(Full Disclosure: I did a write up on the gamerDNA company blog so I’m going to keep this fairly short and sweet. The purpose of this is to give my personal take and record some of the more fun, notable events)
It has now been a week since the last day of PAX and I’m still getting back into the swing of things. Last week I had the pleasure of attending PAX with three others from gamerDNA from Thursday through Monday which was the entirety of PAX. We went there on a mission: Go to the biggest gaming expo in North America and talk to people about gamerDNA. All in all, I’d say it was a success.
If you haven’t gone to PAX before, you should. This was my first time going to PAX and it was the biggest gaming event that I’ve ever been to. Last year I went to SOE Fan Faire and Gen Con and those don’t even compare to the size of this event or the amount of fun had at PAX. The PAX officials have reported that about 58,500 people invaded Seattle and attended PAX, well over the 37,000 that they had last year. I wonder what they will have next year…and how they will fit everyone in the Seattle Convention Center.
Most of the weekend was spent spending some time walking around the Expo floor and then meeting up with the guys from work for a press interview or some other event that we wanted to attend. Friday was very busy for us in particular because that was the opening day for PAX along with the day of our gamerDNA PAX Party that we had later that night. During the couple hours that we had to poke around on the floor we decided to hand out gamerDNA t-shirts to random PAX goers and check out the various booths on the floor.
The expo floor was huge, with booths from all the major and some of the minor game studios out there. Strangely absent, though, was a booth from Activision(Besides Guitar Hero World Tour and the Blizzard Booth). While taking a quick survey of the floor I noticed the dominance of the Xbox 360 which was being used to demo practically every game on the floor. One of the games that I did see demoed on a Playstation 3 was Mirror’s Edge (they showed the E3 level), which ironically froze up while I was watching and they had to reboot the PS3.
After only a couple hours on the show floor we had to make it back to our hotel to get ready for the gamerDNA Party. The plan for the gamerDNA party was simple: Have some food, some free drinks and Rock Band. We didn’t want it to be too sales-pitchy, we wanted it to be a fun atmosphere for people to come in, talk to people and have fun playing games.
The party was a definite success with over 150 people stopping by over the course of the night. We had a lot of friends from Microsoft show up, the GamerCast Network stopped by as well as many others throughout the night. My personal highlight was when Alex Albrecht and Jeff Cannata from the Totally Rad Show and DiggNation showed up for a little while. The guys played some Rock Band (which by the way, they were really good at) and hung out for a bit. I had a chance to introduce myself and talk to Alex a bit, but it was really just cool to have guys like them show up to a party that was put on by my company. We also had Donna Park from Electric Playground (you know, that show that used to be on G4TV..and now it’s coming back on) who interviewed our CEO Jon Radoff and ended up sticking around at the party for most of the night. Not only was she a gamer, but she was a very cool person to talk to and seemed very genuine. Two thumbs up!
After that Friday (the first day of PAX), we spent the rest of the weekend walking around the show floor, hitting up some panels, and doing interviews with press. I had a great time meeting various developers of different games, as well as friends that I’ve made but never actually met before, which was really cool. I also had the chance to play some games, but not very many…I did a lot more looking than actual playing of video games that weekend..ironically
PAX was a great experience and I’d highly suggest everyone go! I’m definitely going to go next year with gamerDNA and I can’t wait for PAX to come to Boston in 2010
Sure, many game companies are using social media these days as advertising platforms, but are they really using Social Media to the extent that they could be doing? I don’t think so. How can they step it up? That’s simple.
They need to listen.
Over the past few years we’ve seen sites like Facebook and Myspace balloon in size, everyone and their mom become a blogger, and tools like Twitter dominate the news. Surprisingly, a lot of companies that you wouldn’t think of as being very active and on the bleeding edge, like Dell and Comcast, are leading the way in Social Media and how to reach out to your existing and potential customers. I think it is time for video game companies, especially MMO game companies, to take this bull by the horns and capitalize on the wealth of opportunities out there on the world wide web.
First, I think I should start out with how game companies can reach out to bloggers, since I’ve recently joined a Warhamer Online Guild full of bloggers. Last week I asked them if any game companies reach out to them when they talk about their products and I was disappointed when they answer was “No” followed by, “I don’t think they ever will”. The extent that game companies had reached out to these bloggers seemed to be the simple beta key for a game, which I think is a step in the right direction but they could be doing a lot more.
