“But we already do social media” is a phrase we often hear from games companies when we talk to them. And most of you are doing some Social Media.

But are you:

• Going beyond your core audience
• Building long-lasting ‘evergreen’ communities
• Monitoring the buzz of you game and your competitors
• Tracking trends and discovering new audiences
• Uniting your fans and allowing them to be a part of the development process.

The reality is, while many games companies we talk to have community managers and some social media activity, they aren’t maximising their full potential and seeing the bigger picture.

Going beyond the core

Most community managers manage their existing community fantastically well – and this is the job they’ve been charged with. But they often aren’t given the tools or scope to go beyond this and try to expand the reach of their titles.

It is very easy for games companies to fall into the same old routine of only releasing trailers, behind the scenes interviews and making of sketches. These are things that excite the core and die hard fans, but do nothing for people beyond that. So where are your new customers and new blood?

There are plenty of casual players out there who would love to play your games, but they aren’t interested in how it is made or interviews with the developer. They have different trigger points.

Do you or your community managers know what they are? Do they know how to find out?

By doing research online to see the other online spaces your customers and potential customers go online, you can see find ways to spread your message and excite more communities.

Look outside the games industry at how the likes of Vogue and Johnsons are building communities around their audiences common interests and not just their products.

Make your community evergreen

Often communities are built around one particular title in the run up to launch and then are quickly dumped. This means you lose all of those fans you spent so long gaining. Start looking at how you can join up your social media and how you can cross-pollinate your communities.

Games will come and go but you don’t need to start building your communities from scratch every time. Try bringing similar communities together and finding ways to build over arching strategies, just like Capcom does with their Unity site.

Buzz Monitoring

Are you monitoring what people are saying about you beyond just your own communities? Regularly checking and using tools such as Brand Watch and Radian 6 can give you valuable insight into what your community are saying and thinking in real time. These tools are only as good as the words you put into them, you can gain a lot of valuable insight by monitoring not only what people are saying about your company and games but what they are saying about your competitors and the industry at large.

• What movies are they watching?
• what websites are they visiting?
• What other games are they playing?

This kind of market research can really help you shape your own marketing and portfolio.

Ultimately what all of this comes down to is treating Social Media as a way of enhancing everything you do. Think beyond marketing and community management, think about how you can use Social Media to its fullest and get that edge over your competitors.

A look at how Lucas Arts uses Twitter and Facebook to help promote Monkey Island. With a community over 20k fans on each platform and hundreds of comments a day this has proven to be a great example of social media and community management in games.

One of Lucas Arts most loved games series is Monkey Island. The swashbuckling pirate adventure began in the early 90s and after almost a decade of radio silence Monkey Island is back. Games marketing and the online world is a very different place to that of the early 90s where home modems were almost non-existent. So how are Lucasarts using this new landscape to unite fans old and new?

For a start the majority of their Facebook activity is contained within one page. After recently releasing 2 remakes and an episodic series, multiple pages for each game would have created a fractured and time limited community. Communities built around a single product usually have a short shelf life, once the game has launched you can already hear death rattle shaking as fans move on to the newer games communities.

But by creating a community around a specific franchise the community has a reason to exist beyond any one iteration. It means the community can grow over time and not have to stop and start as it tries to lurch between games.

The most important feature of any community is a reason to exist. Sometimes a common interest is not enough to keep people interested.

The guys at Lucas Arts have kept the community engaged and involved with a variety of competitions, tasks and importantly exclusive content for the die hard fans. By being members of this community fans get to see behind the scenes in a way that just isn’t possible in any other medium. Fans can talk directly with the people creating the game, they can request more behind the scenes sketches and be the first to see new trailers and images. Not only that they are surrounded by people as fanatic as they are which reinforces their excitement.

A recent example of an engaging campaign on their page was a set of picture tasks for the community. Fans had to send in photos for each task to help create the “Guybrush Voodoodol” an item that would be later given out in competitions. This set of tasks shows how engaged the community is that without any incentive Fans responded in their hundreds with all manners of pictures.

Different platforms have different strengths and weaknesses and Lucas Arts has shown a great understanding of this by focusing Facebook more on sharing rich media and community discussions where as Twitter has been used for shorter and more frequent updates.

Unifying all of the Lucas arts games under one Twitter account also allows for a high level of cross pollination from the other Lucas games communities. However it doesn’t allow for as much focus and attention as the individual Facebook page can.

In combination this allows fans to become more aware of other Lucas Arts games in a way that makes sense. Fans are not forced or coerced into joining the Twitter but it is a natural progression for the communities to revolve around it.

