Communism, Corporation, Community

There's an old Polish proverb which states "Under capitalism people exploit people; under communism the reverse is true." I recalled this after a discussion with my coworker Simon the other day as we talked about our various challenges when dealing with large corporations.

My job has brought me into contact with several large, multinational companies. Some are my clients, some aren't (and full disclosure: this is not a 'naming names' post, it's a general philosophical post.) Dealing with these corporations has been an eye-opening process for me; before agency PR, my background was at a startup games company and an Oklahoma state government agency as well as some freelance writing and editing gigs. I worked for State Farm for a few summers, but never really got a taste for the full company, and State Farm isn't a multinational anyway. So my exposure to business was limited to smaller and middle-level companies, and of course government.

What strikes me about massive companies is there is a kind of internal bureaucracy normally associated with socialist and communist countries. In fact, it is the exact kind of bureaucracy many libertarians and Goldwater conservatives oppose in goverment: the kind that is a barrier to progress. I'd be remiss if I didn't indicate that it is exactly the kind of bureaucracy that the Neocon Bush Administration has spent the last eight years creating in America. The same that lead to the ultimate failure of and subsequent distrust in the bureaucracy and the administration that created it following the disasterous and murderous breakdown of the system following Hurricane Katrina. The events following Katrina justify the Goldwater conservative / Libertarian view of bureaucracy in a way that no pseudophilosophical blog post ever could.

The resemblance to this justifiably hated bureaucracy in the internal structure of large companies is remarkable. I'm not claiming that it is as dangerous as a failure of infrastructure, but the process to affect change within these bureaucracies is ultimately so convoluted and Byzantine, especially (from my point of view) as they seek to embrace social media, as to be harmful to the company and its consumers both. I realize that these internal reviews and management structures exist precisely to keep things from changing too quickly, but in the digital world it is as much a liability as it is an asset when preventing change. In fact, it's probably far more of a liability. Bureaucracy is the single-largest barrier to adaptation and positive change in either a company or a government.

But how much of a liability? Dangerous to the company certainly. The ability to not react quickly to customer concerns and to rethink PR and communications as one of interaction and customer service is something that will ultimately doom those companies seeking to engage online and go about it the 'old way' and all that implies. But don't take my word for it: Carl Ichan, CEO of Ichan Enterprises (who owns, among other things, Blockbuster) said it best in his post 'Corporate Democracy Is A Myth:

Many American corporations are dysfunctional because corporate democracy is a myth in the United States. They run like a decaying socialistic state. Our boards and CEOs exist in a symbiotic relationship where the boards nourish the CEO with massive stock options that are re-priced downward if the companies stock declines - making them forever valuable. They reward the CEO with pay packages and bonuses when the stock is floundering or the CEO is leaving the company. Corporate performance and the shareholders welfare seldom enter the picture. What kind of democracy is this? There is no accountability.

Accountability is a word I've thrown around before when discussing the same despicable layers of bureaucracy the Neocons created, as ultimately what bureaucracy does is absolve anyone of responsibility. To go back to Katrina, the only one who really lost his job was Michael 'Brownie, you're doin' a heckova job' Brown, a man who was so criminally underqualified for his postion that whomever appointed him should be tried for the murder of people who perished in the days after Katrina. The bureaucracy created so many layers of confusion that in the end, no one except a crony stooge was accountable and the only action taken was he was fired from a job he wasn't doing and didn't need the income from anyway.

This invites other business-government comparisons as well, some of which are exceptionally relevant to engaging online. I could be snide and say Apple is a fascist dictatorship run by one man's cult of personality, but I won't. Or did I? But I'm more interested in the startup mentality from my experiences at WizKids.

The flexibility and freedom of a small to medium-sized startup is far more anagalous to an anarcho-syndicate collective working together to produce things (as opposed to a commune, which works together for the common good, an important distinction Simon pointed out earlier.) This is interesting in that it elegantly mirrors the behavior of many online communities; even within large 'communities' like Facebook people naturally congregate into smaller collectives to serve their specific interests. I realize that's an oversimplification but it's an interesting insight that the companies best equipped to take advantage of online behavior and step around the (you guessed it: bureaucratic) Old Media are those whose internal operations reflect that online behavior.

I can only speculate as to why this is; a company, like a government, in the end is nothing but a bunch of people with artificial structures. When the media structure operates in the same way as the company or government, then it seems - from a relatively small and nonscientific sample - that it is easier for the two to interface. This may be why large companies are so hesitant to embrace social media, as it reflects a system and structure so fundamentally different than the internal bureaucracies they've created that it is too alien for them to comprehend.

I certainly welcome thoughts from anyone who bothered to read this entire rambling piece.

The Value of Information Age

About the time I was in high school - or possibly before, because I wasn't paying attention - someone declared our modern times the "information age," attempting to indicate that information would become the most valuable commodity. Only recently have I really come to realize some of the deeper implications of that moniker.

Information as a commodity is nothing new; historically speaking, one of the reasons Alexander the Great was so successful was that he constantly scouted ahead to gather intelligence not only on the military strength of a region but on the disposition and current political landscapes of it. Sun Tzu said:

Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is FOREKNOWLEDGE.

1. That is, knowledge of the enemy's dispositions, and what he means to do.

Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.
Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.

Emphasis mine.

In a way, the conversation research aspect of online marketing - the role I increasingly find myself in - is exactly what Sun Tzu is talking about, but rather than our enemies we're gathering information about customers and potential customers. We're not assessing the strength of their armies just by counting troops, we're surveying the political landscape to best figure out how our policies will map to their policies.

But a lot of the research that goes into building out our reports comes from sources that we pay for in one way or another. There are subscription-based news aggregators, and of course our clients pay us for our time. And the information itself, in its raw form, is somewhat useless: we not only play the role of intelligence gathering but we play the role of general to a certain degree, offering advice based on what we can synthesize from the information provided.

And certainly there is value in that, but the not-so-cynical part in my asks: what is the value of other information? Certainly my friends Roger and Angela, who have chosen more academic careers, are doing something very similar to what I do: gathering data, synthesizing it, creating something new. But the nature of academia is that they will never (and trust me when I say this is criminal) make as much as someone in the private sector for doing the same basic kind of work and, arguably, more important work than figuring out how better to sell people things they don't really need anyway.

