THE SOCIAL TIMES — A recent NetProspex report studied the social network activity and popularity of the employees within various large businesses in the United States and found that EA was the most social games company. The scores for each company were measured by looking at the number of major social network friend connections, Twitter followers and Tweets by each employee and summed up across the company. EA followed Microsoft, eBay and Disney in the ranking. The report also found some interesting statistics about business social network usage in general. 30.3% of the people who used Twitter for business were female, according to the report entitled the "NetProspex Social 50"...

DIGITAL INFLUENCE BLOG — Nate Ralph of Wired was on to something when he wrote in a 2008 article, "...there’s a largely untapped market that enjoys having fun, but can’t be bothered with system requirements or even plugging something into their TV." With Zynga, creator of FarmVille, recently valued at $4 billion dollars and established game companies such as Electronic Arts jumping on board, games are becoming a legitimate interactive social channel for the masses. Why Would Your Brand Consider Partnering With A Social Game?...

THE SOCIAL TIMES — EA is promoting Saboteur, one of their newest console titles, by creating a Facebook quiz application that involves videos and content from the game. The application isn’t a full-fledged game, but does have a quiz element and leaderboards to compete with friends. There are also prizes to the top players, including an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas. The game basically asks you to identify details from promotional videos or photos from the Saboteur console game...

INSIDE FACEBOOK — In the frozen void of space, a now derelict mining vessel has had a communications failure. Unfortunately, for engineer Isaac Clarke, the USG Ishimura isn’t quite so derelict after all, as its inhabitants are now the skittering, the lumbering, and the grotesque horrors that hail from the deepest corners of the galaxy. This, of course, is the basic premise behind the sci-fi, survival horror game, Dead Space from Electronic Arts’ studio, Visceral Games. As a popular title among the horror genre, the folks over at Visceral are looking to make the next one even better, as they work to spark up some buzz for their next deep space adventure...

THE SOCIAL TIMES — Recently, we noticed that RockYou had been promoting it’s ZooWorld application by using graphic ads on the Meebo chat service. This is certainly another sign of the growth of Facebook games, not only in reach, but in value to advertisers, as they pay to make placements on disparate networks or in this case, chat aggregators. We investigate how other game companies are attracting users to their Facebook games from outside of Facebook...