Monday, November 03, 2008 Rama: Lessons from the Cosa Nostra By Karlon N. Rama Stage Five
I’VE been asked to join a mob.
My first job is to mug somebody for three hundred bucks, use the money to buy a crowbar and then burglarize somebody’s house and maybe make over a thousand more. And, if I do it right, I can make enough money to buy a gun and graduate to stealing cars and robbing liquor stores.
I did some checking. It turns out that The mob I’ve been invited to join has 449,057 members all over the world, as of Sept. 27, and a significant portion of that is from the Philippines.
It’s a good thing this mob only operates inside www.facebook.com. Otherwise, I would be part of the largest crime network in world history; not something that would look good in a journalist’s resume.
Anyhow, if anybody out there would like to go on this virtual crime spree with me, log on to the facebook website and add me up. My handle there is Kaloy Bugoy.
“Mob Wars” is an application inside facebook that was developed by David Maestri and launched in January of this year. It wasn’t an instant hit. It only averaged 331 active daily users on Jan. 27
But with close to half a million people using it actively eight months after, calling it popular would be an understatement.
The game has long gone beyond the realm of what is popular and has graduated to viral status. It is rumored to make more than a million dollars a month in advertising revenues.
An analysis of the game posted at blog.kissmetrics.com pins the application’s tremendous growth in such a fairly short period of time to adoption of a viral invite model.
No, it does not use a computer virus to get people to join. What this simply means is that a user invites several friends, each of which will, in turn, invite several of their friends, and so on and so forth.
To get a user to invite others to join, the application offers, or at least used to offer, incentives like virtual cash to the inviter to buy the weaponry any self-respecting mobster ought to have.
But it also structured the game in such a way that certain heists could only be pulled off it a mobster recruits others to help him or her carry it out.
Moreover, the game’s creator drew heavily from psychology and capitalized on social status as a natural human motivation for behavior. He also used one very practical tool, probably adopted from sports—leaderboards.
Competing to gain social status is among the core activity of human beings, whether they are conscious of it or not.
Mob Wars utilizes this by making its users compete for social status by recruiting mobsters in the rush to build the largest mob possible—the user plus 500 others—and use the formed organization to attack and kill other mobs.
As motivation, the user that has the largest and most powerful mob gets a slot on a published “leaderboard” of “made men” and get recognized either as “most deadly,” “top fighter,” “top bounty hunter,” “top tycoon,” “most notorious” or “most wanted.”
In the Sun.Star Cebu newsroom, right after entering the glass swivel door marked central newsroom, is an 11 x 17 inch paper called the scoreboard. Listed there are titles of “scoops”—stories that appear exclusively in Sun.Star—and “outscoops,” stories that appear exclusively in other papers.
There is a separate category for “better written”—meaning stories that are not exclusive to the paper but were presented better.
Beside the list of scoops are the initials of the news reporters that generated the exclusive storyies.
And beside the list of outscoops is the name of the newspaper where the story exclusively appears. The list does not name who is responsible for not getting the story. It does not have to. Reporters in Sun.Star are organized into clusters, each with a specific area of coverage and concern.
The scoreboard is helpful in determining current performance versus the competition and to motivate reporters to be on the cutting edge. We are all mobsters there; every one of us.