Which is to say nothing about experiential information. Can you even place a dollar value on the kinds of information and the kinds of synthesis that comes with age and experience? Certainly a job that requires "10-15 years experience" pays more than one that requires "1-2 years" but take, for example, my trip to Spain - is there any way to put an actual value on the experience and perspective I gained from that trip? Somehow I doubt it.

I leave the post open-ended for the Puppeteers to weigh in on if they wish.

Also: thanks to all who commented on my last post!

Not a Blogroll, a Read-roll

My blogroll is seriously out of date. I don't really use it as the one-stop shop control panel I used to when reading other people's blogs. In fact, it's become an artifact of a web 1.0 world. I do my reading through Google Reader now, and only in some rare instances do I go look at the content on the blog itself (for example, when I'm commenting on a post.)

So here's my read-roll - the blogs I've got in my Google Reader. If your blog isn't in here, it may be because a) I don't know your blog, and you should leave me a comment; b) for some reason (Magner, I'm looking at you) your RSS doesn't work right and I still have to read your blog on your site; c) you haven't updated in ages and I took you off my roll.

As of this morning, I read 80 feeds. They are all listed below, with the reasons why I read them. Note: Links go to blogs, not to RSS feeds.

• A Soviet Poster A Day. Your daily dose of vintage Soviet propaganda.
  
• Leah In Chicago|Accidentally Jewish. A coworker's blog who concentrates mainly on the journey of someone converting to Judaism, which is good for my religious curiosity.
  
• An American In London. An American Ex-Pat blog, written by a great writer who helped me figure some stuff out about my move. Very well-written posts.
  
• Anacrusis. A daily, 101-word story. A great way to creatively kick off my day.
  
• Become What You Behold. My friend Roger's blog, mostly discussing scholarly things.
  
• Brandon's Shared Items. Brandon's list of Shared items from his Google Reader. (Not a blog.)
  
• Boing Boing. General geek interest site, and one of 5 or so blogs everyone should read.
  
• Bokardo: Social Web Design. Run by a chap named Joshua Porter. I'm not sure when I added this blog to my Reader, but his thoughts on designing for social spaces are interesting and offer a different perspective from how I typically see the web (and web "spaces.")
  
• Brandon's Hodgepodge. Friend and former co-worker Brandon Gribin's blog. He's in Israel right now and posts cool pictures taken with his iPhone.
  
• Brother Magneto's Xbox 360 Blog. A feed of my accomplishments on Xbox Live. One of the killer Web 2.0 features of the 360 that the other consoles don't have. Now if only they didn't break so much...
  
• CC Chapman's Blog. CC Chapman's personal blog. CC's podcast is the only one I listen to regularly.
  
• Cheap Eats In London. One of my most recent adds, so I can figure out where the hell I'm going to eat without breaking my bank in the UK.
  
• Chris's Invincible Super Blog. One of a handful of comic blogs I regularly read, and definitely one of the most entertaining.
  
• Copy, Right? I'm a big fan of cover songs and this blog is one of the best places to find new ones.
  
• Cover Freak. The other great cover song blog out there, it updates less regularly but has some pretty kickass songs on it.
  
• Dave's Long Box. Dave's blog has a great premise: he reviews old backissues from his collection. I've found some pretty interesting stuff through reading his posts.
  
• Dennis Detwiller's Blog. Game designer and author, Dennis' blog is another recent addition but so far has yielded free Delta Green fiction - what's not to love?
  
• Digital Hive. The blog for Digitas, a group that my company's east coast team works with. They really dig into a lot of the technical specifics of new marketing.
  
• Doodle A Day. Fellow Alliterate Stan!'s experiment in posting one doodle a day. Updated daily with a funny, usually gaming-related picture.
  
• Dthon. Fellow Alliterate Scott's personal blog.
  
• DuncanRiley.com. Duncan is one of the founders of Gooruze, a social networking site geared specifically towards new marketers. This is his personal blog.
  
• Fallon Planning. A blog discussing branding issues in the online space, but often goes far beyond to broader issues in new marketing.
  
• Fallout 3: A Post-Nuclear Blog. News and commentary on Fallout 3, from a community perspective.
  
• Francesco Explains It All. Blog of writer/cartoonist Francesco Marciuliano. Topics are all over the place, but are typically funny, good reads.
  
• Gamerscore Blog. I like to keep up to date on what my former clients are up to, mostly because I'm a big fan of the Xbox 360.
  
• Gibson Blog. William S. Gibson's blog, makes for interesting reading. I'm always curious to read author blogs and see how similar they are to how the author writes books.
  
• Grand Text Auto. A great blog about game writing and gaming as an art form.
  
• Grubb Street. Fellow Alliterate Jeff's personal blog, and probably my main source for voting information in local elections.
  
• Grumpy Gamer. Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame's personal blog, updated infrequently but contains interesting analysis of the current state of video gaming when he does write.
  
• isleepnow. My friend Angela's personal blog. I wish she'd update with more original content (hint, hint.)
  
• HorsesAss. Local liberal political blog.
  
• I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER. LOLCats. What more do you need to know?
  
• It's Not a Lecture. David Wescott's blog about online conversations. Often looks at politics, which I believe really led the "new marketing" revolution back in the FreeRepublic.com days.
  
• Jane in Progress. Occasionally I entertain the notion that I could be a screenwriter. Jane, who as written for some of my favorite shows, keeps a great blog about doing just that, geared at newbies.
  
• Jericho Blog: The Salty Scoop. It's no secret I like CBS' "Jericho" a lot, so it should come as no surprise that I subscribe to the producers' blog.
  
• Kotaku. I don't always read it, but Kotaku keeps me up to speed on gaming news when I do. If only they didn't post so much...
  
• Laughing Squid. I found Laughing Squid during the dark times Vista outreach days and really enjoy reading it. It's an eclectic mix of art and various pieces of strangeness.
  
• Lifehacker. Run by some of the same people who run Boing Boing, Lifehacker is a great mix of helpful living tips and odd pieces of gadget-related news.
  
