Developer Perspectives: Social Media and MMOs
How MMOs do and should use social media to keep people up to date about the game and attract new people.
Column By Sanya Weathers on August 28, 2009
In addition to my column here at MMORPG, the website, I’m also a writer/consultant for MMORPGs, the industry. Listen, when you can’t relocate for any reason, and you live a million miles away from all of the established MMO centers, you scratch together a living by being very, very flexible. As I like to tell newcomers, you want to be really flexible, but not so flexible that you can get your head up your posterior. A community person with that much flexibility is not helpful to the customers. Anyway, my main gig at the moment is for one of the new wave of MMOs – a web-based non-fantasy casual game. One of my daily tasks is updating the Facebook and Twitter feeds for this product.
Side note to regular readers: Sorry, no boobies this week. I couldn’t top that column even if I wanted to try. Instead, today’s column is an attempt to help out people who aren’t new to the internet, but are new to trying to use it.
There is no modern MMO marketing strategy that doesn’t contain some hideous corporate droid speak along these lines: “Will leverage popular social media outlets to create viral campaigns which will organically grow our potential market by identifying key influencers.”
I can write like that. I even do it for large amounts of money, because it beats stripping. But I laugh on the inside. There’s nothing that can’t be turned into a line of dialogue from Office Space, is there? Especially when the concept is simple: Find people who like to pass on links, people with lots of friends and guildmates. Make your links cool. Connect the two, preferably using someone else’s software like Facebook or Twitter so that it doesn’t cost you anything.
However, please note, aspiring corporate droid speakers – a viral campaign is not the same thing as a Facebook presence. Also, hiring someone to make a viral campaign is perilously close to astroturfing, so unless you can afford to spend so much money that the production values will overcome the obvious corporate connection, stick with doing it in house.
What makes a good Facebook presence?
An official page is a good start. If you search for WOW or World of Warcraft on Facebook, you get dozens of possible pages. There’s one that says “official” on it, and the contact email address even ends in blizzard.com, but it’s difficult to tell if it’s really official or not – there’s no unique content. If you search for World of Warcraft Facebook, the first result in English (with the text except visible on Google reading “welcome to the official Facebook page of World of Warcraft”) is actually the page of a self-professed duper and exploit website.
The studios that care about Facebook (because they don’t have ten million players and would like to) put in more time. There are several, equally valid approaches.
Aion, for example, has multiple groups that were started by fans, but the top result is the official FB page and boasts weekly updates. But they’ve got their players driving the content (the source of real virality, despite what expensive PR firms might say in a pitch meeting). Players are actually using the Facebook page to recruit members for guilds, ask questions, and more.
Champions Online has an excellent Facebook strategy for building lots of fans fast. If you search for the title without being a fan, it takes you to the page – and the first thing you see is not the wall with all the people already in the know, but the chance to win an Alienware computer if you immediately become a fan and create a Champion.
The official Free Realms page is called that, and takes a more portal-to-the-product approach, as opposed to a community hub. It contains lots of official updates – and an employee assigned to be very responsive to customers using the page to ask questions. The page features a big graphic making it easy for anyone who wanders in to transition directly to the game.
The truth is that it doesn’t matter how you rock Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or whatever. You do it to build community, to draw people together (because with MMOs, the human connections are what spur longevity), and you do it so you’re primed and ready for a viral campaign. Social media sites aren’t in and of themselves viral, they are platforms by which you execute a viral campaign. And if you build them for no other reason BUT to serve as your loudspeaker, the players will know, and you won’t have the effectiveness you planned for.
So what’s the basic building block of a viral campaign?
The answer is simply “cool content people want to be the first to send to their friends.” That’s it. Every other component in a viral campaign can break if you try to push it from the inside.
Cool content has to be one of two things – either low budget enough to look (and preferably it would actually be) totally random and off the cuff, giving players the feeling of discovery, or high budget enough to be awesome. No middle ground is acceptable. I don’t mean to say that players will hate you or anything like that. But the return won’t be worth the investment, because it’ll be too tepid to bother passing around and you’re out all the money.
If the product isn’t cool enough to go viral on its own merits, and you can’t afford a real whizbang production, stop using words like viral. In your hands it’s an empty buzzword, and one that is wasting time you could be spending on development.
If you’ve got awesomeness or money, there are a few tricks. Fiction writers are admonished to “show, don’t tell.” That applies to viral campaigns. Never use words to tell the viewer that something is cool or cutting edge. And for heaven’s sake don’t describe a game as fun. That’s my first clue that no fun awaits me. Give me images, or let me put my hands on the controls of a flash game in the first twenty seconds.
