Entries Tagged 'Marketing Tips' ↓

You would expect a viral marketing company to be able to make a good viral to market themselves. Well here it is!

I have spoken on here before about the importance of Facebook groups. You only have to reach a small fraction of the 175 million members to make this well worthwhile.

• Stop Shark Slaughter. I only just started this one to support a petition I started to try and create some noise out there about this terrible problem that most people are unaware of.
• Fans of Nigel Fletcher, a great artist. Like most artists my friend Nigel is a bit reluctant to promote himself. This group is a  step towards getting him the attention he deserves.
• I worked at Imagine Software in Liverpool. A closed group with a maximum membership of the 100ish of us who worked there. Good for getting back in touch.
• All Formats Computer Fairs. I ran this business for about ten years and about 1,000 events. It is history now but I thought I would start this in case anyone wanted to reminisce.
• Artforums.co.uk. I run a great online community for artists. This is the Facebook presence of that community.
• People with the surname Everiss. There aren’t many of us scattered around the world, all descended from one Gloucestershire man who changed his name. This may bring some of us together.
• Bruceongames. The Facebook group for this blog. Please join!

As you can see I don’t need much of an excuse to set up one of these groups. It is so quick and easy and it costs nothing. It doesn’t even matter too much if you get lots of members or not. What matters is having a presence in this immense community. There is no reason not to.

The above image was posted onto Facebook by someone called Richard Kirby who lives near Farnborough and who doesn’t know me and who has never met me. What he has done is typical of the internet and I am in very good company, you don’t have to look far to find Nelson Mandela and Mother Theresa of Calcutta also being vilified. It is now a fact of life that once your name is known much outside your circle of friends and family people will attack you on the internet, usually from a position of anonymity. It goes with the territory.

And it is not just individual people who are attacked in this way. Organisations like soccer clubs attract a constant tirade of the worst possible abuse. And, of course, so does your company and the products that it creates. You cannot escape it. In our industry the three platform holders, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo attract an astonishing amount of  vicious abuse. And in the democracy of the internet the voice of the abuser has the same weight as the voice of the reasonable person.

So what can you do to protect your reputation? There seem to be three courses of action. The first is to litigate against your tormentors. For instance in posting the image above Richard Kirby has committed the civil offence of libel for which I could sue him. And I would win. However it really is not worth the time and the trouble, the damages awarded would be trifling and the number of people pouring out abuse on the internet  is so great as to make litigating against all of them impossible.

The second is to generate, or have generated for you, a body of “good” content that outweighs the bad. There are actually a lot of mechanisms for this. Social networking sites like Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. Social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit. Knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and Knol. Blogs and forums. Reputation management sites like Naymz and Lookup Page. And even the act of issuing press releases which get C&Ped all over the internet. A lot of this is what community marketing is about these days.

The third option is to rely upon the intelligence and judgement of internet users. They are used to seeing all this abuse and so have learned to give it little or no credence. People quickly develop filters which allow them to get what they want out of the internet whilst ignoring the rubbish. So your tormentors are pretty much wasting their time.

We live in an age where the reality of the matter is that internet abuse is ubiquitous. It is an inevitability that comes just from being well known. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, there is only one thing worse than being vilified on the internet and that is not being vilified on the internet.

Every day the average person is bombarded with thousands of marketing images: on the bus, the train, in magazines and newspapers, on television, the web and in just about everything they do. It is a total onslaught. Obviously virtually all this imagery is ignored. We have become so shell shocked that we learn to create powerful filters in our minds that prevent all this unwanted imagery getting in. So most of the time most marketing spend is wasted.

Of course when we are working on the other side of the fence we want to get past these powerful filters and get our marketing messages into the minds of our potential customers. And the way to do it is creativity. Just take TV adverts that you have seen recently and ask yourself which ones you remember. The answer is always the most creative ones. This is why creativity is the most important talent that a marketeer can have. And it is why me too marketing and marketing by rote are an almost complete waste of money, they don’t have what it takes to get past those filters.

However there are dangers in creativity. The main one is being too clever and creating a great advert but failing to get over the key messages and the brand. This happens all the time. There are quite a few great TV adverts I have seen that have caught my attention but I cannot remember what they are for.

So here is an exercise for you. Get a game magazine that covers your sector of the marketplace and get three felt pens of different colours. Firstly go through the magazine with one pen and write physically on each advert a score out of ten for creativity. So if is something that really catches your attention give it a ten and if it is yet another piece of me too drivel give it a zero.

Next take a different colour felt pen and go through the magazine and score every advert again, this time for getting key messages and brand across. Features and benefits.

Finally go through the magazine with a third felt pen and score according to how likely you are to want to play the game after seeing the advert. So now you have three numbers written on every advert.

To make it more interesting get one or more colleagues to do the same exercise on the same magazine. With no consultation allowed between participants. Then have a meeting going through the adverts one by one justifying to each other the scores that you have given.

You will now be empowered. If you have done this right you now know exactly what you have to do to be better than your competitors at getting past those filters and selling more games. So less of your budget is wasted.

It is so quick and easy to create a Facebook group that it is very tempting to create one for any collection of people you know of that have an interest in common. In fact the groups are so useful for their members that it is criminal not to create them when you can.