• LOLTHULHU. LOLCats + The Cthulhu Mythos.
  
• Londonist. Gothamist's London branch, and my main source for London news at the moment.
  
• Magazine Death Pool. Seth turned me on to this one - a blog devoted to recording magazines that go out of business, primarily as new media is replacing old media.
  
• MAKE Magazine. The print version of Lifehacker.
  
• Managing the Gray - Marketing for the New Media Professional. CC Chapman's podcast, which Seth originally linked me to once upon a time.
  
• Mashable! Social networking news with commentary. Updates several times a day.
  
• Media Guerrilla. Mike Manuel's new marketing blog. Quality rather than quantity is the keyword for this blog. Mike doesn't update often but his posts are extremely well-thought-out and offer good insights.
  
• My Old Kentucky Blog. One of my favorite music blogs, and another good place to find covers from time to time.
  
• Nothing good can come of this... Despite its pessimistic name, Jon's personal blog is a good way to keep up on what's going on in his life.
  
• Ober Dicta. Seth's personal blog and one of the key inspirations for whipping the Puppet Show in shape.
  
• Paleo-Future. This blog has an awesome premise: a retrospective look at old visions for the future.
  
• Passive-Aggressive Notes. A good humor blog to help me keep things in perspective.
  
• Penny Arcade. I read it for the comics, and Gabe and Tycho are pretty fucking funny.
  
• Permuted Press. Permuted Press publishes zombie novels and this is their blog. I watch it so I'm aware when they open submissions again. Not that I'm waiting for that for any reason or anything.
  
• Play This Thing! I know a couple of the people involved in this blog, but I read it because Play This Thing! is a nice roundup of (mostly) casual-type games online.
  
• Post-Apocalypse UK News. A blog devoted entirely to post-apocalyptic movie and entertainment news. You can see the appeal for me.
  
• Robin D. Laws' Livejournal. Personal LJ for Robin Laws.
  
• Roleplaying Tips 2.0. Online e-zine published with RSS about - yup - roleplaying tips. It usually has some excellent content - I found the "five room dungeon" template here.
  
• Seattlest. Gothamist's Seattle version, one which will probably drop off my read-roll once I'm in London.
  
• Seth Godin's Blog. Despite the fact that he looks like the logo from "You Don't Know Jack" and he's a shameless self-promoter, Seth Godin's blog is a must-read for new marketing folks.
  
• Seth's Shared Items: Seth's Google Reader feed.
  
• Simon Says. A blog penned by my future London colleague Simon Collister. New Marketing with a UK twist.
  
• Slog. The Stranger's Blog, and my second main source for Seattle news.
  
• Something Awful. The frontpage feed (there's a frontpage?)
  
• Strange Maps. Another quirky favorite, this blog - as its name implies - aggregates strange and unusual maps.
  
• Techno//Marketer. Matt Dickman's new marketing blog. I found this one through Gooruze and have found it pretty insightful.
  
• Escapist Magazine. I actually get two feeds from this, but Escapist Magazine is a decent read for gaming - and is the current home of Yahtzee's awesome video reviews of games.
  
• The Fate of the Artist. Eddie Campbell, illustrator of From Hell and writer/illustrator of many fine comics, blogs here.
  
• The Long Tail. Chris Anderson's blog about the changing nature of business, from the perspective of the theory presented in his book "The Long Tail."
  
• The Marketing Blagger. Andy Bargery is a new marketing consultant in London. I found this through the London blogger's meetup (even though I am not there to attend one yet) and it's a good read in its own right.
  
• The Monkey King. Wolfgang Baur's LJ. Wolf's Kobold Quarterly and his patronage project are two interesting things going on in the gaming world at the moment.
  
• The Pirate's Dilemma. Blog for the book/project "The Pirate's Dilemma" about how 'open source culture' is reinventing capitalism. One of my current must-reads.
  
• The Total War Center Forum Front Page News Feed. RSS feed of the news that hits the Total War Center forums, mostly mod updates and news about Empire: Total War, the next game in the series.
  
• Twenty Sided. Geeky gaming blog, but always a pleasure to read.
  
• Web Strategy by Jeremiah. Jeremiah Owyang's blog. Tends to me a little more brand-centric, but ultimately everything blends in new marketing anyway. Updates regularly with great content.
  
• XKCD. This webcomic has become a blogosphere favorite, and I admit I read it regularly.
  
• Your Daily Awesome. Something awesome, usually every day. Like Boing Boing but less pretentious and better quality.

And there you go. That post took me a week to write. If I missed you (specifically your shared items feed - I love those), drop me a line and I'll add you to my read-roll.

A Clicky Situation

There's a really good discussion occurring on HCRealms at the moment about HeroClix and the role of the company (in this case, WizKids) in outreaching to and interacting with online communities. I made a post over there that I'm particularly proud of and figured it would be worth sharing here:

So I wanted to compose my thoughts on this, because there are some really good conversations going on here that are very similar to a lot of conversations going on in PR in general right now. PR's in an enormous period of change - probably the biggest "revolution" since we started this field. Before, companies used to simply talk to the press, send reporters goodie boxes full of swag and expect to receive good coverage for these "review" products. There was no accountability because the general public never knew that the good review of that new television, or game, or whathaveyou was written because there was now a brand-new, identical television sitting in the reporter's home.

But that's changing. Companies simply can't get away with that anymore for a number of reasons. First, the "mainstream media" is becoming increasingly irrelevant as more and more people are going online for news and information. Trust of the media is at its lowest levels ever. When's the last time you bought something based on a review in a magazine vs. the last time you went online and found reviews of a product on Amazon, or on a community about your product?

Companies are realizing that what the fans think really does matter because it often (not always, but often) reflects concerns of consumers as a whole. If enough people think something sucks, then there's a very good chance that it does in fact suck. In a lot of ways, WizKids was way ahead of the curve on this count. Since leaving, I've worked with companies that either have no clue what's going on online or in some cases don't want to hear what's happening. I've literally had to edit reports because they were "too negative," because the upper management didn't want to hear about the problems online and would prefer to ignore them. I'm not kidding.

