

Here’s one particularly “sexy” example of how Zynga uses all the data it harvests, related by Chief Game Designer Brian Reynolds in a SXSW Interactive panel entitled “The New Frontier of Social Gaming.”


…Right?
Apparently a lot of people didn’t think it so innocent. Reynolds said he and his team noticed an unusually high number of people sharing the accomplishment with friends, often with a message attached along the lines of “what is she doing to that sheep?!” Naturally, friends clicked through and started playing the game at an even higher frequency than before.
The beauty of it all is that, instead of freaking out about the X-rated “livestock malfunction,” Zynga took the accident as a lesson and started incorporating more sexually suggestive images into their News Feed stories:


“The kids don’t notice this stuff at all, but the parents love [it],” said Reynolds. “This doesn’t make us viral anymore [because Facebook changed the visibility of app stories] but they still have a very high engagement value.”
Everyone knows sex sells, but who would have been so clever to incorporate innuendo into a social game but Zynga. I have no doubt that its obsession with analytics helps the company regularly uncover effective strategies like this.