Never advertise your viral campaign. Viral advertising is an idiot term used by an advertising company trying to sound hip. That’s not to say you don’t want to plant your content in multiple places to give it the best chance of taking off, but if you’re smart, you did a trial viral campaign and implanted little tracking tags so you could see which places best passed on your content. Once players start getting the link via advertising, they aren’t part of the cool kids club anymore, and no one will be very excited about sharing. If you put up banner ads to let people know about your viral content, you are using the word “viral” wrong. Put it down.
Make it useful to your players. Useful could mean that it will help them accomplish a goal, tells them something they didn’t know, or made them look cool by being the first to pass it on. If it’s not useful to the user, it’s advertising.
And that’s it in a nutshell, really. Build a community, incorporate social media, and do it all for the members of the community with their needs in mind. Trying to build viral content for its own sake is a soulless enterprise that leaves everyone feeling vaguely used. Tools don’t subscribe to games – communities do.
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Interesting. I knew a lot of information was being passed around out there in the "ether" but didn't truly appreciate how it could be used to actually generate an income. Too bad I'm so lazy or I would actually try this and give up my life of crime.
Aion has also been making sincere use of Twitter. The community manager for NA is @aion_ayase and is the hub for a whole community of us who keep a column search for "#aion" up in our Twitter clients. This is also a context for passing news, recruiting to legions (guilds), debating rumors, and so on -- and Twitter is more popular with the over 35 gamers, if gamer demographics are anything like general Facebook/Twitter demographics.
Check it out! http://search.twitter.com/search?q=aion
Yrs,
Shava
I hate viral marketing and influence mapping with a fiery passion - I'm not saying it doesn't work, just that I feel like it devalues and degrades the entire act of communicating.
lol athene (wow)is a player and a key influencer ,and i bet blizzard try very hard to as far from him as they can.lol
influencer ,hell ya succes story of youtube etc.the fact is what make him popular is hes unpredictable
can be good for a company but if you had lawyer it can get fugly fast lol.
company only want what they can control 100% if they cant they ll probably try to skip that part very fast with small character
Not only for advertising, but increasingly by management as a way of evaluating the importance of employees - it's quietly but profoundly changing the way society works.
well that wasn't boobs. That was inteligent insight into the goings on of the coperate internet advertisements. Yawn.
To be completely superficial talking about endowments below the neckline instead of brains above the neckline is much more interesting.
One thing left out; don't hire guerilla marketing shills or at least not ones so bad the avererage sheeople would spot them.
Marketing and advertising are the bane of MMO’s. When I buy a pencil or a TV I don’t have to worry that someone is trying to sell me a lifestyle. When I sign up for a MMO I have to wade through a sea of tosh that is trying to tell me why I want this MMO to be my online life.
What we want from a press release is a video to check the graphics, a summery of combat, description of tools available to players (these days usually none), the background lore, PvP, comms options, guild set up.
What we get from a press release is a gilded lily that makes the MMO sound like it invented the wheel. That it has the best group content to date while allowing you to solo to end game with one hand while crafting to end game with the other!
"Viral Marketing" is a term I hear so often that it's honestly lost all meaning to me. I used to think it meant "word of mouth". Maybe it does mean that. I honestly don't know. Either way, I don't care much for marketing, because I don't like being treated like a comodity.
I realize that I AM a comodity, I just don't like being treated like one.
Can you give us any idea as to how much more putting an official page up there brings in? Is it a large % of your revenue?
eventually they are going to want a peice of that. Then more. Basically what Im asking is could it be a problem down the line when, and they will in my opinion, start taking some of that $.
not sure how they work. they Seem like a trap to me so I stay clear.
That's great, now where's your column from this past week? :D
Well crap, you left me in a tough spot Sanya. Not much to comment on this week.
It's amazing how when you stop trying to be the "cool" writer by talking tough and throwing jabs, the writing turns out ok.
However I do believe there is one error, I believe places like facebook charge companies to put their "official" pages up so it isn't completly free. It obviously doesn't cost the normal user anything to start a fan page but when a company decides to put in an official page they have to work out stuff with facebook. However I'm also sure it's cheaper then standard advertising.
I pretty much LOATHE advertising/marketing in all it's forms. What makes me want to buy a Product is the product itself... not what some chucklehead is trying to tell me about the product....or how "hip" I'll be if I pick it up.
