What is community relations?

[Morgan]

1. Not actively working in the games industry? How are you involved with (much less heading) the IGDA chapter down there?

I've been described as the glue that keeps everyone together. I own the domain name, developed the job board, manage the chapter website and job board and mailing lists, drive (or at least, I try to drive) momentum to keep people focused on growing the chapter, network with groups outside the chapter to find mutually beneficial opportunities (e.g., Art Institute of California, San Diego Filmmakers), set up partnerships with businesses who share our vision, collaborate with the leadership team to organize professional development events and social mixers, take photos of social mixers, and basically serve as the public and media point of contact for the chapter.

I've also been trying to get more involved with our parent organization, IGDA, through various initiatives. I've worked on, and am still working on, proposals for Marketing and Community Relations Special Interest Groups. I've also proposed an international directory of the games industry as a new member incentive, and there's significant interest in making this happen. I managed the IGDA Wiki for awhile, but we decided to change its purpose from a publishing platform for encyclopedic information on games to just a place for Chapters and SIGs to put stuff they want to share with others.

2. Want to pimp your blog? Give me a reason why I should let that sort of behavior happen.

That's entirely up to you and the community. If you guys (and gals?) wanted, I'd be happy to remove the link to my article and not post any more links to my websites or associations. If I had to come up with a reason for why you should let that "sort of behavior" happen, I'd say that I want to contribute to the discussions in this community, and that I hope to eventually become accepted as a member rather than as a "schmuck" or a "troll". Grimwell's forums closed, so I pretty much need a place to hang out and shoot the shit whether on dastardly marketing topics or on the latest, greatest, and uberfun game, which I have yet to discover.

[CmdrSlack]

FWIW, I've also talked to Morgan a lot and know that he's not trying to be a jacktard.  Yeah, his writing is very jargony, but that doesn't make him a bad guy necessarily.  I told him that he'd probably get something like this if he posted here -- but for fuck's sake, don't hate him just because of what he wants to do for a living.  I've been wondering what the Time to Mole on this one was...

[schild]

He's obviously not a mole. Moles can't be this transparent. He still hasn't explained what "disruptive marketing" is. More than that, there's a difference between being jargony and throwing out words to look smarter. And bullshitters can tell the difference. We have fuckin radars for it. I've no problem with him sticking around, attacking that sort of thing isn't up to me, it's the on the end user. But for someone in marketing, he didn't do a good job marketing himself and we called him on it. That first post was a real zinger. I couldn't help myself.

I mean, "What is community relations to me?" Comeon!

[Morgan]

... if you are doing it to sell an opinion you don't personally hold, you're scum.

I agree with you. I have no qualms with rejecting prospective clients who I don't believe will genuinely adopt our strategic branding program, or who I don't believe have products, services, or solutions that merit our program. We do have a code of ethics, but more importantly, I have a sense of duty to my family name that governs all of my decisions.

He's obviously not a mole. Moles can't be this transparent.

Thanks, I think...

He still hasn't explained what "disruptive marketing" is.

The essence of the Heretic brand is "disruptive market-driving brands", not "disruptive marketing". A thorough explanation of what this means requires two articles, one of which is in draft form. Grimwell has reviewed it, and I'm still awaiting feedback from CmdrSlack. The first article is titled Introduction to Branding, defines branding and corrects common misconceptions, and should be an easy read for the layman. The second article will discuss how customer relationships can be strengthened through word-of-mouth marketing and strategic public relations. It will also discuss how these activities can differentiate and position products, services, and solutions into new markets of innovators and early adopters. As the name Heretic implies, we're concerned with disrupting the status quo, not dividing people.

[Venkman]

The biggest problem I've found marketing folks have is being able to speak succinctly. I'm a deductive person by nature, only speaking inductively if I absolutely need to. We're not starved for bandwidth on the web, but many do crave an easier explanation. There is always one there, if the participants are willing to find it.

The dissertation I'm sure will be fine and all, but can you not break it down to 20 words or less? Are you talking ARGs?

[stray]

Wow. Great thread. More esoteric than Hildegard of Bingen's panty size (if she had been born during the time of panties, of course).

[schild]

No one is stupid enough to compete with 4orty2wo. He's not talking ARGs.

[waylander]

The less effective approaches to community relations generally consist of using mass communication (e.g., advertising) to deliver one-way messages to entire markets. Communicating to massive audiences is similar to joining a chat room and screaming about your new product. A few heads might perk up to investigate the commotion, but the majority will screen you out, and the operators of the chat room will probably remove you from the scene altogether. Kick. Ban. Strike three! You’re out.