These communities are more than just sales channels they are providing great content, feedback and a place for fans to meet like-minded people.

One thing we always talk about in Social Media is personality. Personality is important, it’s what makes your outreach connect with people and feel real. It gives a face to your games company.

The brand on the front of the box still matters more than the people in the back of the manual but I see a slow change occurring in terms of people caring about who makes their games.

I expect over the coming years a shift from following publishers to following developers and in turn their employees. Paying attention to the names behind your favourite games may never be a mainstream activity but I think with the opportunity to connect through social networks it will become more important to more gamers.

Why does this matter? Because it gives people the opportunity to speak directly to their fans to build a bigger fanbase for themselves, their company and most importantly the games they create.

On Twitter Cliff Bleszinski (Gears of War) and Tim Schafer (Brutal Legend) have just under 30k followers between them. That is a lot of people to be able to access at a moments notice, to crowd-source, to excited, to engage and to listen. The pair are dwarfed by comparison to the community manager for Call of Duty, Robert Bowling, who boasts over 100k followers! Just think what you personally could do with 100,000 people available at your finger tips.

What is great about these accounts is that they are so much more personal than any company blog or website. It is a direct link between fans and creators but there is a price and expectation you will pay for that access.

If you put yourself into these places fans will demand attention, they will pester you with questions, scrutinise your every update and will all hope to become your real friend. Managing expectations comes with the territory of Social Media and while you need to be careful with what you say, don’t let protocol get in the way of making your account interesting. There is nothing worse than a social network account that simply broadcasts; if your fans wanted that they would just subscribe to your RSS feeds. What they want is to hear from you directly.

I think the more games industry professionals get into direct contact with their fans the better. Then the industry can become more about the people than the brands. We will see how the shift from brands to people continues with the recent news that former Infinity Ward studio heads, Vince Zampella and Jason West, had started a new company with EA.

In last weeks budget Allister Darling said there would be a tax break for the games industry similar to that offered for the film industry.

Firstly I would like to say a big congratulations to the games industry, this sort of recognition in the tax system is long overdue! There was some great lobbying from both the developer trade body, TIGA, and the publisher trade body, ELSPA. Whilst their, and others, contributions where invaluable and influential in this change I think it is worth highlighting how some MPs got constitutions and members of the public to back the cause.

Tom Watson, the MP for West Bromwich East, set up a Facebook group called “Gamers Voice.” the group has just under 17 thousands fans and was created to give UK Gamers a place to voice their opinions and be a part of a campaign to make gaming more accepted across traditional media and politics.

The group have shared information and opinions on events, such as Games Based Learning Conference 2010, and and also incorporated live blogging for those that could not make it.

Seeing as how even big brands often only get a few thousand fans and a smattering of conversation this is a very respectable achievement. It shows that a network like Facebook often works best when you are rallying people around a cause or campaign as opposed to a catchall, no real purpose fan page.

I’m not saying you need to polticise your Facebook page but you should make it emotive. Rather than say becoming a fan of “Qube Media” you should be joining a page that says “I think Social Media can change the world”. It’s emotive and creates discussion points as opposed to just sticking in your brand name and putting on a few photos.

These social spaces need social content and more than just pushing out your information you need to create discussion points for your fans and then encourage and stimulate those conversations.

Hats off to Tom Watson for his great work on this and his continued support for the games industry and digital economy as a whole.

On a side note I recommend you check out a couple of his 5 second unofficial campaign videos. Great stuff!

Video 1: Keeping you safe

Video 2: Keeping you warm

Qube will be working with 505 games on a new Xbox 360 and PS3 title, Naughty Bear set to be released in the Spring. We will be carrying out community mapping and influencer profiling for 505, and will use this to create a highly targeted engagement strategy.

By finding and profiling the game’s potential audience online we will develop a truly effective engagement strategy that will increase positive word of mouth around the game and increase pre-order figures for the game.

505 are excited about the possibilities this new relationship holds. Uk and Export Product Manager, Emily Bryce-Willams from 505 said “we are really looking forward to working with Qube and establishing who is talking about our product online, and how we can harness this buzz and use it to shape both on and offline marketing efforts.”

The feeling is very much mutual on Qube’s part, and we will keep you up to date on the latest on the Naughty Bear campaign.

Pulling trends and topics out of communities requires a lot of work. You need to be in the communities every day, talking, monitoring and pulling out data. For huge companies dealing with your own community can be a huge undertaking let alone the hundreds of fans talking about your brand and products elsewhere.

