5 Things to Keep in Mind on Empire Avenue

Empire Avenue: My Portfolio

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I have been having some fun with this site Empire Avenue. It’s one part economics game, one part social network, and one part social media metric. While that sounds very strange, in practice it’s one of those things that are easy to learn and difficult to master. The basic concept is simple…you set up an account, connect your social media feeds, and the system evaluates you along several lines…how many followers you have, how many posts, the quality of both your connections and your content. I’m not sure how they evaluate such things, and I have seen some truly bizarre evaluations of some people, but for the most part it seems to work pretty well.

Then, based on this evaluation, the system puts a value on you and some shares to sell. That’s right, you just went public as a corporation of you, and shares are for sale. You get a starting amount of the currency of the site (called Eaves), when you begin, and based on your activity on the site and on your connected sites, you earn money each day. When you start buying shares in people, you’ll start to receive returns on those investments each day as well.

That’s the premise, and it is, in its basis, incredibly simple. It’s surprising people didn’t think of this before. But as you get sucked in, there are a few things you pick up.

1. When trying to mention someone you need to use their ticker, not their name. Just like on twitter, or anything else, the parser looks for the trigger @ and then one word…on this site, a ticker name. My ticker is (e)NEALJANSONS, in case you would like to buy a few shares.

2. I don’t want to exchange blog endorsements, investments, likes, retweets, reblogs, or anything else. You shouldn’t, either. That crap ruins social media. It just turns into a bunch of idiots patting each other on the back…a lot of noise and no signal. If you are interested and willing to take the time, LOOK at my content. READ it. If you think it’s useful or interesting, then endorse it. I will extend you the same courtesy, and regardless of whether you endorsed and shared my content, if I like your stuff, I will endorse, like, tweet, share, and everything else. That’s just the kind of guy I am.

3. Your connections need to be to valid sites. That means your blogs need to lead to somewhere; I have seen more than one 404 page and blog not found.

4. If you are going to indulge in illegal substances, don’t put it in your bio or your timeline. I have actually seen a bio that said “Do nuthin but SMOKE WEED ALL DAY!!!” Now, I don’t know if this was meant in the descriptive (he does nothing but smoke weed all day) or the imperative (it is his demand that I do nothing but smoke weed all day) sense, but in either case it’s a bad idea to put this kind of thing in you bio. I know there is a strong case for legalization, and this is San Francisco, but once something is on the internet, it’s here forever. When you find yourself trying to get a job and your prospective employer googles you, this is what they will see. Just assume anything you write anywhere is going to be seen by your mother (or spouse, professor, client, or boss as appropriate).

5. Offer something of value. I have seen people write posts in the “Writing” community that simply said “buy me”. No capitalization, no punctuation…but worse than anything, the person didn’t engage, didn’t say anything of value. I saw another person whose twitter feed was simply the numbers 1-100. Needless to say, he didn’t have many followers, but that wasn’t his real goal…his goal was to get his tweet count up for Empire Avenue. Don’t do this, and don’t encourage it. It’s easy to get a bad reputation in this community…people do remember names and faces here.

Now get out there and buy and sell! GREED IS GOOD!

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