This is sort of like showing up on an MMORPG discussion forum where no one knows you, linking some article that doesn't fit with our understanding of MMORPG community relations, spewing a bunch of crap that is mostly unrelated to the games we play, and then giving us a lecture on marketing theory. The only reason you're not banned is most likely because we haven't finished laughing at you yet.

[damijin]

he seems nice, just so big talk words

[Krakrok]

Off topic comes to mind. You would probably have been better served in the game design/development forum if at all.

[Engels]

This has to be the oddest thread I've read in f13. Not in a good way, mind you, just in a strange, uncomfortable way. Sort of when you're at a friend's party, and some guy shows up that noone seems to know, but he's jovially chatting away. And then he starts handing out business cards.

The second article will discuss how customer relationships can be strengthened through word-of-mouth marketing and strategic public relations. It will also discuss how these activities can differentiate and position products, services, and solutions into new markets of innovators and early adopters.

Someone tell me how this isn't in-your-face viral marketing?

[Grimwell]

This thread needs a kitten. Sadly I don't save pictures of kittens on my hard drive. I did find this to be an acceptable substitute. I hope you agree.

[Samwise]

[Ironwood]

My Daughters considered view of Marketing and this thread in General.

What do you DO at SOE now, Grimwell ?  Genuinely interested.

EDIT :  Never mind.  Found the EQ2 post.  Suddenly not so interested.  :)

[Endie]

I waited a while to see if Schild would get an answer, but I am so totally with Murgos here: this whole thing stinks.  The post itself is marketing: self-promotion.  Just very, very bad marketing since he didn't bother to read around and see that coming here and kicking off with an article that should be entitled "Look at me!  Look what I wrote!  Reds, hire me!" was going to be read as offensive by some.

Morgan: "I do disruptive marketing"
Schild: "Just what is that?"
[Long delay, prevarication, noises off]
Morgan: "I'd need a couple of articles to describe that.  Hey, we should get together and do lunch some time, yah?"

If you won't describe the thrust of what you do in Darniaq's 20 words or less, then you're just playing marketing weaselry.  The document on your site is equally content-free, other than, as Murgos points out, the high point: a logo ripped off from an old game and a company address that's a house.   None of which is a criminal act in and of itself, but in the context of your other claims, it screams"shell game!"

So, since you won't tell us what disruptive marketing is, let's see what the survey says.  It just means "Oh, look at us, we do offensive shit just to get media coverage."  Search engine optimisation is disruptive marketing (i.e. making sure that your company appears at the top of google listings, not some neutral wikipedia entry, God forbid!).  Weaseling into the confidence of opinion formers (warning, large pdf) in order to virally spread product information is disruptive marketing.

And yes, turning up on a community website and spouting only-tangentially-relevant marketing BS in order to get people speaking about you, if only to call you a prick, is disruptive marketing.  Touché.

[WindupAtheist]

Nice work, Endie.

So Morgan runs a two-man "company" out of his house, has no job within the industry, wants one badly enough to spend his time being the coffee & donuts bitch for the local Game Developer Social Club, and has already managed to start the most "me me me" thread seen here since the days of SirBruce.  Yeah, someone is trying to show off for the industry types.

Schild is probably too laizzes-faire to banninate him for being a mole who moles in plain sight.  Let's just grief him.

[Ironwood]

Wait a fucking minute.  If that's all true, then most of you should be accepting him with open arms because it's no more nor less than half of you do.

Yes, I'm being serious.

[Venkman]

So, since you won't tell us what disruptive marketing is, let's see what the survey says

Now now, it's only been 12 hours. Sure, I spam the refresh button both before and after logging out of whatever I'm playing for the night. But I always thought that was just me :)

I like the kitten/catnip image. And man Ironwood, I swear I have almost the exact same picture of my first kid at that age, down to the two vertical stacks of CDs in the background. Gotta see if I can dig it up. The upshot of digital cameras is the less expense in printing. The downside is you keep everything...

[Strazos]

Is she flashing me gang signs?

[Evangolis]

Is she flashing me gang signs?

Don't take any chances.  Cap your monitor, now.

[Roac]

Wait a fucking minute.  If that's all true, then most of you should be accepting him with open arms because it's no more nor less than half of you do.

He said something about not wanting to use monetary rewards for people's opinions.

