Facebook Vanity URL

I was so excited last weekend when I grabbed my Facebook Vanity URL. I was actually at a party with friends…and you know those friends are good people when they have a laptop up that has the Facebook Vanity URL countdown clock on it.

At about 12:02am last Saturday I grabbed my URL..and it’s one more step in my quest to get to the frontpage of Google for the search term “Sam Houston”.

You can find me on Facebook at http://www.Facebook.com/SamHouston

What I did at E3: TweetMyGaming.com

Wow…I can’t believe it’s been a week since E3!  It feels like it was so long ago now, everything has been a bit of a blur and I’ve been pretty busy at work.  Lots of exciting stuff going on, and now I can finally talk about most of it!

First off, E3 was tons of fun!  It was a great chance for me to see some new friends (mostly people I met at GDC/on Twitter) and meet lots of new folks, as well as get an introduction to a different side of the industry.  There is a big difference between the attendance of GDC (students/developers and press) and E3 (markters/sales, press, and buyers), so it was really interesting to meet more folks on the marketing/sales side of things.

GamerDNA sent me to E3 to do all of our press interviews for a new project that we launched, called TweetMyGaming.com .  TweetMyGaming tracks all of the gaming conversations on Twitter in real-time, and shows you what the most popular games are right now.  It’s a project that I was involved with since day one, all the way from the conceptualization and finding a contractor, to the execution/product direction and then doing interviews with the press .  It’s something that I’m very proud of, and I’m happy that I’ve been able to do yet another project around something I’m very passionate about:  Twitter and Social Media.

So far the project has been quite successful for us, with interviews going up on Kotaku , Joystiq , and Destructoid .  Destructoid’s article even features some quotes from me, as Samit Sarkar was kind enough to do an interview with me earlier this week.  It’s pretty good article, so I hope you check it out!

When I was actually at the E3 Convention Center, I did a number of interviews with Current.Tv and MTV Multiplayer.  These turned in to daily segments, and MTV Multiplayer has put up theirs:

MTV Multiplayer - TweetMyGaming Day 1 Wrap-Up

MTV Multiplayer – TweetMyGaming Day 2 Wrap-Up

MTV Multiplayer – TweetMyGaming Day 3 Wrap-Up

TweetMyGaming/E3 marks for the first project and event that I’ve had the opportunity to speak directly with the press and do interviews.  All the feedback internally has been positive, so I’m really excited and happy that I was able to do this for the company.  My hope is that I’ll get to do this more often, it was a lot of fun!

In the near future I may do a brief post about E3 and what I saw there, mainly with pictures from my iPhone.  So until then…see you around and thanks for reading my blog!

Little bit of Catch-Up

Turns out that I haven’t been that great on keeping up with the blog this year.  Maybe I’m not cut out to be a blogger…but I’m glad I have it.  I’ve got an idea for a post about Twitter that I’ve been meaning to do…and I imagine I’ll also have a lot of stuff to talk about this summer because of all the adventures at work.

First off, GDC was a great time and I’m really glad I got to go.  Being at a convention that was filled with Game Industry Professionals was a very cool experience/feeling – you could really feel the tight knit community that the Game Industry has become.  Everyone knows each other, helps each other, great discussions are had, and tons of fun is had as well .  I definitely want to go back next year!

Since GDC things have been pretty busy both at work and outside of work.  Earlier this month I was given the opportunity to speak on a panel with Scott Macmillan and Darius Kazemi at the Independent Game Conference (IGC) in Boston.  Scott and Darius are two local independent game developer guys, and I’ve came to know and become friends with them mostly because of Twitter…so it was very fitting that we did a panel about “Networking for Indies” that focused on leveraging Twitter.  Overall I think we did a pretty good job and I learned a decent amount about what I’d like to do in the future, if I get the chance to do a similar panel.  It was my first panel/time speaking at a conference, so I’ll strike it up as a WIN!

My last bit of news that I wanted to document was that I’m going to E3 next week!  When I look back at what all has happened over the past year..it’s pretty hard to believe that I’ve had the opportunity to go to PAX, GDC, and now E3.  I’m super greatful to GamerDNA for sending me to these events and letting me take part!  Right now I’m putting a few things together for E3 that I can’t really talk about, but I’m very excited about them.  This will be my first E3 and I’m expecting it to be an awesome experience, with lots of new things to done and lots of new people to meet either for the first time, or the first time outside of Twitter

That wraps it up for this blog post, I hope to stop by after E3 and share some pictures/stories, as well as write a couple blog entries about Community Management and another on Twitter.

GDC 2009 – Coming Soon!

I’ve been long over due for another blog update..but I wanted to throw this up just in case I don’t update before GDC.

I’ll be at GDC representing gamerDNA next week and I’d love to meet up with as many people as possible. I’m not going to any panels(I have an expo pass, though), and I’ll be there Tuesday-Friday evening. If you want to meet up and talk, I’d love to, and while I’ll be in some meetings during the day I’m sure I’ll have time to meet up with folks, especially at night!

