I love Facebook.  I really do.  And it would be incredibly easy to spend my entire day there chatting to friends, trading status updates and comments and playing some of the many games that have been developed as apps for the site.  And there’s an extent to which that behaviour could even be justified by some of the work I’m doing at the moment, since social networking has become an important component of start-up marketing strategies everywhere.

But there are some inherent dangers to getting too involved with Facebook.  Beyond the ‘Facebook ate my life’ scenario where the only people you ‘talk’ to are Facebook friends you’ve barely met more than a couple of times in real life, and the pitfalls of posting on Facebook when you should be either hard at work or have called in sick with a migraine and your boss happens across it, there are some other areas that need exploring with caution.

Mafia Wars is one of them.  Similar to apps like Robin Hood, it involves earning cash and points and levelling up.  And you can improve your chances of success by increasing the size of your mafia, which means either inviting your friends or exchanging points for virtual mafiosi.  So far so good.  I started playing the game this afternoon after being invited by one of my friends to start playing and join their mafia.

While I should probably have expected that such a thing would exist, I was nonetheless surprised to see that there is at least one group dedicated to the task of helping people grow the size of their mafia.  Surely they could invite their own friends and not resort to strangers?  Well, actually, I get why people don’t invite their own friends.  For one thing, depending on your age group, computer games are simply something you don’t admit to playing unless it’s a hand or two of poker.  As a long-standing Runescape fan I have less hesitation at admitting my love of gaming, but from there to inviting a friend to play Mafia Wars when I have no idea whether they like that kind of thing or not… let’s just say it’s not going to happen.  

And I really am not sure quite why it works.  Mafia Wars, while better resolved than Robin Hood in so many ways, is still a very slow, clunky game.  I really couldn’t tell you what the appeal of the game was.  My own experience of Robin Hood had me bored within a short space of time and that was that.  There’s nothing that really happens and it soon just gets to be about how many people you can get involved in your gang.  While MW does have more complex gameplay, it’s still not that great compared to the many other MMORPGs on the market.

But this is Facebook, so maybe there are other factors at play.  Out of idle curiosity, I had a look at the group my friend had joined and discovered a wall post that allowed people to request adds and invitations.  Complete strangers inviting other complete strangers to become part of their friends network with the sole purpose of having enough bodies to advance further in Mafia Wars.  Now, it’s entirely possible some real friends may develop from this, as is the case in many an online forum or game.  But the next generation of this is already in place - people developing a different Facebook identity in order to add lots of random people to their mafia, which is clearly not what the game’s developers intended.

For someone who uses social media to help clients spread the word about their product or service, the idea of this is in equal measures appealing and worrying.  It’s appealing because it allows me to cherry-pick a bunch of people to add as friends before inviting them to join me on MW.  I can simply pick people from UK networks and I suddenly have up to 500 new contacts to add on MW who, as ‘friends’ will get to see my status updates.  Which is great for helping promote sites, groups and pages, because some 650+ people can see each of my updates, assuming they’re not hiding me on their home page.  Even with a 1% conversion rate, I get 6 or 7 people buying into what I’ve promoted, and each of those has other friends who will see their ‘news stories’ and have the opportunity to investigate what it is and join in for themselves.

So there’s a huge capacity to tap into the networking side of this.  On the other hand, if everyone playing MW decides to add 500 total strangers, they will either have to stop reading their news feed from simple overload, or they will start hiding the majority of the new friends so they can focus on those people they actually want to hear from.

I decided to conduct an experiment.   I added a few people at random from the group.  Within 10 minutes I had 10 new friends, who are all now part of my mafia, as I am part of theirs.  And the results so far are interesting.  While my personal instinct, and that of some other players, is that I’d like the option to separate off different categories of friends in order to keep my news stories relevant in a real world context, other people are enthusiastically playing the game, letting it publish stories to their news feed and using their status to invite friends to join their mafia, as well as to ask people to send them items they need to complete ‘jobs’ in the game.  And other players are responding, so clearly not everyone is filtering yet.

While I’m only a sample size of one, so I won’t go reading too much into my own reactions, I’m looking forward to watching how this develops.  Either there is huge potential to tap or it’s a flash in the pan, and right now it’s too close to call.  I’m sure a few of my fellow mafiosi will be happy to answer some questions on their experiences, so maybe we can get some actual research into this.

Want to be part of the experiment?  Add me on Facebook and invite me to join YOUR mafia

m xxx