Morgan:  this is a gaming site, not a marketing site.  Meaning, the common interest of people here are games, not marketing tactics.  As such, most people here have a very strong dislike or distrust of marketing of all stripes.  Redouble the truth of that for any sort of self-promotion.  Hell, even Haemish (an ex site admin for F13) has been given lashes by the community for propping up his personal site.  The only reason that Raph, Lum, and others like them get away with it is because they're devs - the people who make the games that the people here care about, and because mostly, their blogs are less about self-promotion (although Raph has done that a few times for his book, but he gets a pass) and more about discussing games, game design, game production, etc. 

But you're not discussing any of these things.  You're discussing how to make people like me like whatever game you are promoting better.  Unless you trick a friend/family member into buying me a shittastic game, the only way I buy a game is because I've read about it on a half dozen sites as well as a couple dozen people who've gotten it early, and even the harshest critic can't dampen my desire for it.  Marketing tactics do not appeal to me, except as far as they may be amusing to watch.  SWG probably had some of the most amusing community-based marketing for it in a while.  I also never bought it, because I knew enough about it to know it wasn't for me. 

In any case, you don't bolster customer relations via "word-of-mouth marketing".  You do it by being honest about the product and sometimes tossing around freebies because we like toys (hold a contest to give away game time, autographed tshirts, beta access, whatever) for whatever product you sell.  Except that, you're not selling a product.  You're selling your ability to sell a product.  You're selling your ability to outsmart the customer, not your ability to work with the customer.  Nobody here is buying.

[Endie]

She's giving the fingers to the camera at that age?  Jings.  She must be from Glasgow, yes?  It's just a reflex there.

[Calandryll]

Word of mouth marketing and creating (supporting is better - I'll get into that later) evangelists is PART of Community Relations, it's not the definition of the field.

Community Relations should never just be an extension of marketing and especially shouldn’t just be responsible for creating word of mouth – and I say that having a marketing background spanning 5 years before doing Community Relations. I’ve done both, and the difference may be subtle to some, but the differences are extremely important. If your player-base sees the OCR person as nothing but a marketing mouthpiece, that OCR representative will lose all credibility.

Now onto evangelists – which the author calls opinion leaders. If you have a good product and a good message you will create evangelists. It’s up to the OCR representative to identify, nurture, and support the evangelists (whether they are websites or individuals) they feel will do the best job of helping spread the message. Community can also reach out to potential evangelists (such as guild leaders and fansites) to further spread the word. Evangelists that spawn from the community naturally are FAR more effective than those that are "created". Again though, all of this is ONE PART of what OCR does for a game. It’s an important part, but I wouldn’t say this is the definition of Community Relations. Not even close.

Good Community Relations consists of a lot more than that. It’s part marketing, part customer service, part technical support, part PR and part its own field. As Krakrok said, Community Relations is really about the interface between your customer (or potential customer) and the various teams (development, QA, Customer Support, etc.) Doing that well DOES create good word of mouth. But effective Community Relations can also have a direct impact on the game’s development, on corporate policy, and a whole lot more.

[Venkman]

... the only way I buy a game is because I've read about it on a half dozen sites as well as a couple dozen people who've gotten it early, and even the harshest critic can't dampen my desire for it. Marketing tactics do not appeal to me, except as far as they may be amusing to watch...

I don't know if this was part of his original point, but to me, there's a link within what you said here:

There are specific marketing tactics that can be used to get those couple dozen people to do the right kind of talking. Not all of it is as obvious as writing some so-stupid-its-easy-to-spot marketing speak at Ask.com. It's the essence of viral marketing to get something started and let the people take over the conversation. You obviously need to have a high degree of confidence in what you're offering though, because once you release it, you can no longer control the propogation nor the message.

Also, while I agree with schild that Morgan's not talking about ARGs, the bulk of activity in this space is like the Ilovebees stuff. For profit, for companies. It wouldn't work for people here, but that's mostly because this entire genre is fairly inbred when it comes to message. And that is because MMOs are not fire-and-forget one-off experiences. The history of the games, developers and players has had such a close integration between supplier and consumer that any attempt to not do that is immediately met with suspicion. As a result, they can't really do traditional marketing for MMOs unless they are trying to capture people not here. And even that is risky because the people who ARE here know way ahead of time when something is coming, and still assume that by virtue of it being an MMO, it must be for them at least in some way. :)

[Lum]

Wow, I hope Schild never demands I justify MY existence.

Also, chiming in to agree with Calandryll (which is usually a safe bet when CR is involved) and to emphasize: Community Relations and Public Relations are very different. The markets involved are different, the way you speak to them are different, and the objectives are different.

PR: Sells you a new game. Tells you how cool and froody their client is. Wears nice suits.
CR: Gathers, filters and sanity-checks communication bi-directionally. Canary in the coal mine. Curses amusingly.

