Spencer Liu, community, and how machine learning identifies narcissists – VB Engage

This week, Travis and Stewart interview Spencer Liu, CEO of KTplay, about the importance of community, how to build one in a smartphone-driven world, and how mobile games can benefit from bringing fans together.

In the news, we discover machine learning techniques that can identify who you are from just your social media status updates. We also find out why a shopping bot won a major award at SXSW and get an update on where we are with 360-degree livestreaming video. Hint: Wide-scale adoption is just around the corner.

• Welcome to VB Engage episode 46! [0:10]
• VB Engage is coming up on a one-year anniversary. [00:45]
• Be on the lookout for an epic competition/giveaway from Huawei in the next few weeks. (Hint) [00:55]
• We have some epic episodes coming up, with Noah Kagan, Jon Miller, John Rampton, Everette Taylor Jr., and Sujan Patel. [01:30]
• We’ve talked a lot about machine learning and cognitive computing, and Mariya Yao wrote an article about Cambridge Analytica on VB this week. [02:35]
• Five secrets about you that machine learning pulls from your social media posts [03:10]
• Cambridge Analytica has been around for a while, influencing election results. [03:50]
• Re: Myers-Briggs: Stewart is an ENTJ, Travis is an ENTP. [04:20]
• Before you’d need progressive profiling to get data about your customers, now you can just scrape their social profiles. [05:00]
• Not only can you get profile data about users, but, as we discussed with Sarah Austin in episode 004 of VB Engage, you can also discover their emotional intelligence. [06:00]
• IBM Watson and how it uses emotions and personality traits in marketing, as discussed with Stephen Gold in episode VB043. [06:30]
• A shopping bot won the SXSW Accelerator Pitch Competition this year. Here’s why. [07:15]
• Lily is a new chatbot that helps women buy clothes, with the aspiration of helping empower women to make them be the “best version of themselves.” [08:00]
• The CEO, Gupta, personally spent over 10,000 hours interviewing women about their online purchasing behavior. [08:40]
• There is a similar site for gentlemen, Proper Cloth, that will take your measurements, ask about your style, and generate custom clothes for you each week. [09:15]
• AI and machine learning are indeed making their way into all areas of our lives. [09:45]
• Travis wrote an article on 11 different AI and machine learning technologies this week. [10:05]
• Samsung released a new 360-degree livestreaming camera with 4K, through YouTube. [10:45]
• Livestreaming with a 360-degree camera with 4K — you’d better have a clean room, folks. [11:40]
• By the time we get to 2020, almost every human will have a smartphone. [12:00]
• Consumers will engage with brands through live video and augmented experiences. Brands need to begin thinking about all of this. [12:30]
• If you’re going live, make sure your content is quality. [13:15]
• Just because you can go 360 with 4K doesn’t mean that you should be going live. [14:00]
• Contractually, if Stewart is on video, it must be standard definition. [15:00]
• Soon VB Engage will do the news portion of our show on live video. Stay tuned! [15:30]
• In this episode, we will be interviewing Spencer Liu, CEO and cofounder of KTplay. [16:00]
• How do mobile game developers get people engaged? What can you do to stop people from uninstalling your game? [16:50]
• Engage your players through game design. Understand what your users are thinking. [17:10]
• As a game developer, do you realize that there are thousands of people playing online simultaneously? Is there a place where we can bring all these players together? [18:30]
• Most game developers use Facebook to build their game community, however, the engagement is not as effective. [19:30]
• If you are thinking of building a community, the first place you should consider is INSIDE your game, where your most loyal and active users are. [19:50]
• KTplay offers a simple SDK (software development kit) that is completely customizable. You can integrate your game in under 10 minutes. [20:00]
• You can curate your homepage, user-generated content, and media-rich discussion forums, where people can share their strategies and achievements, host live events, and much more! [20:50]
• There’s a whole lot of value in getting honest opinions from real people who have spent money on your game. [21:45]
• Social Media is still the best strategy to use for mobile game user acquisition. Facebook ranks first, Google and Twitter take second and third place, respectively. [23:50]
• The most successful games companies employ a lot of partners to increase user acquisition. However, that’s still useless unless you can keep people from uninstalling your app. [24:30]
• How do developers and marketers determine where they should focus their time and energy on developing their app? [25:00]
• It all boils down to driving downloads using paid advertising and business development through partnerships. [25:20]
• To retain users, you can always redesign your game and optimize the balance of your games. [26:00]
• A lot of players interact with each other in the community, creating quizzes and mini-games and talking about the game. User-generated content helps pull people back into the game. [26:40]
• The market in China is different from the market in the U.S. Competitions and leaderboards may not work as well in the U.S. [27:40]
• Chinese people love to pay real money to win. They tend to be highly competitive and are open to socializing inside the game. [29:30]
• Western players are more focused on the gaming experience. [30:30]
• KTplay was created after Spencer Liu got frustrated in Angry Bird’s Level 23 and started searching for a walkthrough online. [31:55]
• After being successful aggregating users, KTplay evolved into a retention-driven platform. It can now run events, highlight and feature posts, and encourage people to share the app by use of virtual currency incentives. [33:20]
• The key thing is to increase engagement. [34:10]
• How do in-app notifications play into this? How can you make sure that you are doing it effectively? [34:40]
• In-app notifications have to be relevant to where your players are in the game. [35:50]
• Use notifications to lead people into different forums or discussions to help them get used to the game mechanics and surround them with like-minded people. [36:40]
• Thank you, Stephen Liu, for joining us on VB Engage! If you are a mobile developer and trying to get more engagement in your app, check out KTplay. [37:50]

Next week, John Rampton will join us. He is an entrepreneur, journalist, author, and great influencer. He will be talking about engaging your audience and will share some of his thought process on being an entrepreneur.

If you missed last week’s episode, VB 044, Travis and Stewart interviewed Michael Stelzner, founder and CEO of Social Media Examiner. We talk with Michael about all things social, mobile, and the future of the world’s most popular communities. It’s an interview you won’t want to miss.

As always, thanks for tuning in. We’d love for you to subscribe, rate, and review the show on your favorite podcast channel, since that helps keep Travis from joining the circus.