Casino Enterprise Management

This article is a summary of an in-depth upcoming CEM article that covers social networking.

Social Networks, the Mass Personal Communication

Social network analysis is a hot topic in the business world today, we only have to look at the influence of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn on how people are interacting today to see the influence of social networks. Refer to https://casinoenterprisemanagement.com/blog/twitter-most-talked-about... for a CEM blog on social networking.

One uses social network analysis [SNA] to  map and measure the relationships and flows of information between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other information/knowledge entities connected through a network. The nodes in the network are the people or groups of people while the links are used to show relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA is used to provide both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships. SNA is used in the business world where it is referred to as the Organizational Network Analysis [ONA].

These networks of interactions present a huge wealth of behavioral information; they also represent a sea change in how communication between people and organizations is taking place. In the past, communication was either mass media or personal, but now we have the new method which can be called ‘the mass personal’. In fact “research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.”

In this world of mass personal communication we are dealing with a connected lattice of interactions. Individual people become broadcast houses sharing their experiences with hundreds of others. With the advent of Twitter we can expect our players to be broadcasting their gaming and gaming service experiences in realtime. To test this idea a search using www.monitter.com for “Megabucks” found a series of discussions relating to two tourists winning the jackpot and peoples’ opinion on this topic. Now let us take this to the next step and we will have twitter users monitoring jackpots and service events in a casino. It may well be that these users will be more up to date with these events than the property itself.

This immediate information dispersal makes the communication mechanisms of the past to be far too slow. The implications are fascinating when you add the ability of gas the owner of the “Megabucks” jackpot to join into this communication directly with the customers. 

Communication Techniques

By breaking the type of communication down into two dimensions, the first representing if the message is a dialogue or a monologue and the second representing if the message is delivered to a broad group of individuals. This breaks the communication into four groups.

                  Dialogue    Monologue
Targeted     Email/Mail    Custom Media
Broadcast   Social          Mass Media

Targeted Monologue (Mail)
This mode of communication is normally conducted as an email or mail. In this dialogue both parties are engaged in a one to one communication. In marketing, this communication is focused on “having the knowledge on the consumer preferences, there are suggested personalized products and promotions to each consumer.”

One key constraint in this mode of communication is that when we design these promotions we do not expect customers to communicate the details of their offers to other customers. This independence of offers enables us to establish a statistical control groups so we can attempt to measure the effect of a marketing program. This process enables the construction of A/B marketing programs where we can determine the influence of one variable, for example the amount of freeplay offered to potential players, on the result, for example did the customers give the casino an extra trip.

Targeted Dialogue (Customer Survey)
In this communication we expect a response to the request (the survey instrument), this kind of communication can take the form of a “survey” either by phone interview or an internet survey to gain customer feedback. This feedback, while typically in much smaller volumes that the A/B marketing programs and has the potential of providing more information.

Broadcast Monologue (Media)
Mass media methods are used to broadcast some message to a broad and often untargeted audience. These methods are often associated with acquisition marketing efforts or general brand awareness efforts.

Broadcast Dialogue (Social Networking)
Enter the effect of the broadcast dialogue and the social network. With the 350 million active Facebook users in December 2009 (up from 220 million in June 2009) we simply cannot avoid facing up to the fact that our customers now control a huge communication medium, a medium where they implicitly trust most of the information they are sharing.

On the Twitter website, they describe how twitter “connects you to your customers right now, in a way that was never before possible.” This immediate communication makes us a mere participant in the immediate dialogue that our customers are already engaged in. Now our customers may be providing trusted advice on where to game, where to eat and sharing experiences, while we are thinking about measuring the response to the A/B marketing program for next months marketing efforts.

The Analytical Challenge
As this sea of change in communication sweeps the world we need to address how we handle the analysis of our efforts. Questions like:

1)    How can we establish independence of our control groups as our customers share information?
2)    How can we determine the effect of a new gaming device when there is an invisible force of social networks influencing the games effectiveness?
3)    Are we now forced to communicate with social networks and not individuals?

Conclusion on Social Networking
Social networking creates an exciting new dynamics within the gaming floor. Our customers are now sharing information and experiences, traditional A/B measurements while still a powerful tool are likely to be replaced with clustering techniques where we must first establish groups of influence within our customer base. The effects of this  sea change technology are nearly impossible to predict but they are measureable. These measurements give us a chance to adapt the way we interact with our customers and become part of the social networking phenomena. The alternative is to close our eyes to these rapidly growing influences and hope that we make the right choices.