[Ironwood]

Could you tho ?  Just for fun ?

[Lum]

I got Schild and his f13 posse into a party once.

[Roac]

... the only way I buy a game is because I've read about it on a half dozen sites as well as a couple dozen people who've gotten it early, and even the harshest critic can't dampen my desire for it. Marketing tactics do not appeal to me, except as far as they may be amusing to watch...

I don't know if this was part of his original point, but to me, there's a link within what you said here:

There are specific marketing tactics that can be used to get those couple dozen people to do the right kind of talking. Not all of it is as obvious as writing some so-stupid-its-easy-to-spot marketing speak at Ask.com. It's the essence of viral marketing to get something started and let the people take over the conversation.

There is vagueness in terms, so I'll define for the sake of my post.  They can have other meanings.

Viral marketing is where people talk about your advertisement.  People are interested in the advertisement for the ad's sake; it's funny, unique, creative, and overall entertaidning in its own right and is in some form that people can share (download, link to, etc).  It merely contains product placement of some sort.  

Word of mouth is where there is talk about the product itself.  I like X, so I tell my friends about X.  You don't buy word of mouth.  You can fake it (fake blogs, etc), but when discovered it tends to go very poorly for the company.  Dishonesty tends to not win friends.  Certainly some people do more to promote a product than others, and it is natural to want to target them.  Be careful, because favoritism is a grey area that can put off some people.  Further, if you are too selective in giving access to people it creates substantial doubt as to the legitimacy of it all.  A prime example of this is any closed beta where community press releases are allowed, but only after review; otherwise everyone (including these authors) are under NDA.  Such press releases without NDA tend to be called Previews, not Reviews.  This is ok and common already; see reporter access to playable demos at E3 and so forth.

If word of mouth is what you want, create playable demos for public download (or for online games, public traial period).  If you can't do that and have it go well, your product isn't working.  There's not really a trick to this though; get the product into people's hands and let them try it out.  If you do try to inject a trick of some sort, the community will figure it out and roast your ass for it.  The real work is in figuring out your target demograhpic, and how best to get a product into their hands to play with.  But this isn't new, and Moran isn't offering any new insight into how to do this, just that he can do it better.  Because he says he can.  There's no content, and that's the whole point of word of mouth; it's to look at the product's content and see if it's worth something.

So... yeah.

[schild]

I got Schild and his f13 posse into a party once.

But remember, you almost weren't let into the party.

Good Community Relations consists of a lot more than that. It’s part marketing, part customer service, part technical support, part PR and part its own field. As Krakrok said, Community Relations is really about the interface between your customer (or potential customer) and the various teams (development, QA, Customer Support, etc.) Doing that well DOES create good word of mouth. But effective Community Relations can also have a direct impact on the game’s development, on corporate policy, and a whole lot more.

My point was a little more baseline. Sure, someone can say "X Game Has Great Community Relations" and the game can still suck balls. Basically, the product has to be good before you can pull off bolstering word of mouth about the product. No one ran out and bought Death by Degrees for the PS2 because adavertising was everywhere (and i mean everywhere). Hell, most people don't even remember the ads. And with a good product (see, God of War - it's just a really great example), with zero marketing, word of mouth spreads like wildfire and the game sells a couple million copies. Word of mouth is just one of those things that can be prodded by marketing types, but can also exist completely in a vacuum. And the only reason I latched onto it in this conversation is because he used the word "disruptive."

[Sky]

Hey, grimmy posted hello kitty vader. That's my job!

[schild]

Hello Kitty Vader won't throw us off point on this one.

[Sky]

I had to reach deeply into my vader collection, but I can rebut the kitty vader with pink vader:



I have to admit it's one of my favorites.

[schild]

I won't let you derail this thread.

[Sky]

How about portapotty vader?



I think the entire idea of moling for games is pretty vile. Portapotty Vader just expressed my feelings on moles. See? Right on topic.

[Roac]

I think the entire idea of moling for games is pretty vile.

It's also pointless.  If someone is going to take the time to wander around a gaming forum to read up about games with the intent of purchase, it is likely that they are genuinely interested in the product (otherwise, they're not likely to listen to some random twit on the net about it).  So... put efforts out to showcase your product.  If it's any good people will create the positive word of mouth for you.  If it isn't, one or two moles isn't going to change the overall oppinion.  Best they'll do is bring more discussion to the product, which is majorilly negative, which hurts anyone in marketing who might be trying to dress it up.  I can't see where you *want* to bring discussion to a mediocre or bad product in a room of cynics.  You don't want the public to control product perception in those cases, and all a mole would do is encourage them to.