Buying Sandals. A thrilling subject of course – but on recent experience, a valuable insight into behavioral media targeting. It also highlighted the still impossible task of defining exactly what media spend drives a purchase online or in a shop.

Media agencies and media owners now draw their handbags at dawn to put their best case forward on who should have the biggest media spend from the clients budget. As a social media agency, we know that more than most.

And measurement is still vital – after all, measuring and proving the effectiveness of a campaign will affect how your next set of spending is distributed.

The journey

Back to the sandals. It started out with a very basic need: summer shoes. Being a tall lass with size 9 feet my choices are limited, so I had already omitted the decision to buy shoes online after previous disastrous experiences. Oiling ones calves to get into riding boots is not a good look. They remain in my cupboard.

Office, a shoe shop based in Brighton, is generally packed at lunch time and I will avoid Saturday shopping at all costs. So a couple of weeks ago, I prepared myself by looking online at their shoes, prompted by the first touch point email.

Ooooh! 50% off, click through, have a look around. Yes these are the ones that I want. Something for every occasion and a size 9. Hooray.

Since first visiting that page on the Office site I experienced a few PPC ads on various sites including The Guardian. All good, I am impressed with their PPC efforts and I love it when media works well.  But I have been to the site already, so I don’t click through.

Pay day arrives, I see an update from Office on Facebook telling me that there is now 60% off shoes. This is even better. Armed with the knowledge of what I want this should be a quick and easy process.

Kerching. The purchase was made and the shoes are on my feet.

So what made me do this?

Did I already know what I wanted and would have bought them anyway or was this due to advertising/social media?

The answer is a blend of it all, which leaves the million dollar question answered but highlights the fact that a tipping point to make a purchase comes from all directions. In an ideal world, the chap in the shop that took my money would have asked me “How did you hear about us and what made you buy those shoes?” which would have warranted a lengthy response from me. “Well, I saw your email, I know that you do size 9, then I saw a Facebook update and an advert on The Guardian…. Does that help?”

What is important is that Office were with me every step of the way, I had both concise offers directed at me on Facebook and email as well as unavoidable PPC advertising on mainstream news sites that I visit every day. The opportunity to see, I would guestimate at 15 times per day.

How this can work:

If I had bought my sandals online, Analytics would have tracked my journey to the check out, insight may have shown that I was on Facebook then clicked to Office to buy shoes. But as online browsing habits are frequently erratic (I generally have at least 12 tabs on the go at the same time) there is no certainty that it happened this way. But, it’s a good indicator.

Where it failed:

I purchased my sandals in the shop: for the few days following this I have still been shown adverts for said sandals repeatedly on sites from PPC.  I have them now; I don’t need any more thank you! So what was at first a great example of some Paid Search is now frustrating and a waste of their money.

This is not the Paid Search managers fault- how are they to know I have already bought them? Do I need to take a picture and update that I have them? Would that be picked up? In an ideal world perhaps but as we know you can not manipulate the masses to behave how you want them to.

What we can learn from this:

All departments need to work together, set KPI’s that are relevant to each other and share benchmark data at the start of a campaign. This needs to be a process that constantly evolves (and is shared) to get better with not only each campaign but each DAY of a campaign to make the marketing budgets really work for the client.

(This is where PPC and Social Media work brilliantly together- daily analysis and changes reflecting behaviour.)

Only when the bigger picture is considered will we be able to better understand the overall paths taken to make a purchase and get closer to answering the question: “What half of my marketing budget works?”.

]]> http://www.qubemedia.net/blog/2010/07/23/sandals-and-social-media/feed/ 0 http://www.qubemedia.net/blog/2010/07/22/but-we-already-do-social-media/ http://www.qubemedia.net/blog/2010/07/22/but-we-already-do-social-media/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:48:13 +0000 Glenn White http://www.qubemedia.net/blog/?p=1737 “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.

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.

Welcome to the first of our weekly Political Buzz blogs. Using data gathered from Brandwatch, we aim to give an insight into the online buzz around the main 3 parties. Brandwatch tracks social conversations taking place online allowing us to gather insight into online trends and activity. As with all our blog posts, we would greatly appreciate your feedback to let us know how useful they are.

The week in politics – where’s the buzz?

Well, it’s a good week to start. Mainly because Mr Brown asked the Queen on Tuesday to dissolve Parliament and an election has been called for 6 May. The 3 main parties are now firing up and starting some serious campaigning.

The most popular places to talk about them are on the social networks  Twitter and Facebook, but the major news sites are also getting a look in. Will we start to see political affinities emerge as the weeks go on?

As it stands the number of conversations around each party leader are as follows…

What do the people think?

While the number of mentions doesn’t reflect sentiment, it does show how much people are talking about each party leader. This may change over the course of the next 4 weeks so we will keep you posted.