We have looked before at how Starbucks have used My Idea to gather ideas from their user base to help with co-creation of their products and services. A number of other companies are now also offering a similar service such as Dell and Sony.

With Sony using a voting platform to gather ideas and prioritise features with their user base it got me wondering how this could be used beyond the platform holders. Last year Infinity Ward used a similar system combined with Twitter to get feedback and ideas from their fans for Modern Warfare 2.  It would be interesting to know how useful that was and how much of that feedback they really took on board.

There are quite a few feature requests that made it into the final game. Whether these ideas were already planned or if the votes helped the developers is hard to say but I would think that the top rated feature being in the game was more than just happy coincidence.

Some other highly suggested feature requests are eerily close to things in the final game. Again these may have just been obvious ideas but either way it is a great vindication of the platform that at the very least fans will feel like their voice was heard.

Whilst these platforms can be great tools for gathering customer ideas, you need to make sure their is a clear strategy behind it. You need to ensure you have a clear idea of how you are going to communicate with your customers on their ideas, they could end up frustrated if you are seemingly asking for their help and then not implementing their requests.

I think using these tools effectively could produce some real gems. I wouldn’t expect every user to come up with ground breaking ideas but even if you only get a couple it could make it all worthwhile.

Some final questions to think about.

How involved should your fans and customers be in your designs? Could this end up creating homogenised games designed by committee? Could ideas from your existing fans alienate potential new customers and how do you keep that balance?

In both my work and leisure time I spend a lot of time looking at online discussions about videogames. I see a lot of things said that suggest there are a huge amount of gamers being poorly served by the industry.

The home console’s birth in the 80s has grown into a monstrous entertainment industry. Everyone is now a gamer. But while the industry has got broader in appeal how much has it evolved for those 80s and 90s kids, who now have families, jobs and responsibilities?

Take for example Final Fantasy. A game that gained huge popularity in the west with Final Fantasy 7, selling just shy of 10m copies worldwide and a game that is so culturally important that it is still talked about today. Released in ’97 when gaming was just beginning to flex its adolescent muscles and reach beyond being “just for kids.” Much loved for a variety of things especially its (at the time) visual flair and length.

When you don’t have your own source of income a game that can last up to a 100 hours is great value for money. But those cash rich time poor kids have grown up over the last 13 years. They now have the money to buy all the games they ever wanted, but not the time to play them all, certainly not to completion!

13 years on Final Fantasy XIII is just hitting the shelves and do those 90s teens have the time anymore? Many reviews are citing 20 hours of play are required before the game “gets good”. When many of the audience barely have the time to play a game for more than a few hours, will they be willing to invest almost a day of their life to get to the fun part?

Gamers are also now surrounded by opportunities and social choices that they didn’t have to worry about before. Many of the “hardcore” games are exclusive not inclusive, alienating partners and children. If you are looking for an opportunity to make a lot of money and a lot of people happy I would invest in creating games that those hardcore gamers of yester-year can play with their friends and family, be they the most dye in the wool elite hardcore gamer or a Farmville loving Wii waggler.

The gaming industry needs to start listening beyond the buzz. Stop just monitoring the discussions around your brand and start really examining the communities in their entirety. Look for trends in how people are playing and what they are saying. There is a big opportunity to listen beyond your remit and spot opportunities before anyone else does.

Additional notes:

For some insight into how the audience is maturing and how the industry may end up losing players I recommend checking out this recent forum discussion.

And for some steps in the right direction I would look at how games like Guitar hero have added independently scalable difficulties. How New Super Mario Bros Wii creates an environment for hardcore and casual gamers to have a good time. I would also look at how Portal and Braid created those complex and deep experiences much loved by “hardcore gamers” but presented in a shorter time frame or with bite sized chunks.

Last week the gaming communities were working together to uncover a mystery. The popular Valve game, Portal, had received a mysterious update that added a new achievement to the game. No other information was given from Valve and initially the update looked like it may have been due to some sort of legislation agreement claiming it had “Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations”

It quickly became obvious this wasn’t just a regular update and something was afoot. When moved to a certain place in the game, radios started transmitting strange signals and messages. Over the course of several days these messages were decoded by gamers. One morse code message translated into a series of letters spelling “LOL” – very funny Valve! Other noises turned out actually to be images when ran through Slow Scan Television (SSTV) application.

The most interesting transmission was a phone number that when dialed by a modem led to an old BBS (bulletin board). The password and username were worked out from the hidden images and more secret messages were uncovered. Various text and ASCII images all hinting towards something brewing inside Aperture Science, the game’s fictional laboratory setting began to emerge from the BBS.

