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• How do you create a social network while protecting your brand?

• How do you translate a real world experience into an online one?

• How do you spread your brand’s reach

In highlighting companies leveraging social media I turn to Turner Sports. Now Charlotte, North Carolina may have outbid Atlanta to house the NASCAR Hall of Fame, but Atlanta-based Turner Sports manages NASCAR.com.

I don’t follow NASCAR, but 75 million Americans do. While it’s one thing to attract legions of fans to the racetrack, it’s quite another to create a compelling online experience.

Apparently, NASCAR teams still draw relatively little traffic online. Many will admit that their official Web sites have been treated as “a necessary evil.” Teams generally don’t have the staff or know-how to keep the content relevant and it brings little to no return.

Turner Sports is hoping to change that and create a huge online following by managing NASCAR’s online presence. They are combining traditional website features with social media to foster loyalty, sustain interest and drive traffic.

To see how Turner is succeeding, I did some digging on the Internet and found an excellent customer case study published by Cisco who partnered with Turner Sports to create NASCAR.com. I also spoke with Scott Doyne, business manager, NASCAR.com at Turner Sports New Media.

The challenge was how to attract fans to the site and create features that extend the NASCAR experience. Turner sees social networking as a way to help fans connect with each other and share their interest in and passion for the sport.

The first step in the process was gaining upper management’s support. Establishing a community was at the time a new concept and there were “few precedents on which to build a business case.” But with management’s approval, Turner and Cisco spent about 8 months creating an architecture that gives fans and teams the ability to:

• Create their own NASCAR.com presence using highly personalized profiles

• Share photos, blogs, podcasts, other media files

• Customize their pages with graphics and content

• Join affinity groups, known as “Crews,” around particular races, drivers and sponsors

The result: Nascar.com’s community website.

Building a community without brand protection safeguards is relatively easy. The challenge was “balancing the desires of fans to express themselves with NASCAR’s need to administer content quickly” without sacrificing the immediacy of a successful online community.

According to Cisco, much of the development time was spent on creating procedures to moderate conversations and monitor uploaded content. Special software screens out prohibited words. Moderators contracted by NASCAR also work to block inappropriate content.

Not surprising to me, the fans have for the most part followed the rules of engagement and less than .3 percent of all comments have been rejected for using inappropriate content.

Is it working? According to Turner, through the end of November, the site is averaging over 6.5 million unique visitors per month. In February 2008, they had 8.9 million unique visitors, which was their highest month ever. And November saw a 19 percent increase in page views year over year. Nascar.com site has 60,000 Registered Members and 4,200 crews and has generated 260,000 pieces of content (blogs, photos and videos) from its users.

Beyond forums, Nascar engages fans through fantasy games like Fantasy Cap Challenge and 3 Wide in the Chase that allow fans to compete with others for prizes.

They also have had a lot of success with widgets extending the NASCAR.com site. The widgets allow users to view, read, and interact with their favorite NASCAR content on their social network, blog, personalized page or Web site.

As Scott Doyne said, widgets extend the ecosystem and give users more flexibility to combine content in new and creative ways.

When a community site is successful, you tend to minimize the concerns you may initially have had.   As Michael Adamson, vice president of sports new products at Turner Sports New Media said: “When we started, the idea of an online community was hardly on the radar for most companies. Now for them, and for us, it has quickly become the cornerstone of an online strategy.”

It appears the lesson in all this is that the chances of success are greatly increased by soliciting management buy in, anticipating pitfalls, and most importantly respecting the fan experience. 

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: NASCAR; Nascar.com; Scott Doyne; Turner Sports;

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With the inauguration of Barack Obama a day away, it is worth noting the communications strategy that helped get him to the presidency.  In last month’s New York Times Magazine, there was an excellent analysis on how the Obama campaign mastered the media.  I think it is very useful for communications professionals who wish to embrace both openness and message control.

I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people say you can’t control the message in the age of new media.  While you can’t dictate what bloggers say about you (and it behooves you to pay attention to what they are in fact saying), you can control what you say and how you say it.

As the Times reported, “Obama’s New Way organization was grounded largely on Old School codes — notions of loyalty, aggressiveness and discretion.” If there were any disagreements, power struggles or hurt feelings you would never know it.  Perhaps that is the luxury of a winning campaign.  Losing campaigns tend to spout leaks.  

Interestingly, Obama’s control of the message coincided with an “open” embrace of new media. In the course of the campaign, the Obama team showcased a number of new-media applications designed to project a sense of open-book communications to the public.  While clearly not ignored, traditional media had to compete with new forms of communications including Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

For examples, check out slides 37-41 from Online Community Best Practices by Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester Research.

The Obama campaign made news by directly communicating with voters via email and text addresses for major announcements and taking advantage of websites like fightthesmears.com  to defend against rival attacks.