I worked at Imagine Software in Liverpool does what it says. A private group that is obviously limited in size. This has been a great opportunity to contact long lost colleagues and to dig out resources for the group to share.

All Formats Computer Fairs is for anyone who had anything to do with these events. Over a 1,000 of them over a 20 year period. So the potential is great. But will it be realised?

Artforums.co.uk is for this friendly and supportive community of practicing artists. They can post their work to the group and use it to plug their websites. So there are good reasons to join.

People with the surname Everiss is another private group that can never be big, there are only a few hundred of us on earth, descended from one Gloucestershire man who changed his name from Deveraux to Everiss in the 1700s.

Bruceongames is for people who follow this blog. Feel free to join if you are a game industry professional. Use it to plug the websites of your companies and games in the “post a link” section.

So have you started any Facebook groups? Post their links into the comments on this blog if you want, let’s make the most of this social networking.

Firstly if you want web traffic you need the search engines to index your site. And the search engines look for keywords. So it is really useful to know the keywords that people are using in their search queries. Google release a lot of this information in Google Zeitgeist. Using this could make your website a lot more successful.

Secondly there is a lot of useful information you can find out about a website but it takes ages to do so. Firefox SEO does it automatically to every item on a Google search. This really is a very powerful tool indeed and will give you so much marketing information that you probably didn’t have before. Here is what it looks for: PR: ? | Google Cache Date: ? | Traffic Value: ? | Age: ? | del.icio.us: ? | del.icio.us Page Bookmarks: ? | Diggs: ? | Digg’s Popular Stories: ? | Stumbleupon: ? | Twitter: ? | Y! Links: ? | Y! .edu Links: ? | Y! .gov Links: ? | Y! Page Links: ? | Y! .edu Page Links: ? | Technorati: ? | Alexa: ? | Compete.com Rank: ? | Compete.com Uniques: ? | Trends | Cached: ? | dmoz: ? | Bloglines: ? | Page blog links: ? | dir.yahoo.com: ? | Botw: ? | Whois | Sktool | Yahoo position: ? | Majestic SEO linkdomain: ?

This article contains practical information based on marketing games. It also has input from experience in marketing forums and blogs (both of which are applicable to games). Everything here is free. All you need to do is the work. And the more work the better the results. Not all these methods are equally effective all the time, it is a matter of picking and mixing according to what you are trying to do.

We have become accustomed to an internet where a lot is free. Google, Wikipedia, the BBC and much of casual gaming for instance. Because this same ethos runs through the internet it is possible to do a lot of marketing without spending a single cent. Obviously using each one of these methods takes skill to get the optimum results, but that will come with practice.

1. Start a blog. Use Google Blogger or WordPress. Post your marketing content and links to it. It will show up on Google search within hours.
2. Use Google Blog Search or Technorati to find other people’s blog entries that relate to what you are doing. Add valid comments to these blog entries, with links where applicable.
3. Use social networking sites such as Facebook and Linkedin. Post links on it, form groups and put an RSS feed from your blog in.
4. Post videos to Youtube. Form groups. Put RSS feeds in to your social networking. One advantage of the internet over paper media is that you can use moving images, make the most of it.
5. Use social content websites such as Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and Stumbleupon. These can generate huge amounts of traffic if a story catches on.
6. Keep a track of the forums that are relevant to you. Create and post to threads where relevant. Put your url in your signature if it is permitted. Do not spam or abuse the forum, it is a community.
7. Seek out all relevant Wikipedia entries and ensure they present your perspective accurately. Add to the external links section at the bottom of the entry. Do not spam, only post what is valid. Also create Knols for everything relevant.
8. Make sure that you are getting onto news aggregators like Google News and NewsNow.
9. There are literally thousands of directories on the net that each need applying to by hand. Use Google to find the relevant ones for you and fill out the forms. Here is a game blog directory, for instance.
10. Many news sites allow you to add your comments to stories, Metro for instance. Do so when relevant. So if there is a major general news story that effects you it is an opportunity to whizz round a few big news sites and get your perspective over. Also many specialist news sites work the same way.
11. There are lots of free press release services, Free Press Release, ClickPress Fastpitch and Pressbox, for instance. Write a press release and stick it on a few of them. Choose services from different countries if applicable.
12. Website valuation tools. These are a bit of fun but they also often archive their results. So in a few minutes you can create a lot of good links into your website. Wesite analysis and statistics sites often work in the same way.
13. Join the reputation management sites. Like Naymz and Lookuppage. These create quality links and tell your side of the story. They help to balance out the anarchy of the net.
14. Free advertising on Craigslist, Vivastreet, Gumtree and all the other free classified services. These need refreshing regularly. They are nicely targeted and you can reach people in lots of countries.
15. Review your own products! On sites such as Amazon and Metacritic. In fact it is really good fun to go through and work out which comments are marketing plants. Your skill is in making yours impossible to distinguish.

By now it must be obvious that these methods are best used together, synergistically. Which is true of all good marketing. They also require creativity if what you do is going to stand out. And you will need a thick skin from time to time as the usual web idiots throw brickbats at you.