So listening to and reading what the community has to say is the first step, and I think WizKids does pretty well on this count. I know Seth reads these forums often - he linked me to this thread, after all - but the next logical step is community interaction. Sure, we know what people are saying, but what can we say back? There is, as hair10 posted, a hell of an opportunity here to talk directly to the people who are buying your stuff. And it's one I was, quite frankly, given free reign to utilize, sometimes with not-so-great consequences. More than once, my foot went firmly in my mouth.

I believe, however, that a few mistakes are worth the overall gain when talking to the online community. Connecting with fans, being honest with them and straightforward (something I always strove for), acknowledging the limits of what you can appropriately tell people but still keeping them "in the loop" for lack of a better term - all these things are extremely important. Coming online to say "no" isn't really conducive to conversation. More importantly, whomever the representative is has to be OK with some back and forth with the community - that is the basis of conversation, after all.

There are limits, of course. There are some things that for whatever reason I couldn't tell you guys, or really you didn't need to know (just because it didn't matter, not because I was trying to keep anyone in the dark.) But overall the interaction is worth it because it builds community, and it doesn't matter where it happens - on WizKids' own forums, here, or another site. A Facebook group maybe, or a group chat on Xbox Live. There's lots of places to hold these conversations, and if you're limiting yourself to one place you're missing a good deal of conversation elsewhere. I myself was guilty of this when we shifted focus entirely to the WizKids forums and left HCRealms out of the loop for a while.

At the risk of this turning into a novel I should probably wrap it up, but I wanted you guys to at least know what was going on a little "behind the scenes" - but more importantly, I want you guys to know that what WizKids did a few years ago really was innovative. Not a lot of game companies (and certainly very few companies overall) do what WizKids did, and I know that there is some very strong resistance to it from people more entrenched in the "traditional" PR of talking to print media and sending people fancy review swag method. There are people who don't realize that those ways are rapidly dying out but simply don't want to change how they operate because change is hard. Anyone who has ever lived through a website changing its template can attest to that.

I don't mean to make excuses and I don't want this to sound like you guys are ungrateful - that's the exact opposite of what I want to communicate. Overall, WizKids should engage with you guys more. Seth does an admirable job, but he is, in the end, a game designer and spends a lot of his time designing games. In an ideal world there should be another "BrotherMagneto," someone who is brand-agnostic (as opposed to a brand manager not versed in communications) who has the time to engage with the community and let you know what's going on. That doesn't mean spilling details on upcoming sets and dials (although that's certainly one of the more fun parts of the job!) but engaging in conversation, listening to what you have to say and offering the company's perspective on things.

The Life Toxic

After my last series of posts, I had a reader ask me a very good question: how do you deal with a toxic community? A community so entrenched in its negativity that anything you say or do with them will be turned around, thrown in your face or used against you?

Do such places exist? Are there really people out there who devote a good deal of their time online to complaining, albeit passionately, about something? Yes, there are. I've seen several varieties of these kinds of communities in my time. Here are a few off the top of my head. I've kept things general and intentionally not linked to anything, and none of these examples represent any of my current clients:

• A blog by an ex-employee of a company that claims insider information of wrongdoing, but offers no hard evidence. Any press release made by the company is dissected and twisted by the blogger, who claims to want "open discussion" - but blocks the company's IP addresses from viewing the blog, thus shutting out the institution they claim to want to change.
  
• A forum devoted entirely to how biased and unfair the moderators on another, much larger forum are, populated largely by people kicked off the larger forum for breaking rules.
  
• A blog devoted entirely to how biased one particular moderator on a forum is - with daily updates of the moderator's posts and moderating decisions, often deriding the moderator for his "stupidity" and bias.
  
• A forum created by a "clan" or group of gamers who were annoyed enough at the game company's decisions to change their game that they created their own forum where they could openly criticize nearly every decision the company made.
  
• A blog whose writers posts news neutrally, but then offer consistently negative commentary which is echoed by the community members, with comments often numbering in the dozens to the hundreds on each post.

Also, since I'm getting a lot of traffic from Fallout communities following my use of Fallout as an example, I need to clarify that none of those examples are a Fallout community.

So to my reader's question - how do you engage with a community like this? The short answer is, you don't. Period. Sometimes, there is no strategic advantage to engaging with a community so toxic and hostile that they have the time, effort and inclination to do nothing but be negative on the Internet, especially towards a company or a product. While it's true that there are companies out there that certainly deserve ire, consider the kind of person who would make a blog only to post about how awful a game company (rather than, say, a political figure) is and then update it constantly, regardless of whether anyone aside from a small number of like-minded individuals actually read it. That's the kind of mindset you're dealing with.

But rarely do communities get this bad, and a little research will typically be more than enough warning to avoid a truly toxic community. Note to fellow PR stooges: this is why you can't just do "parachute bloggerism" and expect results. You send your email to the wrong community, and they're really going to make you regret it. So step one is avoiding communities like this.

Step two is realizing that not all community members out there are this way. Nine times out of ten, there are other outlets for discussing a passion, be they blogs, Facebook groups, forums, Listserves or something else. Find those communities instead, and engage there. The toxic community members will either close themselves off further - in which case you lose nothing - or take an interest in engaging you outside of their comfort zone, on another site, where you have at least gained their attention. That's progress.

Step two and a half is what happens if there isn't another place to engage. This is not an either-or situation, and the image above comes from one of my favorite Star Trek references: the Kobayashi Maru, or the "unwinnable scenario." In Star Trek, a Starfleet cadet is introduced to a simulation where they are forced to choose between rescuing a ship in the Klingon Neutral Zone and destroying their own ship and killing their crew, or ignoring the ship's distress call and abandoning the people aboard to certain death. Kirk was the only cadet to ever pass the test (as of Star Trek II anyway) by coming up with a unique solution: he reprogrammed the simulator to let him win. The lesson of the Kobayashi Maru is that there's typically another solution to any seemingly dualistic problem - and in this instance, you have to fiddle with the community a bit to win.