And what did openness mean to the Obama campaign? According to the Times, it was about the campaign’s willingness to make the candidate, senior staff and information (from policy positions, donors lists, and birth certificates) available in a manner that “bred a feeling of real-time connectedness between campaign and voter.”

In short, they provided access to information to those with the least amount of access – the public.

For corporate communications professionals, the Obama campaign demonstrates that even the most open and transparent communications efforts can be disciplined.

As Jonathan Kopp wrote me

Obviously, a balance has to be struck. The campaign clearly respected and valued peer-to-peer conversations among voters. And they earned people’s respect and trust by providing the information and tools that helped those conversations flourish on MyBarackObama and at offline gatherings. The campaign-to-voter conversation is a different story. That’s where message discipline and consistency come in to play.

Jonathan is a partner at Shepardson Stern & Kaminsky, an integrated communications firm that was on Obama for America’s national media team and the campaign’s agency for youth.

In the age of conversations, with decentralized communications and multiple spokespersons, losing control is a palpable fear.  And in fact your message will be lost or muddled without guidelines.  

New media gives you new ways to reach your audience.  It’s immediate.  It’s personal.  It’s about creating a “non traditional” corporate image.   But it isn’t carte blanche for employees to say what they want.  They should be fired for using abusive language or revealing proprietary information. The Obama campaign was relentless in staying on message.  

Disciplined also means not wavering when embracing new forms of communications.  The Obama communications team understood its value — using it imaginatively and consistently.  It was not a gimmick used on an ad hoc basis.  New media was integral to Obama’s message and central to a large portion of his supporters.

Perhaps in the end, one of the lasting legacies of the Obama campaign may very well be its understanding of the power and novelty of new media as well as its ability to use it as a fulcrum to drive its message.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Obama; Obama Campaign; Jonathan Kopp; SSK; FightTheSmears; MyBarackObama; Jeremiah Owyang; Online Community Best Practices;

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Last night I attended a meeting of the Atlanta chapter of the Social Media Club led by Peter Fasano and Tessa Horehled at Manuel’s tavern. It’s been a little over a month since I had been there standing among screaming Democrats watching the presidential election results.

As I have written before, the Social Media Club was co-founded by Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells and has chapters across the country. As they say, “Social Media Club is being organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media.”

Tessa’s motivation for helping to bring the Social Media Club back to Atlanta was that she wanted to build community and “dispel some false, inauthentic notions of what social media is.” Peter has spent considerable time in San Francisco and wants to bring some of that passion for social media and new ideas to Atlanta.

Roughly 30 people were at hand for the chapter’s second meeting. The event was sponsored by Regator, which is urging people to vote for their site for the Open Web Awards.

The topic was social media and retail. The conversation initially centered on customer service, but candidly came alive when Jason Brett talked about his newly founded company called Jumbis. The company generates single product sales websites that turn buyers into evangelists.

The idea is that a customer gets discounts for sending out messages via Twitter, email, etc telling his or her friends that he or she bought something.

Some call it leveraging your social network; others call it spam. Peter said it reminded him of the pay for post efforts of a few years ago. Jason was soliciting feedback from the group because he wants to make money, but he also wants to do it ethically.

Needless to say, the commercial aspect of the notification turned some people off. Others worried about the relevancy and frequency of the notifications.

As Amber Rhea co-founder of Georgia Podcast Network said, I have no problem reading a random posting about an awesome donut you just had at a particular donut shop; it’s another thing to be paid for doing it.

Ultimately, what I found most interesting was that we were having a discussion about Jumbis in the first place. Jumbis was founded at Atlanta’s Startup Weekend 2 last month where fellow entrepreneurs rightly praised its founders for developing the idea so quickly. Then last night the idea was filtered through a social media sieve. In other words, the startup community and the social media community came together to share ideas and help make Jumbis more successful.

In light of the new Administration coming in, hopefully this sharing of ideas at a bar in Atlanta is a sign of new things to come in the City’s technology community.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Jumbis; SMCATL; Social Media Club Atlanta; Social Media;

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Big Three Automakers CEOs before Congress

If there ever was a case to be made that image matters, it was back in November, when the CEOs of Detroit’s Big Three flew on their corporate jets to Washington, DC asking for billions of dollars in bailouts for their troubled companies. Talk about an industry black eye.

That Ford, Chrysler and General Motors made a PR blunder of the highest magnitude goes without saying. What is less clear is how many of us PR professionals would have anticipated Congressional reaction and advised our management before hand to do the following:

Do a “Capraesque” Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Be an everyman Jimmy Stewart character and drive to Congress in our experimental hybrid car to demonstrate our concern for the little guy and our commitment to frugality and innovation. Along the way we can stop and meet with car dealers and customers to hear their concerns. We will show our understanding about new communications by blogging or Twittering and chronicling our trip on YouTube to reach younger audiences.

