Buzzfeed president @Jon Steinberg -Empire Avenue ticker (e)JONSTEINBERG take note: last night I, (e)DOMINOORACLE experienced the #SixDegreesofKevinSpacey effect. (For those who don’t want to read the blog post, it’s a game to see how far behind you Kevin Spacey- or some other Twitter Celebrity (with or without Tigerblood) is following on Twitter. Except instead of being on Twitter in my case it was on the social media stock market game Empire Avenue.

I was able to  influence a recent EAv connection, (e)Caleb  Storkey, to mention the #SocialEmpire Facebook group while he was on a conference call from the UK with Robert Scoble (e)SCBL (his name links to a video interview he recently did with the founder of Empire Avenue), Jeremiah Owyang (e)JOWYANG and Neil Pierce. Soon after, Jeremiah Owyang became a member of our Facebook group, a person who is FB friends with the likes of Cameron Gross (@Best Buy) Jeffrey Leong (@Cisco) and Alan Young (@Google) among many others. As the CEO of Sanera (e)ALIARENAS put it in her blog post about joining Empire Avenue, “My friends, this only happens in social media”.

One of the main things about Empire Avenue which makes events like this possible is that it has now become not only a social media metrics site (better than Klout and PeerIndex in Jeremiah’s opinion) and a game, but also a true social media platform in and of itself due primarily to the newly added chat function. I’ve rarely seen the number of people who have chat enabled on site (not all do by any means) drop below 100 users, day or night. So, the way things happened was: I connected in chat with Caleb a few days ago and then invited him to join us in #SocialEmpire. He now appears to be well and truly hooked on both the game and the group.

When Jeremiah poked his head into a chat we were in last night, a conference call was set up on Skype, which you can read more about on Caleb’s blog. Since Jeremiah joined Empire Avenue a few days ago, I’ve not been able to keep tabs on all the new arrivals to the game, they’ve been coming in so fast. The highlights of yesterday were when (e)AUDI (e)LINCOLN and (e)FORD all made their EmpireAve IPOs. Scott Monty (e)SMONTY , Ford’s social media director joined the game in the last week, so no doubt those IPOs were a result of that. Today, (e)INTEL  is inside Empire Avenue and Verizon Insider (e)VZINSIDER is also inside. No, the preceeding was not an inside joke about insider trading…

So, with these major businesses now jumping into this “now not so little game” what would be the incentive for ordinary people with social media metrics like mine (for example) to join you may ask. Well, networking in chat and communities, showing your approval or disapproval of people and brands’ content by buying and selling virtual stock, keeping track of how your SM platforms are doing and where they could be improved are just a few of the possibilities. Finding good interesting content based on interests and communities is also a possible reason. Plus, if the big brands don’t engage (prior examples would be (e)SEARS and (e)OREO ) you can even beat their shares prices if you do become active and engaged. My share price is nearly double that of Sears’ and my wealth is around 40x what that company has simply because they’ve elected (so far) not to be active in the game.

But, let’s be more down to earth for a minute and pretend you’re looking for work as you read this post. Do you know about #HireFriday on Twitter? It was started by the current Vice-President on EAv’s Human Resources and Recruiting index, Margo Rose (e)HIREFRIDAY in order to help those looking for work promote themselves. She’s shooting for a million community members by year’s end. Whether you’re seeking work, content, metrics, networking or just fun and games, Empire Avenue may have something of value to offer you. Every piece of content we produce has some value, even a 140 character Tweet; Empire Avenue is working on quantifying that value.

Oh, I’ve also made a couple of PeerIndex lists: Empire Avenue players (completely incomplete with “only 1400 names so far) and Social Strategists (based on Jeremiah Owyang’s list).

ETA: fresh new Empire Avenue posts hot off the presses from both Jim Durbin (e)SMHEADHUNTER and Mike Newton  (e)MIKENEWT

Added Saturday evening: A friend, (e)LIBDRONE  from the #SocialEmpire FB group blogged today about Scott Monty (e)SMONTY and the addition of (e)FORD to the game and got a comment on his blog post from Scott. It turns out that Scott Monty has also blogged about the game in addition to tweet mentions. I had a chat earlier this evening on Empire Avenue (e)EAV with (e)RICHQUIGLEY (LI profile) from News Broadcast Network who was just another new face on the boards until I replied to his chat status with my chat status…

Tags: #SocialEmpire, Empire Avenue, name dropping, Social Empire, social media, social networks
Categories: Buzzfeed, Empire Avenue, name dropping, networking, Robert Scoble, Six Degrees of Kevin Spacey, social media, social networking

This entry was posted on Friday, April 22nd, 2011 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Buzzfeed, Empire Avenue, name dropping, networking, Robert Scoble, Six Degrees of Kevin Spacey, social media, social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.