• Managers who keep their schedules in their online calendar and expect their subordinates to do the same – and who use the calendar application to book meetings, schedule rooms, projectors, and laptops – will soon find their department functions more smoothly.

• Managers who understand how to use categories in their calendaring and scheduling with have a more visible cues  to their schedule for the day.

• Managers who understand the task management functionality of their system can more easily delegate and items and follow up with subordinates. 

• Users who manage their inbox filing items in folders or deleting if no longer needed will get a faster performing system and will stop losing important emails in all the clutter.

• Users who have a grasp of the calendaring and scheduling functions in their email will be better able to make use of mobile computing to keep up with tasks and contacts away from the office.

Email was the killer application for the 1990s. Within the enterprise it’s still extremely important, but even more important is a collaborative infrastructure that combines email with contact and time management.   The good news is ALL the major players in the market have the functionality in their product – they just have never been fully embraced and used by the enterprise.  A few techie experts won’t be enough, the collaborative tools of the enterprise need to be embraced at all levels.