What Is Empire Avenue and Why Should I Care?

If you’ve spent any time following social media types on Twitter or reading their blogs, you may have noticed an increasing amount of chatter about Empire Avenue. This online game has actually been around for about a year now, but has recently started taking off among social media influencers across the web.

What is Empire Avenue you ask? To explain it simply, Empire Avenue is a virtual stock market for buying and selling shares in people and businesses. When you create a profile on EmpireAvenue.com, people can buy shares in you or your company. The value of your shares goes up as more people buy shares in you and as you interact with other social sites. It’s just a game, but it can be useful in showing you just how valuable you are in the social market. It’s got some pretty brilliant gaming mechanics built in, so you’ll probably find yourself checking in on your rankings pretty frequently.

Signing up is free, and you have the choice of signing up using your email address and password, or by connecting your Facebook account. If you don’t have a Facebook account yet, feel free to check out our post on How to Sign Up and Use Facebook later this week.

Once you’ve created your account, setup is easy:

Create a ticker symbol that represents you. Choose wisely. You can always change your ticker later, but it will cost you!
Upload a photo of yourself. It helps to keep your photo consistent with the one you use on other social networks so that people can easily identify you.
Connect your social networks. Each time you connect an account, your value goes up, and you unlock an “Achievement.” Achievements increase your value as well.

Invite friends and start investing to connect with more people and continue increasing your personal value.
Fill out your profile by adding your interests and writing a short bio to help you connect with people.
Join Communities based on cities and interests. You can also join or create private communities once you’ve been a member for over a week and have a share price of at least 14 Eaves.
Start chatting with other users using the Chat function at the bottom of your Empire Avenue screen. There are chat topics on everything from general questions on Empire Avenue, to tips for new users. Chats are a good way to start interacting with other users, and are great for finding information about features that you have questions about.
Aside from inviting friends and unlocking Achievements, you can buy or earn more Eaves (the Empire Avenue currency) at any time. You can either purchase them with real money, or earn them by completing tasks from Empire Avenue’s partner, Super Rewards.
With Super Rewards, you can watch videos, purchase magazine subscriptions, install applications, or take surveys to earn Eaves. Some of these rewards are free, and others are paid. You decide which rewards you want to take part in.

There’s no real risk in playing, and if you don’t want to spend a whole lot of time on Empire Avenue, you can still increase your value by going about your normal daily social activities. So go ahead and sign up at EmpireAvenue.com and start investing in your friends, colleagues, and followers. It’s fun, and you might even meet some cool people along the way.

Interested in learning more about new social tools? Check out our reviews on tools like GroupHigh, Sprout Social, and Mediafeedia on ExploringSocialMedia.com.

About Jess Ostroff

Jess Ostroff

Jess Ostroff is a digital marketing and social media virtual project manager for Social Media Explorer and Exploring Social Media. You can follow her on Twitter @jessostroff for musings on technology, music, and other topics related to location-independence and freelancing.

http://www.demeterinteractive.com Jesse Bouman

Are the community options and chatting the real value? I’m sorry, I don’t get why people are spending copious amounts of time on here.
http://socialmediaexplorer.com JasonFalls

Honestly, we haven’t seen a lot of value there either, other than there are
good folks there to chat with. But we find them on Facebook and Twitter,
too, so it’s not unique. EA is a game. It’s a game for geeks and it can be
addictive and fun, but it’s a game.
http://www.demeterinteractive.com Jesse Bouman

Fair enough. If it’s a game, I have no qualms with that. I’ve just heard people tell me that their is marketing and branding value which I don’t buy. No pun intended.
http://jameskoole.com James Koole

I’m not sure the “why should I care” part was answered. If it’s another way to measure influence, maybe it’s interesting, but it seems to require a lot of effort.

I tried Empire Avenue out after BlogWorld on the recommendation of @ChrisPirillo but I quickly found that my time was better spent building value through creating good content as opposed to trading “stocks” within this strange little economy.
http://socialmediaexplorer.com JasonFalls

Fair point, James. The why should care is, “If you dig games, it’s fun and
interesting to social media industry types. If you are trying to figure out
one (of hopefully many) measures of influence in the social media world, it
can give you an indication of who might have some influence. Beyond that,
perhaps you shouldn’t.” But that’s just my take (Jason). Jess and others may
have other opinions.
Anonymous

Hey James. I agree with Jason in that it’s just a game, and another online network to connect with people. The actual “value” that you generate through Empire Avenue might be more of a popularity contest and is based on who likes you rather than what your “influence” is across the Web. But again, it’s still a new platform, so it’s hard to tell. It may not be as useful as, say, Twitter is in building value/connections, so if you’re trying to delegate your time then maybe you shouldn’t care much about it at all!

Thanks for reading.
http://dustinryen.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/empire-avenue-a-valuable-tool-for-networking/ Empire Avenue – A valuable tool for networking | Dustin Ryen's Blog

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