I don't mean hacking into the toxic forums. Rather, create your own community. Not for the control over its members, but for the initial control over its content. This can be as simple as starting a blog where you have well-defined rules about low-content, hostile comments and delete such as necessary. Or it can be the creation of a forum where you start driving conversation, and let things evolve naturally on their own. Or - and I don't mean to bandwagon here - a Facebook or Gather discussion group was made for this sort of thing, and they're not that hard to create.

The best way to deal with a toxic community is to simply remove it from the equation. I don't mean ignore it, because often times a company's harshest critics can provide it with some of the best feedback. But there's also no reason to set yourself up for failure when engaging with a community that tends to be toxic. The fact of the matter is, it's just not worth it. Sure, there may be more of them than there are of your positive community when you first begin engaging - but that demographic will change over time. And the payoff is worth it.

Note: Thanks to Mike Reed's famous Flame Warriors for the picture above. Support his work, it's seriously awesome.

The Value of Engagement, Part Three: Taking It To the Community

For context, see my first post about the value of both listening and talking to the community and how it differs from traditional PR, and my second on how engaging with blogs is only the first step in online marketing. I concluded with this:

I have said before we need to figure out "how" to do this - frankly, we know how. It's a challenge dealing with individuals, but that's how you have to do it. It really is throwing out the old rules of engagement (to use CC Chapman's description) and not so much writing a new process as dealing with things on an individual level. You can no longer spam a press release to 500 people, get 100 hits and call it a success. But one good post on a forum related to your target audience, where 500 interested and passionate individuals might see it - now you're cooking with gas.

Engagement of individuals is where this industry is heading, and this is especially important to agencies. I've thought more about what I was asked that initially sparked this entire train of thought. While engaging with blogs is within our area of expertise, engaging with so-called "top tier" blogs isn't much different than engaging with a magazine. By "top tier," I mean the blogs that have grown to begin replacing print media - the Engadgets of the online world. I do not mean this in a negative way; it's the natural progression of things, and a PR professional would be a fool to ignore them. In fact, I've seen people in my agency on the traditional PR side begin taking ownership of outreach to these blogs and relationships with the bloggers/reporters there - which makes perfect sense as well, because talking to these bloggers is a lot more like talking to traditional media, except things happen in "Internet time," something that really requires an entire post of its own to explain.

But going back to the main thrust of the two previous posts, the underlying "thesis" here if you will, its actual individual engagement with community members that offers the potential for the most value. When a blog like Engadget covers something, dozens if not hundreds of other blogs pick it up - and the news often gets posted to specific forums dedicated to whatever the item is. For example, if Engadget covers a new cellphone it's a shoe-in that cellphone enthusiast forums are going to pick up on the post.

So why go on those forums to talk to the community members there, if they're already getting their news (or if you've got an online agency sending them news?) What's the value in that? The answer to that question is what I've been trying to set up - that the value, although somewhat immeasurable by "traditional" means (hits, key message playback, and so forth) lies in the emotional attachment to the brand and the feeling of investment created in the community by such interaction.

What ho! says the traditional marketer? Isn't this also an opportunity to control our message, to disseminate and throttle and control information as well?

Well sure, I suppose. But there's an underlying disparity in how the traditional marketer views information flow and how the new marketers (should) view information flow.

• Traditional Marketing Wisdom: Engagement is how we control information, revealing only what we want and when we want and not worrying about transparency.
  
• New Marketing Wisdom: Engagement is about transparently providing context to information, whether that information has been released by "us" or not.

Transparency has been a major point of discussion in the marketing blogosphere in the past, and something I've weighed in on myself. But "context" is word I've been thinking more about recently. Context implies framing information in a certain way, but in a transparent world context is the next logical step in the sharing process (the "opinion" of the Opinions section, to steal from my first post.) I realize "context" comes close to "influencing information," but that's not the way in which I'm using it. Context should be providing more information to make the information that's out there make sense.

So how does this work exactly? From my own personal experience at WizKids, it involves someone (me) watching forums, answering questions, recognizing when the community may have missed something or simply doesn't understand what you've said for whatever reason, and then trying to address it. But from a professional standpoint I'd like to look at what was originally going to be a couple of examples from the video game world, but has since kind of melded into one big example. Transparency declaration: the examples involve a game that is due to be released on the Xbox 360. I have not worked on the Xbox 360 account officially since the end of June, and the last billable work I did on the account was long before that, but I needed to say it anyway just so there's no confusion.

The game is Fallout 3, and (transparency again) it is a franchise I have been involved with for 10+ years if you count chatting on the Wasteland forums on Prodigy. I wrote the original Fallout PnP back in college, I worked on the d20 Modern translation that will never see the light of day, and I've been involved with the community from a fan's perspective since 1999 at least. And I've posted before about Fallout and the various things Bethesda was and wasn't doing to engage with the community, including the "Community 20 Questions" in that last post.

Engagement. Engagement never changes. Bethesda runs a pretty tight ship on their own site, and they have been focusing the lion's share of their engagement efforts thusfar on both traditional gaming media like Game Informer magazine and gaming-related websites like IGN, Kotaku and so forth. Fallout has a really active fan community - No Mutants Allowed and Duck and Cover being the two largest and most active - that even before Fallout 3 were announced, some eight years after the last Fallout game shipped, were still receiving dozens of posts a day on their forums. Let that sink in: eight years since the last product shipped, and the community was still more active than a good deal of communities dedicated to current games / products. How's that for a dedicated and invested fanbase?

Bethesda's engagement efforts, though, did not include that fanbase - at least initially. The reason they gave, and this is not a bad reason, is that they wanted to focus more on gaming sites and magazines. A company with limited resources needs to choose its battles, and the gaming press can have a major impact on how well your game sells, especially when you're investing a "metric shitton" (official measurement) of money into producing a game. You need to make a profit, so your game needs to sell to a wide audience.

OK, cool, and Bethesda has said they plan to engage with the community at a later date. The "20 Community Questions" were asked and answered. And Bethesda asked the fans themselves "what do you want to see us do to interact with the community moving forward?" But in the midst of all this, some community members decided that the promised future outreach wasn't enough and secured an interview with Pete Hines of Bethesda at the games convention in Leipzig. They did this by "becoming" members of two European gaming sites, and then publishing their interview / demo impressions on No Mutants Allowed, which the Fallout 3 blog reported on as well (along with many other outlets too numerous to link to here.)