The beauty of this campaign was not just in its clever design, but in the way the community responded. The only information that Valve gave out was that there was an update and it was up to the community to do the rest. Fans worked together across a variety of platforms and communities to unravel the mystery, with the gaming blogosphere picking up on every update as it happened.

This was a triumph in public awareness for valve but also one for the gaming community. A second game update extended the games ending and was shortly followed by an official announcement of Portal 2, but the ending is not as exciting as the journey.

The obvious take away from this would be ARGs are good ways of getting publicity, or clever marketing gets you buzz, but these are not interesting conclusions. The lesson to be learned from this is that your fans are your biggest asset and fastest way of spreading a message. They will speak louder and longest about your products than anyone else.

What this update did was supply fantastic fan service and give the fans something they wanted to share with everyone. Giving your fans something to get involved with and get excited about is much more fun than a press release!

Start thinking about how you can better treat your fans and how they can help you when you need them. They are not just a bunch of message board users to throw PR at.

Last week this quite interesting talk from the recent Games Developer Convention surfaced online. Jesse Schell addresses a few key talking points but the most interesting to me was how Gameplay could be used as an incentive in everyday life. I recommend you find half an hour today to watch this video! Once you’re done my thoughts on how you could use these ideas in your business are after the jump.

Gameplay and progression are such powerful incentives for consumers and they become super charged incentives when placed in social structures. Farmville would not be played by the millions of people that play it if it wasn’t for its social foundations.

Plenty of local cafes run reward point schemes, they are all pretty basic, each purchase gets you a stamp, 8 stamps gets you a freebie.

These are fine but what more could those businesses do to make being a customer more fun? What about bonus points for coming outside of lunch hours, or achievements for being the first person to order a certain meal. Rather than stamps for purchases maybe you can use them to reinforce positive behavior, bonus stamps for saying please and thank you or bringing your plate back to the bar.

Internally why not give staff experience points for performing tasks, doing the washing up, eating a fruit each day of the week, turning up on time! You can plot these online or just on a whiteboard. Perhaps when staff “level up” they can be rewarded with different things “Congratulations on reaching Level 10 Tom you have unlocked a £100 bonus!”.

Start looking at your own business and look for areas where you want to positively enforce behavior, this may be in your customers or even your staff. Think about how game play and social structures can be used both online and offline to make being your customer and working in your organisation just that little more rewarding.

Word of warning just make sure your look at the strategy and not the technology. It is easy to get bogged down in setting up Twitter account and Foursquare sites but unless you know why you are doing it..dont! Also just because everyone else is doing it is not a good reason! Have fun and let me know if you come up with or see any great examples

High scores started in the arcades. Whilst “Insert Coin” flashed at the bottom of the screen the rest was a leaderboard of the best player with only 3 letters to identify them. Arcades were gaming hubs and being top scorer meant you were the best in the local area.

Those 3 letter names were infamous in friendship groups and you know who you needed to beat. It created a social incentive to want to be better than your friends, play one more time and put more money into the machine.

With modern online gaming the leaderboard is back. You can now see how good you are at the game compared to the rest of the world. But knowing you are 231,321^st out of 2 million players isn’t as impressive as being in the top 10 in your local arcade.

Some of the most powerful incentives we have are social ones, and trying to be better than millions of other people will only compel the few. We need to make the leaderboards local and unique to each user. This creates a much higher social incentive and makes players play more to beat their friends.

Games are turning our social circles into personalised leaderboards. Every user has a unique leaderboard that only shows the scores of their friends. Being the best of your ten friends is a lot more compelling than being better than millions of strangers.

The beauty of these modern games is that they can always be connected online. They can always be plugged into our social circles.

This means no one ever needs to play a game in isolation (unless they chose to) it also means you don’t have to play a game with everyone, you can choose to just play with the people that matter to you.

Now when I play Bejewelled Blitz on Facebook the game is constantly reminding me of how I am doing compared to my friends. I don’t know if I am the best player in the world, I don’t even know if I am in the top million, but it doesn’t matter.

What I do know is that (for a short while) I had the highest score of all my friends and it was great, but my high score just encouraged others to play until they beat it.

This is just the first step soon games will go beyond reflecting your social circles scores. They will start using our social circles to make our games more personalised and unique to us. Our experiences will be used to enhance other peoples games and we are starting to see the beginning of this with games like Spore using our friends creations in our game to make our experience matter just that little bit more. I expect a whole lot more of this over the coming years.

Now I must go and get the top score again on Bejewelled!