We have found a lot of conversation around the general election and how people intend to vote, some of it positive:

and some not so positive:

Talk of the election online was somewhat overshadowed by talk of the Digital Economy Bill passing, with some reporting that Twitter mentions outnumbered the election 10 to 1. Read more about #ge2010 vs #debill on Rory Cellan-Jones’s blog.

Overall there is varying sentiment for each. Conversation around Gordon Brown is overwhelmingly about him calling an election.

However, there is also a great deal of conversation comparing his policies to Cameron’s and updates about what is happening with regard to the election campaigns.

David Cameron conversation seems to focus around the start of his campaign, and a large amount of the current buzz on Twitter is about him campaigning in Scotland. Including him meeting with Catholic voters:

This obviously struck a chord because it spawned a rather popular hash tag in #cameronbelievesinzombies.

Some were saying their votes could even be swayed by the hash tag. Could comedy hash tags be a key influencer for swing voters in marginal constituencies?

Conversation around Nick Clegg returns a lot of mentions for Fairness and Change, however a great deal of the conversation on blogs and twitter also brings up his lack of character and a call for more anger and passion from him.

Vince Cable also appears to be a very popular topic, receiving proportionately more positive conversation than the other Chancellors. Could this prove key in an election where the economy is receiving such a centre stage?

Something to think about…

Finally, politically inane comment of the week goes to @aaronrussell on Twitter:

Come back next week and see what has changed on the buzz front after the first full week of campaigning…

Some key players attended such as Virgin Atlantic, Travel Counsellors and Visit Britain, as well as many others representing a cross section of the Travel Industry.

The discussion featured many interesting topics, but some of the key points raised were:

• The opportunity that Social Media presents should not be overlooked.
• Coming up with a strategy before embarking on any Social Media initiative is key.
• High level investment is needed if any initiative is going to truly succeed.
• There is a tremendous amount of value to be gained from listening to your customers online.
• Resource and ownership are both big issues when it comes to using Social Media for your business.

While the minutes of the event are for the organisations in attendance only, the Social Media in Travel Benchmarking report is now available to download. If you would like to be kept informed about future travel events, please get in touch.

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.

More of This

This week saw political figures respond to questions asked by social network users. Barak Obama spent half an hour answering a variety of questions from Youtube users. While he was only able to answer a few of the 11,696 questions asked it was great to see the president of the United States taking the time to respond directly to his citizens. The video has received almost half a million views and has over 9,000 comments. That shows a great level of discussion and influence with a smart piece of crowd sourcing.

Over in the UK Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg was taking part in a similar endeavor. Reddit users had been asked to submit questions for Nick and then vote up their most popular questions. Mr Clegg then answered these questions in a refreshingly under produced Youtube video. It was great to see a party leader taking the time to go into other communities and get involved in discussions.

David Cameron has also taken some time to answer user submitted questions. Although the Liberal Democrats approach of going into existing communities may be preferential to some, it is great to see the Tories taking this action (they also have a nice and slick system for submitting and voting for comments).

Why is this worthwhile? A couple of Youtube comments from Nick Cleggs Reddit video make it perfectly clear why.

The next step is for the parties to get involved in these comments on their own videos

Less of This

Labour have a bunch of “tools for your website” on their official site. Rather than focus on their own policies they seem to have taken the school boy approach of throwing insults. There are a series of “satirical” widgets that you can install on your site to show txt speak conversations from the Conservatives. Hardly the most thought provoking or conversation starting stuff. Instead of creating fake conversations for your site perhaps they should help voters engage in real conversations with the party?

Have a look at the offending item below and let us know what you think. How do you think the political parties should be using social media?

Currently “PR” is the weapon of choice with regards to companies getting information about their games online. This entails a series of press releases and interviews appearing on the biggest gaming websites which then filter down through the smaller sites and eventually into the communities.

This practice is only a slight evolution of the old PR model used when print was king. The aim was getting column inches in the biggest newspapers and magazines and bagging the much sought after magazine cover. PR stands for Public Relations but most of this sounds like Media Relations to me.

This old school way of doing things is fine in the most part. A lot of gaming enthusiasts visit these sites so it makes sense to target them first. If you do get a story on there the site’s influence and advocacy will add kudos to your brand’s reputation.

That is if you even manage to get your story onto those sites in any meaningful way. Ad-funded sites need as much web traffic as possible so your news story could be old news within minutes.

Old school PR doesn’t reach those gamers not on these websites, the mums buying Wii Fit, the kids pining for a Ben Ten game and it’s hard to imagine all of those Call of Duty sales exactly matching the web traffic of Gamespot and IGN. Finally this top down message is all one way traffic. How often do you see game companies commenting on their own news stories with more insight, correcting misinformation or just answering questions from the community.

Another Way?

