Empire Avenue — Communities

At the risk of turning this blog into an Empire Avenue fansite I’ll venture another post about the ‘ave.

A new feature came out with the latest update to Empire Avenue — communities. This allows users to create and join groups of likeminded influencers in such realms as videogames, books, writing, or whatever else tickles their fancy.

As Adriel Hampton recently discussed on his blog these communities are the chance for people to get in early on Empire Avenue and carve out an area of expertise. Basically be the dominant dog in whatever interests in them before Empire Avenue goes mainstream.

In the first run of the Empire Avenue beta my stock did not move much but when Empire started allowing users to invite others after the ‘reboot’, I found myself soaring up the leaderboards, always in the top 20 on most lists, and sometimes even as in the top 10. This has increased the number of people reading my blog and the number of twitter followers that I have. People started noticing me once I hit the leaderboard.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing. I think some influencers see the leaderboard as an impossibility — I’ll never get my stock that high. And the truth is, for most people, that is correct. It is difficult and will become more difficult for people to ascend the global leaderboard. As more people come onto Empire I doubt I’ll hold my position there either.

Uhm, isn’t that discouraging?

No!

Realistically very few people will have the social clout and/or the time to play the Empire Avenue game to be the top of the overall leaderboards.

But as Adriel pointed out, it won’t be difficult at all to become the top of a niche. For myself I have my sights set on the Writing Community — since writing is what I do, that makes sense, right? I also plan to spend a lot of time engaging with the Videogames community discussions. This is one of the reasons that I think Empire Avenue limits the number of groups people can join — it puts a real value on each group and prevents the ‘overall leaders’ from dominating the rankings on each community group. They simply can’t join every community.

That gives the rest of us a chance.

What are you passionate about? What field do you consider yourself a leader in? Join Empire Avenue, create a community about that. This is a real opportunity to establish a foothold in a social network site that is going places. And fast!

If you need an invitation message me an e-mail address and I’ll hook you up — and I’ll even buy a few shares in you when you join.