The language used in the post on the Fallout 3 blog is telling: the two reporters / community members were "intrepid ninjas," and their operation was, in the words of Fallout community manager Matt "Gstaff" Grandstaff, "Very sneaky indeed." It's important to note that Brother None, in announcing the interview, doesn't use language to denote that he was being sneaky at all - but he does note (quite importantly) that while he and the other community member were allowed into a demo, a NMA member who registered as a member of NMA was not.

There's a lot of things to learn here, not the least of which is: in an information vacuum, community members can go to great lengths to get information being kept from them - and to actively seek out engagement with company representatives. Brother None and the NMA crew were certainly within their rights to do this, just as Bethesda is within their rights to react to it in any way they choose (and it seems that the interview kind of forced Bethesda's hand on community interaction, which in my opinion is not a bad thing - see an interview with Pete Hines about community for more information.) Another thing that one must keep in mind is that even members of the most traditional media can be bloggers, and what appears on a personal blog is not subject to the same standards as a press site, let alone a traditional media publication. Rather than rattle off a list, I will simply mention that to my knowledge no blogger or community member has been successfully sued for libel or slander over something written on the Internet (feel free to correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, and I'll update.) Even though a community member may be a reporter (or in my case, a marketing stooge) they're still community members with opinions, passions and a love for the product.

It's clear that Bethesda is doing a lot of things right insofar as community interaction. Proof positive of this is their dedicated Fallout Community Manager, Matt "Gstaff" Grandstaff. One of the most impressive online gaming-related campaigns I've seen recently was the frenzy whipped up by 2K for BioShock, and I'm not the only one: the Hollywood Reporter did a great article on it. Money quote, as quoted on the Fallout 3 blog:

“As with, say, science fiction movies or other genres that are considered ‘cool,’ fans tend to look at marketers as ‘clueless suits’ who hype everything,” says Bass. “We knew we needed to be careful to do things in a way that was cool … not to build hype but to build buzz. Especially when we started marketing the game two years before it was finished. I mean, how do you go out on the E3 floor and say you’ve got one of the greatest games ever made when there’s nothing for anyone to see or play?”

Rather than label “BioShock” as “the next big thing,” Bass decided to create a Web site into which he could keep releasing assets to show — not to tell — how good the game would be.

Bass makes a very important distinction between hype and buzz, and one that will probably be the subject of a future post. Hype is something that builds expectations. Buzz is something that builds awareness. And the tricky thing about expectations, especially in the gaming space, is that they're very easy to create and very hard to live up to. When you create buzz, you accomplish your goal (selling more units) while still keeping the trust of the community because expectations aren't out of control. By all counts, BioShock was a great success and even though there were some hiccups around launch time they seem to have been ironed out and the community is that much stronger for it.

Neither Fallout 3 nor BioShock would be driving the kind of buzz they're driving (and drove) simply by engaging with blogs. Both stores - one evolving, one almost over - are examples of interacting with the community as individuals, and the "value" is clear. You can begin to win over a negative community, and you can create the kind of buzz that turns a hard-to-sell game into a success.

I will be the first to admit that this strategy won't work in all cases. If you're selling dishwasher soap, chances are there isn't an invested community out there interested in discussing dishwasher soap. But there very likely is a community out there that's passionate about some aspect of your product (maybe your soap is good for the environment, or fights germs better than other soaps), and finding those communities is the key.

Which brings me to the end of this series of posts. I've thought of some other things I want to talk about, but they will be more appropriate in other places.

And if you read this far, I'll give you a cookie.

The Value Of Engagement

I had an interesting discussion yesterday with a coworker who asked a common question when dealing with the folks here in EIS: "what value are you adding?" If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that, I'd have a lot of dollars.

But underlying that question is a sentiment that lies at the heart of both PR today and specifically what I do, and where I think we need to go from here. We (meaning, the New Marketing folk) have trained the traditional marketers to see the Internet as something of which they need to be aware, and in which they need to participate. That's good, but it's only the first step on a long road and unfortunately it seems that more and more, traditional PR practitioners see it as the destination rather than that first step.

The traditional PR "comfort zone" modus operandi is this:

1. Examine product or service and create a catchy strategy for getting people exited about it.
2. Call or write or email (aka, "pitch") magazine or newspaper with catchy product idea. This can be a clever press release, a press kit that may or may not relate to the product itself, or a "product sample" that the reporter can play with and then choose to keep. Or a combination thereof.
3. Set up an interview with the reporter, where the PR person prepares the company's spokesperson with a series of questions the reporter could ask, the important things the spokesperson needs to talk about, and a little bio about the reporter that details what the reporter likes and dislikes.
4. After the interview, the reporter writes the story, and PR provides them with images, answers follow-up questions, and so forth.

I realize I squeezed a lot of traditional PR know-how into four sentences and obviously glossed over some things, but if you reduce the total to four main components, it would look something like that.

Traditional PR people like that because it's safe and controlled (to a certain degree), but more importantly they can measure the value in such a thing. Another way of saying "what's the value" is "what's the ROI" (return on investment.) That's a marketing and advertising term that bled its way into PR after people realized the importance of our industry, and advertising and marketing people started migrating over to PR jobs. ROI can best be expressed by an equation:

ROI = ((X*Y)^Z)/A, where X is the number of stories about a product, Y is the tone of those stories measured on a standard scale, Z is the circulation numbers of the publications, and A is the "investment" in time and resources (AKA $$$) spend on securing the coverage.

There's a reason people like this method: it's quantifiable, it's trackable, and in the end you can present hard numbers to a superior (or an auditor) and say "look at what we did with our budget!"

Author's Note: I was not a PR or business major, so I'm sure someone who studied this stuff will correct me on the formula and definitions above - but the spirit of it is correct.

So when faced with the Internet and "the blogosphere," it's not surprising to see traditional PR people looking for something sane and familiar. They see blogs and think: "blog = news outlet, blogger = reporter" and want to engage and measure appropriately. Several times I have run into the question, "why are we planning on outreaching to this blog when this other, completely unrelated blog has a much higher readership?"