How to listen to the blogosphere:
Start monitoring the blogosphere using tools like Google Blog Search, BlogLines and Technorati. It’s very simple to setup a search for “Warhammer Online” (or any other game/company name for that matter), sort by the most recent date and then get an RSS feed for that search result and pop it in to Google Reader. Every day, and if you can throughout various parts of the day, have someone on the staff monitor the blogosphere for these conversations and respond accordingly. If someone is having a problem with the game or complaining about a system respond to it. Even a simple “we’re aware of the issue and we’re working hard to fix it” and acknowledging the writer will help.
Sure, there is a lot of noise out there but you will also find a lot of opportunities for you to create a positive customer support experience with your company. I’ve also learned that responding within the first few hours of the post is very key so that the writer sees your comment, other commenters see your comment, etc. It doesn’t help anything if you show up 2 days late to the blog post..everyone has moved on already.
Once you’ve mastered monitoring keywords and phrases that have to do with your company and/or products (game names, company name, etc), you could start monitoring keywords that your company estimates will provide a lot of opportunities to bring in new customers. Perhaps you could monitor “What’s a good MMO” and pop in the comments telling them about your game and providing the writer a free trial key to the game. As long as the original poster is asking a question and inviting replies/discussion, you should be welcome and be seen as helpful.
How to listen to Twitter (And other status related applications)
Twitter has a recent success story for a company that has really caught on and being used by millions of people every day. Luckily monitoring Twitter and other status apps is relatively easy because it has a lot less spam and noise than tracking blogs or forums. There are also a few great examples of companies that really do well in this area
Create a company Twitter account and start updating about things related to your company. Online game companies could use this particularly well, encouraging all their fans to follow them on Twitter and use it to update them on the status of servers, downtime, patch time, new updates, etc. Thankfully Twitter has had pretty good uptime lately, so if your game is down, hopefully Twitter will be up and your fans can find out what is going on via SMS, IM, Twitter.com or various Twitter applications.
Similar to blogging, start monitoring certain keywords on Twitter and act on them. Search.Twitter.com is your friend and you can easily create another RSS feed for your search and import that into your staff RSS reader. You might also want to check out applications like TweetDeck which allow you to use all of the features of Twitter.com and their Search within one application.There are a couple examples of companies using this as a great tool to engage with their customers. If you ever go on Twitter and complain about your Dell computer not working, expect a reply from Richard who will try to help you. If you ever are having problems with Comcast expect Frank from ComcastCares to show up and ask you if you need anything. Two of my coworkers have mentioned Comcast on Twitter before and been contacted by Frank who tried to help them out. Twitter is a great tool for customer support, community management, public relations and marketing. Everyone should be using it.
When you’re a relatively small company or a niche title, I imagine it would not be terribly difficult for a community manager, marketer or PR person to monitor all these conversations. Once you get up to games like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty 4, it gets a lot harder to separate the important information from all the noise. At that level you could probably have someone like Frank at Comcast who works full time monitoring social media and taking action if not more. In the near future I think you’ll see a lot of companies crop up to make applications that are supposed to help you monitoring social media. I’m currently checking out one of those companies now, so I’ll have to let you know if it’s any good.
Conclusion
All of these are methods that I’m using today at gamerDNA to listen to potential and existing conversations about our brand, products and opportunities that might arise for us. I’m just beginning to learn about these things so I’m by no means am I an expert, but I think this is too big to not share with everyone out there and to get some discussion going about it. It may take you awhile to master each of these things but in time I think you will see how powerful these tools really are.
After all, when have we ever been able to listen to what people are saying about your brand and act quickly? These are exciting times for marketers.
If you would like more information on social media and getting more involved there are a ton of people out there that can help you. One person in particular, who I’ve learned a decent amount from as of late, is Chris Brogan who works for Cross Tech Media. I’m sure they could help you out and get you started in the right direction.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions via email at sam A qforq DOTT com or leave a comment. I’d love to hear what other bloggers, media and others in the video game industry think. You can also find our gamerDNA Twitter account here (which I and a few others are behind) as well as my personal twitter account here.
This week has already been a long week at work, mostly because monday we stayed until about 3am getting a brand new Quiz system implemented and up and running. Along with the launch of a brand new quiz system we launched 3 new quizzes for players to take. Now instead of just the Bartle Test (and the MMORPG and Guild quizzes that are no longer with us), we have a Gamer Decades of Influence quiz and an FPS multiplayer and RTS multiplayer playstyle quiz.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for what this system can do and we’re working right now on some new types of signatures for people to
use to show theirresults. We’re also kicking around ideas for new types of quizzes that we could put out there for people to take.