How do I KNOW about the product.... well in Real Life, I can goto the store and lay my hands on an actual working model of the Product. If it's a car...I can take it out for a test-drive and see how it feels/performs.... If it's a fire-arm (I'm a hunter in RL, so that's one of my other big-budget items)... I can pick it up.... feel the balance, the proportion.... see the quality of the manufacturing in the stock and other components, work the action...see if it's smoothe, etc.
If it's a piece of commercial software (I work in IT...and do a fair amount of technology purchasing).......most commercial software products have trial versions that are downloadable for free these days.... I pretty much won't even consider buying something unless I can try it out first.
Same holds true for games and entertainment software....If I can't try it out first....I'll rarely if ever plunk down any money on it. All the advertising/marketing in the world is entirely irrelevent to my purchase decision....beyond simply making me aware that a Product exists...... purchase decision is ENTIRELY based on hands on trial of the product itself.
Of course, advertising/marketing..... if it's totaly obnoxious or troubling in some other regard can have a NEGATIVE effect on my purchasing decisions. There ARE products out there that I have decided I won't even TRY OUT....that otherwise I might have taken on a test drive....based upon something about thier advertising/marketing that I found obnoxious....or that sent up warning flags based upon the message they appeared to try to relay.
Fun, hardcore, awesome, incredible, unbelievable, unmatched, revolution or next generation all means the samething to me. Your game is crap, and you try to tell, no wait, you try to force me to believe that its great and awesome and I absolutly need to buy it or my life will be ruined. I hate corporates F$%*.
On topic, great read sanya, but, its missing pictures. Do you know the website ''the escapist''. Anyway, everytime they make an article they make a picture with it. I think MMORPG.com is missing this feature. Who doesnt like pictures? Thats what your last article made me realize. >:P
awww darn, no more bewbie stories :( *sadpanda*
On a more serious note, me being a dinosaur i don't really use facebook or twitter (heard the name, have no idea wth it is).
I prefer calling my friends or use IM if they be online.
As a person above said, try before you buy is one of the best options imo.
Oh, and nice read, gj :P.
I think more games need to do things that MXO did. I remember getting strange emails and people getting crazy calls that had to do with the game. I don't know how well it would work with other games but it worked well with MXO because of the Matrix lore.
All very sensible and intelligent...
pfft.
No forums pew vee pew :(
How do i rate myself? Day one internet user? Almost!. EQ1 pay per hour? Not quite. Social media is mostly hype which is easily extinguished by a craptastic game like for example Warhammer Online whose primary expectant player base were ex- DAOC players who were crushed by its WOW magnetics looking for DAOC 2.0.
Facebook, Twitter are modern day fad social networks. I don't need to tweet to tell a friend my behind is itching. I just say it to them up front. Though Facebook isn' totally a waste by any means its also a novelty. Been there, done that mentality if you will. Bottom line is you can sell a MMORPG to oblivion, rake in insane profits based on hypes for a short time but if you don't provide a social element that actually draws players into it then you have a door stop of a game if you ask me. Thanks to games like World of Warcraft which in fact had at some point a social element, that quickly faded once nobody needed anybody to advance.
I'm a veteran gamer and hype media really does nothing from me. I'm a pessimist towards newly released titles because almost every game ever released since DAOC was pure dog doo doo. Socially MMORPG's have been on the down swing. Once they produced a product that people didn't require assistance from others the social element of MMO's fell out. Being that nobody groups anymore the chance of establishing social elements with strangers is about zero in chance.
So where am i going with this? People couldn't really give a rats A$$ about gaming companies trying to promote there game on fluff. Fluff is so yesterday. Hype is so yesterday. Creativity in MMO's is beyond yesterday. So what do companies try to sell us? It's not the game but the self made hype about how great a product they have to offer. I've played them all and well i'm still playing the greatest game of all time and even that was watered down by WOW influence. *DAOC*
I think Sanya is a hot momma ;) /flirt and a fabulous, intelligent writer. I personally think the gaming industry is going in the wrong direction. It needs to look back to what works instead of forward to what is failing miserably. Though my subject matter is not necessarily direct in relation to her post it addresses what is wrong with games and companies who fail to concieve that the ultimate success of a game is a game that will draw in a player base who cares more about the friends they make intended or not then any game medium will ever offer us.
i think who ever did the "comic-esk" character of Sanya, made her look like a long haired man, imo