Here's the thing: this really is the first step in a much larger process, and "success" should not be measured by the number of stories appearing on blogs and the total readership of those blogs. Why? Because that isn't where the interesting things are happening on the Internet. Sure, you should try to get bloggers to write about your stuff, but what's really interesting is in the comments sections in the blogs, and on the forums and newsgroups and email lists where real people are sharing their opinions of the product. The real measure of success isn't stories, it's sales, and you can have all the great stories in the world - but it ain't the reporters who are going to line up to buy your product. It's the people doing the commenting, the people engaged in the conversations.

Here's another way to look at it: when I was a tyke, I read two sections of the newspaper every morning, the comics and the Opinions page. The comics because they're funny, and they were still publishing Calvin and Hobbes back then. And the Opinions page because it was the most interesting section of the newspaper. Who wants to read the news, when you can read what people think about the news? What gives you more insight into your community (I use that term here to indicate "the town in which you live") - news about your town, or what the people in town think about the news about your town?

Of course, a lot of bloggers put their own opinions into stories, which is good - and it's one of the things that differentiates them from traditional news sources. Just like in literary studies, there's kind of an unwritten rule in blogging: if you're quoting a source (say, an article you picked up somewhere else or a song you're posting), then you should write at least as many lines discussing the quote, if not double the number of lines. It's a rule I haven't always followed, but it's one I try to follow as best I can, and many other bloggers do too.

But like the Opinion pages of yore, the most interesting perspective of the online community is in their discussion of goings-on. At WizKids, I used the community's reactions to identify short-term problems but also long-term trends, which we could then use to adjust our overall strategy. It's definitely an investment in time, but it's one that companies would do well to invest in more often.

UPDATE: Next post in series: the current debate about how to engage bloggers, and why it doesn't go far enough.

16 Observations on Social Design

I grabbed this off Leah's Twitter stream: the 16 Observations on Social Design by Joshua Porter, on his blog Bokardo. It's a good read, and these are good things to remember whenever you're interacting with people (specifically in groups, IE forums) online. #16 is probably my favorite: "Because life in not deterministic, we cannot always predict human behavior."

Anyone who doesn't believe this should sit by and watch months worth of carefully-laid plans about an announcement start to crumble as the community picks up on something you never dreamed they'd care about, and turn your positive announcement into something that's going to make you pull a "long weekend" shift. HeroClix fans, I'm looking at you.

My New Car, or How I Became a Community-Based Corporate Shill

In the war of "my giant money-grubbing corporation is better than your giant money-grubbing corporation," many of my peers have taken sides. Some like Apple. Some like DC (comics for you noobs out there.) Some like WotC and the d20 system (RPGs, noobs.) Some like Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

This is what new marketing people dream about when we sleep, when we're not dreaming of Great Cthulhu that is. Community members so attached to a product they paid money for that they will go out, for free, and advertise that product. They'll tell their friends and write about it in their blogs. It's the online equivelant of wearing a brand on your t-shirt, or your favorite NASCAR racer's jacket with his corporate sponsors' logos all over it - you're paying to do a company's work for it.

I used to think I was better than that. Above it. I'm on the inside, right? I ought to know better?

Yeah, well, then I got a new car. My brand-spanking-new, a little more than 100 miles on it Toyota Prius. And boy howdy do I love it and you're going to hear about it.

We decided on the Prius at the culmination of a six-month car search. We had the following criteria for a new car:

• Low road noise. Our old car was a real rattletrap, especially above 40 MPH or on rough roads.
  
• Good gas mileage. Even if it meant paying more, I'd rather that money was going to a company that was trying to innovate gas-saving technology rather than an oil company. Also, fuck you Dick Cheney.
  
• A comfortable ride. I'm a big, tall guy. My lower back starts hurting when I'm crammed into most car seats.
  
• Red. This was actually Liz's preference; I could care less what color a car is.

So we test-drove five or six different cars that fit those criteria and also fit into our budget. I'd been impressed with Audis in the past, and we had a nice test-drive of an A4, but the mileage wasn't great and the frankly it wasn't as comfortable as the Prius. The Civic was far too small. The Jetta was also uncomfortable. And the Mini doesn't have a backseat to speak of.

But the Prius was an advanced winner almost from the beginning. The car is really roomy - surprisingly roomy, actually. The backseat is bigger than the Taurus I rode in when my parents were out last month. It feels like a midsized car, and it handles exceptionally well. Not quite as good as the Audi, but that's not really a surprise. For its price and size, it was more than enough.

And yeah, it's a hybrid and it gets great gas mileage. I test-drove a Prius back in 2001 for a magazine article, and at the time the car seemed more of a gimmick than an automobile - like a Go-Kart, Liz said. I agree. This feels like a real car. It's great to ride in, the gas mileage is superb, and I'll get a tax credit for it this year. Not too shabby.

So look out people: I'm now a Prius evangelist. If you're around me for any length of time, prepare for my spiel on how awesome this car is. You've been warned.

Also - pictures here.

Fallout: Can't We All Just Get Along? Also, a Gift to Fallout Fans [UPDATE 1]

If you take a look at my gamertag on the right nav, you'll note that my picture is now the famous Vault Boy from the Fallout series.

It's safe to say I like Fallout. A lot. Enough that, back in college, I wrote and subsequently managed a pencil-and-paper version of Fallout (and doing so earned me my only entry in a Wiki that I'm aware of.) I didn't start with Fallout; its predecessor, Wasteland, was one of my favorite computer games growing up. The post-apocalyptic setting, the open environment, the different quests, the involving storyline - the game really was the first of its kind. It was the first C-RPG I actually completed, playing through all the way to the end. I participated in (and moderated) discussions about Wasteland on Prodigy back in 1990 and 1991, where Brian Fargo was an active and transparent member of the community.

My first real "short story" was post-apocalyptic, as was my first novel. I have an entire bookshelf devoted to PA fiction, and studied it in college for honors credit. Working on the Fallout PnP game was my first real introduction to game writing, and to the power of what a community could accomplish together. It's safe to say that my involvement with Wasteland and eventually Fallout had an extremely profound impact on my life.