If you would like to meet up, please message me on Twitter via @reply or Direct Message at http://twitter.com/SamHouston

You can also email me (info is on my about page).

See you there!

(PS! Don’t forget about our GDC Tweetup on Wednesday! http://www.gdctweetup.com/ )

Blink 182 is back together!

Last Sunday the Grammy’s were on and I imagined to catch them..pretty much by accident.  About a half hour before the Grammy’s started I was checking out Twitter Search to see what people were talking about for the hashtag #Grammys. Luck would have it that I saw someone mention something about how Blink 182 was presenting an award…their first time together publically as a group in almost 5 years.  I had to watch.

Read more »

Introducing GameIndustryTweet.com

The past week has been a wild ride and I’ve been working hard on following up on my Video Game Companies on Twitter list in an effort to expand that service out to more parts of the industry.  The result of this effort is the launch of GameIndustryTweet.com .

GameIndustryTweet.com will be the centralized site for the video game industry and gamers to find their favorite game industry professionals on Twitter.  Right now the site covers Game Developers/Companies, Press, Public Relations and Community Sites that are on Twitter.

Every update to the site will be posted on the front page of the blog with a list of the new people that have been added.  This means that by subscribing to the GameIndustryTweet RSS Feed you will stay on top of all the latest people added to the list.

As for QforQ.com, I plan to continue to blog about Social Media and offer advice on how the Video Game Industry can best leverage these new mediums.  I encourage everyone to read my latest article on How to Engage your Audience on Twitter .  If you would like to know how to contact me please check out my About page .

Thanks everyone!  I hope you enjoy GameIndustryTweet.com !

How to Engage your Audience on Twitter

Great, your company is now on Twitter, you’ve convinced the boss or PR/Marketing that you should be there and now you have tons of followers.  What do you do next?

Engage your Audience

Read more »

Thank you very much! (There’s more to come)

Wow, the past 48 hours or so have been insane.  What started out as a blog post I was writing while bored watching Edwards Scissorhands has now caught on like crazy throughout the gaming community.  Yesterday I wrote a blog post about Video Game companies on Twitter and since then I’ve received thousands of visitors to the site, hundreds of new followers, and many many blog comments, Twitter Replies, Direct Messages and emails all requesting to be added to the list or thanking me for writing the list.

Read more »

Video Game companies on Twitter

This past summer I made a blog post basically calling out video game companies for not being active in social media , specifically Twitter.  In that blog post you can find some tips/tutorials I gave for how to use social media, how to monitor, etc.   Please check it out if you’re interested in how I use Twitter at gamerDNA and how to use it to monitor your brand/company on Twitter/FriendFeed and blogs.

Luckily, since then a lot of game companies have signed up for twitter and they are using it for various purposes like personal use, advertising stuff they are doing(or worse..just using it as a way to post when they have a blog update via TwitterFeed integration), or even actively using it to interact with their customers/gamers and as a customer service tool.

Since things have changed since that August blog article and I haven’t really seen a list on the web somewhere of all the game companies on Twitter, I’ll try to start a list here.

Notice: Due to the popularity of this list I’ve decided to launch GameIndustryTweet.com .  If you’re looking for a list of Video Game Companies on Twitter please click here .

Please add me on Twitter to keep in touch and enjoy GameIndustryTweet.com !

Company I work for:

gamerDNA:

gamerDNA – Official Twitter account for gamerDNA

JRadoff – Jon Radoff, Founder and CEO of gamerDNA

SamHouston – Sam Houston (Me), Community Manager at gamerDNA

TrapperMarkelz – Trapper Markelz, VP of Product at gamerDNA

Duhame – Sean Duhame, Creative Director at gamerDNA

skio – Antares Meketa,  Social Media Engineer at gamerDNA

Colliny2k – Collin, Engineer at gamerDNA

FattyChubs – Stephen Sopp, Engineer at gamerDNA

Imran_Malek – Imran Malek, Product Specialist at gamerDNA

stealthbaz – Russell Miner, Engineer at gamerDNA

I can now legally drink AND gamble!

I am now 21, as of about week ago on January 2nd. In the US this means I can now legally drink alcohol and gamble. Yay!

I had a small celebration at work with some coworkers on my birthday..nothing too wild or crazy. I think later this month I’ll go out and visit some of the bars with some friends from work..they’ve promised that I’ll "get smashed"…which I’m not necessarily excited about, but I’m hoping I’ll have some fun along the way

What I’m most excited about is that I’ll now be able to actually do stuff after dark after work, at conventions like PAX, or go to parties at events like GDC/PAX/etc. Working as a "professional" and going to industry events while underage over the past two years has kind of sucked when I couldn’t go to anything or had to sneak in. I *did* learn how much networking/schmoozing/professional events relied on alcohol, though

So anyways, yay I’m 21! Time to have some good times in 2009!