Just because you are making a game does not mean IGN or Gamespot are your best bet for reaching the widest audience. Really work out what your game is about and who would like it, different communities have different common interests.

Try looking at smaller games communities with niche interests that match your product, look further afield at communities that aren’t all about videogames. You may find that Mumsnet is a better place to get information for your new fitness game to reach its target audience than any games website.

In all honesty that bit of the job is the easy part, making your PR actual relations with the public requires more time and care. Make the information relevant to them and actually talk about what it is you are trying to sell. When someone asks a question go answer it. Show that you care about your audience and build your online reputation.

Having conversations with the right people and communities is much more important than a one way message to be disseminated from on high. Use all the social media tools (forums, blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc) to have real interactions with the people that matter most – your customers!

Right now there are a few standout shining examples in a sea of lame attempts and auto tweeting options. I will highlight a couple of these fantastic communities designed to allow players to interact with each other and the game while away from their console.

Bungie.net

Bungie.net is probably the poster child for linking a game and web community into one experience. Bungie have created a space that brings players of the popular franchise Halo together, wherever they are.

The site allows you to see global stats such as how many people are playing online and where they are, but more importantly it acts as a better way to share information than the in-game interface.

Bungie.net is a great resource for finding and sharing user generated content. Users are constantly sharing and rating their favourite content to share their experiences and add content to other peoples.

Killzone.com

Killzone.com joins the gaming community of the highly rated, Playstation 3 game, Killzone 2 together. Killzone.com also offers similar levels of stat tracking, enabling you to see who the best players are in the world and what online tournaments are coming up.

The site also allows me to check out my own statistics away from the game. I can also quickly check which of my friends are online playing and compare my progress to theirs. Now my friends can rub in how much better they are in the pub and use their iPhones to prove it (please don’t do this.)

Why are they so important?

Creating a web based user interface allows for greater flexibility than a game interface where the user is confined to a controller. A browser combined with a keyboard and mouse is much better for interacting with large sets of data and information. The experience shouldn’t be completely separated from the game but should enhance the options already available to the player. It should also act as a window into the game’s community away from the console.

For example Bungie.net allows the user to search the Bungie community for user created maps. The user can then filter these by tag or rating until something takes their fancy, then with the press of a button the map is queued up ready to download the next time they turn on their console. That level of integration is vital for joining the web and console communities together.

Social networks, such as Facebook, already have huge pull for users, so rather than reinventing the wheel with an isolated gaming community these existing platforms should be enabled. On Bungie.net a user can share links to their own maps, videos and statistics across their other social networks. Being able to share a great moment of fun or a level you have found across your Facebook or Twitter makes more sense than just sharing it within the game’s own space.

This can also pull players back into the game as their friends highlight why the game is still fun and may even help to drive sales as potential players see their friends enjoying themselves and want to get involved.

The communities allow all of your activity to be linked together, so when I ask a question on the forums I can see if the answer I am getting is from a player who knows what’s what (ie how much has he played Killzone and is he any good.) The beauty of all this is it happens without need for user input, I don’t have to manually input my stats or tell the site who my Playstation friends are, it just pulls all that data in. Again linking any communities that exist outside the game as closely as possible to the in-game community needs to be done as tightly as possible.

The more ways you allow the players to interact with your game and their friends when they are not sitting in front of the TV, the more likely they are to keep coming back and playing it and therefore more likely they are to keep telling other people about it.

To Wrap Up

Those are just some of the features these community sites offer. There are a host of other communities developed around games (listed below.) I recommend you check some out and spend some time getting to know why they are so interesting and how you might make a better one! If you know any other good examples let me know in the comments.

Over the coming year I expect a lot more integration of videogames in other places, whether it is checking out your friends’ stats on the web or sharing your top score on Facebook. Gaming’s integration into social media isn’t going away. It is only going to get bigger and better.

Fifa (http://www.eafootballworld.com)

EA Skate (http://skatereel.ea.com/)

Spore (http://eu.spore.com/sporepedia/)

The problem is the entire competition was set up in a way that will always generate spam. In order to tell all of my twitter friends about the film I just have to make one tweet….that is how Twitter works. I make one tweet and all of my followers will see it. Sending each of them a message individually is still spam and unnecessary. This should have just been a random prize draw, even a Retweet competition would be better (although still spammy!)

Parlaphone in fairness use Twitter better than most, they interact with their followers and don’t just push news through an RSS feed but this is quite a faux pas. Fortunately it only lasted an hour, however even with the competition over some users seem unaware and are still spamming away.

Naughty Parlaphone!

UPDATE: Just got sent this screen grab from the Blur Facebook page encouraging users to tweet as much as they could. The comment has been taken down now, probably because the competition is over, but maybe to hide the spammy encouragement? Conspiracy! Double Naughty Parlaphone.