Maybe you guys could help out…why kind of quizzes would you like to take? Personally, I’m thinking of putting together a quiz for PVPers.
Lastly, I’ve gotta give a shout to Casualties of WAR, my new Warhammer Guild which is expanding to over 100 people! I’ll also give a shout to Rick over at /Random for being a nice guy and checking out my blog!
Thanks guys, until next time..happy gaming!
(PS. Since I’m being considered a blogger now I figure I should live up to that title and blog
more often now..like more than once every 2 months. You can count on more entries as time goes on :))
Like the title alludes to, this week has been exciting..but really the past two weeks have been good for me. Since a decent amount of stuff happened I’m just going to dive in, so hold on!
First off, I’m very excited and happy to announce that I’ve been promoted to Community Manager at gamerDNA. It was official last week but I wanted to sit on it first before I announced it on my blog. I’m very stoked to be in this position and I’ve been told gamerDNA will be sending me to gaming events in the future to represent the company to gamers. I’ll also be more active on forums, blogs and in game communities to help represent the company there. In just about two weeks I’ll be at PAX giving away gamerDNA t-shirts and inviting people to our gamerDNA party so if you’re there, please let me know and you’ll get an invite and a shirt!
I’m still getting used to the job and all the new responsibilities and expectations but I’m enjoying it. I love the challenge and it is fantastic to be able to work with two things I love to do: working with games and working with gamers. Over the coming months you’ll be seeing a gamerDNA podcast unveiled(finally), some more contests for the 360Voice and gamerDNA communities, as well as a TON more blog posts on the gamerDNA company blog.
This week brought the August meeting of the Boston IGDA Chapter which was sponsored by Harmonix (Guitar Hero 1&2, Rock Band, etc) and Ralph Baer, who basically created home video gaming back in the 60s, was the speaker. Due to the awesomeness of Mr. Baer and Harmonix we had about 5 guys representing gamerDNA at the meeting. Mr. Baer’s speech was very interesting because we gained so much insight into how little these guys had back then technologically, but all that they did with what they had. In today’s world you could call this guy a hacker, making the craziest inventions out of what little they had, bringing the video game console to your living room.
After Mr. Baer finished his presentation Harmonix took over the stage and had the E3 preview build for Rock Band 2 for everyone to play. Incase you don’t know…Rock Band 2 hasn’t even came out yet and it has been played by hardly anyone, so it was super awesome to be able to play the game. Steve Sopp and I took the stage and rocked out, which
you can see here:
Steve Sopp (far left) on guitar and Sam Houston on Drums
You can also watch a slighly embarrassing video (for me) of us playing Rock Band 2, shot by the Harmonix job recruiter.
Finally, I’ve decided to join the Warhammer guild “Casualties of WAR“, ran by a few bloggers/fansite people I knew from Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. The guild is made up of a *ton* of MMO bloggers/podcasters and industry people, so it should be a pretty awesome time. I’m really looking forward to joining these folks in ventrilo and having a good time sacking cities and taking down some keeps.
That about wraps it up, soon I’ll be getting ready for our gamerDNA trip to PAX and I’ll be sending out invites to the gamerDNA party (with free booze!). Stay tuned
Well I’m all moved in, I’ve got my own internet and cable setup from RCN and I’ve been enjoying my new TV. The move itself went fine and only took a couple hours and about 3 car trips - so not bad at all.
I got pretty bored Sunday and Monday because I had no cable or internet connection but the cable installer guy finally came in the afternoon on Monday to setup my internet and cable. This guy was a nice Boston normal guy…but obviously was just trained to do that trade and wasn’t super in to the internets or how things worked. I was amazed when I used the acronym “ISP” and my internet service provider installer asked me “What does ‘ISP’ mean?”. He also had no idea that Comcast screws with your internet connection and blocks certain ports (ports for torrents for example). I don’t think he even knew what a port was. Oh well, he was cool and hooked up my stuff and it works. Thank you, Mr. RCN dude.