I even signed up for the now-canceled Fallout d20 project from Glutton Creeper Games. I did my part, the check cleared, and that was that. Some projects just weren't meant to be.

So when the first Fallout RPG (sorry, I don't count Tactics) in nine years is announced - that would be Fallout 3 - I got interested. And excited. And even more interested when it wasn't Interplay or Black Isle behind it, but Bethesda, who I knew best for Oblivion and the original Terminator FPS.

They started teasing it at E3 last year, and this year we got a teaser trailer with Ron Perlman's voice and a look at a nuked-out Washington, D.C. and a member of the Brotherhood of Steel strutting around. And then the magazine previews began, and the fans starting going nuts.

Not Jericho nuts, this was more of a frenzy of "what the fuck?"

Fallout fans (and I consider myself a member of this group) are some of the most passionate, driven and vocal online communities. They never hesitated to let me know what was wrong with the Fallout PnP game, and their input helped make it better. But one middling (Tactics) and one awful (Brotherhood of Steel) game later, and they aren't really a trusting lot. I signed on to Duck and Cover (one of the two major Fallout communities, No Mutants Allowed being the other) in the early days of the Fallout d20 game to tell them to "wait and see" before calling the game bad.

I've been following the Fallout 3 discussion on fallout 3: a post-nuclear blog, which is doing an excellent job of capturing the various interviews and nuggets of information around the web and allowing fans to respond. One of the two reasons I'm writing this post is to suggest once more to my fellow fans that we need to take the same "wait and see" approach to Fallout 3. I've read some pretty terrible things online from the community - intentionally making a mod like "Hot Coffee" in an attempt to get the game banned being one of the more egregious - but we seriously need to wait and see.

Which isn't to villanize the community at all - their voice needs to be heard. But it's better heard if delivered calmly. I offer as evidence the Jericho community's reaction to their show being canceled. They didn't cry "CBS is raping the franchise!" They organized, presented their point of view (NUTS!), and got the network to reverse their decision. Most importantly, they were positive in their approach and the appropriate people responded to that.

I share many of the communities' concerns about the game. It's set in the East - awesome. Did it have to be the Brotherhood of Steel and super-mutants? Nuke-tossing grenade launcher? Ugh. My biggest complaint (and one that probably won't be changed) is the lack of turn-based combat, or even something turn-like (see: Tactics.)

First-person point of view, I don't care about. Some of the other things sound downright awesome. The idea of integrating character creation into the story of your character's early life is fucking awesome. And the graphics, if they can pull off half of what we've seen in early screenshots, are going to rock my socks.

But I've been fooled by early looks at video games before. It's more than a year before the game comes out, so again, I'm going to go back to "wait and see." I suspect we've seen only a fraction of what Fallout 3 is going to be, and I have a feeling that it's not too late for them to make some changes if necessary (like, say, the look of the super-mutants.) To put it more bluntly: some of the fans need to chill out. If it comes time, organize and be positive about it. Use what happened with Jericho as an example of how to get something done with an online community And for fuck's sake, stop using the term "rape" to describe what Bethesda or anyone else is doing to Fallout. The number of times that term is thrown around would make one wonder what kinds of Freudian things are going through our (the communities') subconscious.

The thing is, I've been through this before. Fallout was "inspired by" Wasteland. But it was a different game, and a lot of the things that the community is saying about Fallout 3 (some deserved, some not in my opinion) were things I was thinking about Fallout when it came out. When I held the box in my hand and read it, my first thought was: "this isn't goddamned Wasteland. How could they even put that on the box?"

And it wasn't Wasteland. It was something new, with its own awesomeness and its own problems. Oh, were there problems. The grinding parts of Fallout 1, facing rats and ants. Woe to you, player, if you created a character other than a brawler your first time through, and even then you could count on reloading once or twice. Or Fallout 2, rushed out the door so quickly it was (and still is) almost unplayable without a massive patch. But I adapted, and love Fallout for what it is, flaws and all. Will Fallout 3 be the same? I'll wait and see.

At any rate, here's the real point of this post. I've been toying on and off with the idea of an RPG that's user-created and user-edited. Kind of like Wikipedia, but for a game system. What could the community come up with for a PnP if turned loose on a system and a setting, with the same degree of responsibility and the ability to edit in Wikipedia?

So, fellow Fallout fans, I contacted my friend Ausir who runs the Vault. Although I've toyed with the idea of working on a new version of the Fallout PnP, unless it was a paying gig I couldn't justify the time. Mercenary I know, but them's the shakes these days. So I turned over all my PnP materials to Ausir to convert to a Wiki, and the result is this: the Fallout PnP game Wiki, completely open-source and available to the fans to edit, take apart, restructure, correct, and change as they see fit. It's not complete yet, and Ausir has some materials I don't have, but I encourage everyone to check it out.

Additionally, as I have been asked for these on several occasions, I zipped up the last version of the document I worked on along with all other Fallout PnP-related items I could find and uploaded them to my website. Get that file here. Ausir promises me that a larger, updated .zip with more materials will be available on the Wiki soon, at which point I'll either mirror that file or simply take mine down (but I'll update when I do.)

The resources in this .zip:

• Fallout PnP "Unlimited" (a never-released, partially completed revision) .doc format
  
• Psionics rules, .doc format
  
• Great Wastes sourcebook, .doc format
  
• The Enclave 2.0 sourcebook, .PDF format
  
• Tribes sourcebook, .PDF format
  
• Waterworld total conversion, .txt format
  

Have at it, guys. Do me, and us, proud.

Update: I talked with Ausir a little bit about Fallout 3, and he mentioned that a lot of people online would be OK with it being called Fallout X, where "X" is something other than "3." Kind of like how Heroes of Might and Magic isn't Might and Magic 10, because it's slightly different than Might and Magic. And kind of how Fallout: Tactics wasn't Fallout 3 because it's a different kind of game.

I'm not 100% convinced such a move would be the right thing to do (after all, technology has changed a bit between Might and Magic 1 and Might and Magic 8), but it's one worth considering.

I'll update with the new .zip file later.