For my gaming update, I’m currently heavily addicted to my Xbox 360(especially now since I have a big HD plasma screen to enjoy it on) and playing Grand Theft Auto IV quite a bit. I think I’m about 70% done with the storyline in the game. I’ve also been playing a lot more Rock Band lately, mostly because we bought Rock Band for the office and the developers of the game are right across the street from us. I went from being okay at playing songs on medium on guitar to now being able to play pretty much every song on hard. I’ve also noticed a decent improvement in my drum skills in the game, which I’m happy about since I’ve always loved drums and used to play drums when I was a kid. The downloadable content for Rock Band continues to be awesome and I’m currently addicted to songs from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Muse and the one Angels and Airwaves song in the game. All the Small Things by Blink-182 is also in the game, which I bought and it’s fun to play, but the song is so overplayed to me I’d have a lot more fun if it was a song like “Always”, “Josie”, “Dammit” or maybe “Rock Show”. Whats my Age Again would probably be more fun that All the Small Things.
Oh well, it’s Blink and they’re my favorite band so I can’t complain too much
Current Music Addictions: Muse, Tegan and Sara, and Spoon.
That’s about it! Have a great rest of the week and enjoy the fast approaching weekend(already!).
As of today, I’ve moved in to my apartment in Boston and I’m going to go to work tomorrow :) I officially started last week and I’ve been slowly starting, getting some concepts and ideas together, as well as trying to track down some contacts. We’re supposed to be able to move in to the GuildCafe offices within a couple weeks..and they’re supposed to be the same offices that Harmonix is in..or atleast used to be in?!
Either way it’s pretty kick ass and I’m excited.
Now I just need to get a desk and chair and I’ll be like 10x happier
I thought I’d use this blog entry to try and catch up with what has been happening over the past six months. I’m going to try and keep this short and sweet because otherwise you could write a small novel about what all has happened since the last real blog entry, so here are the important things.
Back in July I became “Uncle Sam” when my sister had a cute little boy named Adrian:
He’s been a blast to help take care over the last six months and I’ve really enjoyed being a part of his life. I look forward to making sure he likes good music, taking him to fun things with his uncle and making sure he gets an introduction to video games. I did my duty as a nerdy uncle and bought him a “Level 1 Human”jumper from Jinx.com and he should be able to wear it some time this summer.
A few weeks after Adrian was born I flew out to the SOE Fan Faire in Las Vegas. Through some convincing of the community management team for SOE they agreed to pay for my plane ticket out to Fan Faire. Las Vegas was a lot smaller than I thought it would be and it was ridiculously hot…when there was a breeze it felt like you were standing outside an oven. Since I was only 19 years old at the time I couldn’t really take part in the drinking and the gambling so that made the trip kind of lame, not to mention the Rio is a pretty boring hotel that is off the strip.
Overall, though, the trip was awesome and I got to meet tons of people in the MMO industry and the community around SOE games. This was my first chance to finally meet John Findlay who at the point of our meeting was the CEO of Uberguilds and I had only talked to on the phone and exchanged emails with. I also got to meet Ian Jones, the server/hardware guy for The Uberguilds Network. The guys were nice enough to let me stay in their room at the Rio, where I slept on the fold out couch and got up early every morning to setup our Uberguilds Radio booth.
Oh yeah, the whole point of us going to Fan Faire was that Uberguilds Radio was going to have a booth setup in the main Fan Faire hall and broadcast live all week. The broadcast went great and it couldn’t have been such a huge success without the help of TxTurbo who was our knight in shining armor and came in to make our broadcast what it was. TxTurbo came with a video camera, his laptop, mixing board, several mics, an LCD screen, speakers, a little marquee and more. This dude really made our booth stand out and we absolutely blew the competition out of the water. We filmed interviews with people all weekend and it put Uberguilds Radio on the map as a great source for MMO coverage. What we did in Vegas really showed the potential for what we could do with a relatively small amount of people, some hardware, and a love for video games. You can bet we’re going to be doing more of this stuff in the future…hopefully later this year.
I wanted to also mention that I met a lot of awesome people at Fan Faire, all of them being people I had either talked to online and become friends with or never talked to at all. Scott Hartsman was an awesome dude to meet and was so nice to me, it was unbelievable how cool he was to me..just some internet radio kid I also finally got to meet Steve Williams, who I interviewed back in March of 2007 about Vanguard’s Diplomacy and he too was an awesome dude. I want to give some shout outs to Silas Morse(Vanguard programmer), Troy from Voyages of Vanguard, the Flying Labs guys(Jess, Troy, Rusty), all my old friends from The Matrix Online(and even some guild mates), Brasse, and everyone else that we met at Fan Faire!
After that I went to Gen Con in Indianapolis, Indiana and filmed several interviews with game companies, with the help of Dan Salters from Uberguilds. There we got to meet Cuppa Jo from NCSoft, Theresa Prudenz and the rest of the Flying Labs Studios people, more Warhammer Online devs and that was about it. I hated Indy because it sucked to try to find a parking spot and if I had a choice I’d probably get a hotel room and walk next time because it was just absolutely shitty trying to park there.
Fast forward a few months and I started and ended a job from hell at Subway, I registered for the winter semester at Franklin University to study Marketing, and I started a job at Best Buy in the media department selling video games. On November 21st GuildCafe officially announced that they had acquired The Uberguilds Network and Findlay and Ian now work for GuildCafe full time. Dan and I both still don’t work for a salary and we’re currently considered volunteers. Uberguilds Radio is still in operation and we’re currently making business plans for the future that will hopefully include it becoming a part of the GuildCafe business plan and become a full time job for me.
Right now I’m taking a business principles class at Franklin that is all online and I’m reading a ton of books about internet radio, radio, and marketing. I’ve been told that GuildCafe is very interested in me working for them full time and possibly moving out to Boston to work directly with them. I’m just concentrated on being as qualified as possible for any job that they want me to do and coming up with a solid plan for the station. While this has caused a lot of stress on me because I want to work for them so bad I’m trying to stay patient and work hard to prove to them that I’m worthy of being employed.
Well that’s about it….besides the fact that I was let go from Best Buy(I was seasonal), I’m out of a job and I bought an Xbox 360 for myself for Christmas. Maybe I’ll write some other time about the 360 :P Until then I hope you can read my ramblings and have a good day
I realize I’m a bit late but I wanted to comment on this apparent rumor that Blizzard is interested in making some sort of World of Warcraft mobile application for your cell phones, iPhones, etc. The reason I wanted to add my two cents is mainly just because I’m so excited about the possibilities with this. Everything is going mobile these days, from internet browsing to internet radio, people want to stay connected and our technology is allowing them to do so.
“Forget mobile games, and make a mobile application instead. Something that gives you access to guild chat, or other admin aspects of the PC version of WoW. Instead of selling it through mobile operators, Blizzard might tack this onto the regular WoW subscription - pay a quid/dollar extra a month, and get the mobile app.”
I agree, everyone should probably forget about hoping to raid Onyxia on their iPhone. They should instead be excited about how they could manage that raid on their phone, how they could check up on their sales in the auction house, work on crafting a new item, or maybe just chat with their guildies and friends. I doubt these applications would be super complicated to build, definitely not as complicated as trying to fit WOW on a mobile device and have a graphical version playable.
I think in general as video games go more and more online that they should be making mobile tie-ins to their service. To me it’s all about surrounding yourself with your hobby and with something that you love and enjoy. After all, that’s why I do internet radio for gamers. This could do all sorts of good for your brand royalty and after all, the more time people spend in your game the better, right? If you could provide tools for your players that could make it easier for them to do things, like coordinate raids for example, I bet you’d make them quite happy. I’d much rather send out a message on our integrated mobile device raid function than have to coordinate a last minute main-tank change via IM or phone call.
This isn’t the first time that MMO companies have talked about doing stuff like this but I do wonder why WoW has been so slow to act with regards to this. SOE’s The Agency has talked about possibly integrating game features into mobile devices, for instance getting a text message from your own Q when your new car is ready. I’m pretty sure 38 Studios has also talked about integrating into mobile devices, as well as a slew of other things like movies and other media forms. In my opinion more and more companies need to be thinking like 38 Studios and be proactive about the future and lead the way. I think this is the future of MMO/Online gaming and I don’t understand what is taking developers so long to act.
Is Raph Koster’s MetaPlace talking about this? Why hasn’t Second Life done something yet? It’s time to start thinking outside the box and creating an entire experience(in marketing terms, your brand) for your players. It’s just a matter of time and I can’t wait What do you think MMO companies should do to break outside the mold and do something new and unique, beyond just adding new ways to PVP and raid?
Oh yeah, the whole point of us going to Fan Faire was that Uberguilds Radio was going to have a booth setup in the main Fan Faire hall and broadcast live all week. The broadcast went great and it couldn’t have been such a huge success without the help of 
World of Warcraft mobile application
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