I am a big advocate of new media with a political background, and I am not sure I would have made the recommendation — after the fact yes definitely, in a PR vacuum for sure, but in an office of a GM, Ford and Chrysler CEO, maybe not.  But can you imagine the PR benefit if you had?

Old habits die hard. I can recall listening to a displeased CEO who had to wait an extra half hour at Dulles Airport even though our flight actually arrived earlier than the one from National. So I can only imagine the response if I had made the suggestion in a company with multiple corporate jets.

Given that BIg Three CEOs are 1) fighting for their companies’ survival, 2) stretched for time, and 3) accustomed to big time perks, it seems unlikely they would willingly, for example, drive a Chevrolet Volt hybrid protoype that GM CEO Rick Wagoner used for his second trip before the Senate Banking Committee.

[I understand that two of the CEOs did drive to Washington, but only when they had already squandered all their PR capital.]

So let’s put aside individual personalities. Forget scheduling for a moment.. It comes down to corporate culture. If the underlying DNA does not embrace change, it is unlikely that PR can make up the difference.

This past Friday the Wall Street Journal reported that the Big Three are using YouTube, blogs, Twitter and Google search to make their cases to the public.

It is interesting to note that many companies turn to new media when they are in crisis as a way to signal that they are listening, that they get it. If you are willing to invest in social media in a time of crisis, it certainly makes sense to invest in social media in calmer times when the stakes are not as high and when credibility can be banked, not spent.

In all fairness, however, new media is not new to the auto makers.

General Motors employs Christopher Barger, Director Global Communications Technology while over at Ford Scott Monty heads up its global digital and multimedia communications. GM’s corporate FastLane blog is one of the first successful corporate blogs.

In a recent speech to the Public Relations Society of America in Detroit, GM Vice Chairman and FastLane blogger said of new media:

“But it’s so much more than that, I’ve come to realize. It’s an opportunity to have a real dialogue with our customers and potential customers. It’s an opportunity to put our message out there, unfiltered.”

As I have long maintained, social media is at one level a series of tactics to deliver your message. At another it reflects a deeper commitment to your customers and a willingness to see them as partners in your business.

Putting aside the Big Three, all the blogs and social networks in the world are not going to improve a company’s image if management really doesn’t want to or is unable to tap the power conversations and engagement to deliver better products and services.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Big Three; Big Three Bailout; Detroit Bailout; Bob Lutz; FastLane; Chevrolet Volt Hybrid; Christoper Barger; Scott Monty;

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• Companies must grapple with both their corporate and consumer brands, which are often served by different social media strategies.

• Each product may differ in emphasis and focus, but they all should fit into one overall marketing strategy.

• Social media is one part of that strategy; traditional marketing efforts still dominate.

Companies have multiple brand identities. There is the corporate brand relevant for investors, regulators, and job applicants. And then there are individual product brands, which customers care about. Unless you need to highlight your corporate agenda, your social media strategy will typically support your brands.

Take Atlanta based Newell Rubbermaid. I venture to say that few have heard of the Newell Rubbermaid corporate entity even if they know many of its products including Sharpie pens, Graco baby seats and Rubbermaid containers.

I had a chance to reconnect with the keeper of its social media strategy, Bert Dumars (blog) at Technology Association of Georgia  where we both sat on a social media panel.

Bert mentioned that Newell Rubbermaid had just launched a product blog for its Sharpie pens. Along with its Graco and Rubbermaid blogs, Newell Rubbermaid now has three blogs. There is no Newell Rubbermaid corporate blog.

Its blogging strategy is consistent with a company that is successfully shifting from a B2B to B2C marketing strategy that highlights individual product brands.

So how do these blogs reach their users?

• For the Rubbermaid blog, its purpose is not brand awareness. Most people have heard of Rubbermaid. The goal is to increase awareness of its products. Most people don’t know the extent of the product line. The blog therefore targets influencers, like professional organizers to help validate the products and spread the word.

• For the Graco Baby blog, the issue was brand awareness. The goal is to “humanize” the brand by targeting mommy bloggers and highlighting the real people behind what was perceived as a corporate brand. The blog has helped increase Graco’s positive awareness from 65 percent to 83 percent.

• Sharpie has a hugely loyal user base. The purpose of this blog is to create a platform that opens the brand to conversation and what Newell Rubbermaid believes is a pent up desire to engage with them. It is intended to play up the cool factor and will feature artists and creative outlets for Sharpie pens.

Three brands, three blogs, three approaches but one overall strategy. Blogs managed individually by different brand managers. Newell Rubbermaid’s Dumas understands that conversations are critical to a brand’s future, but that they take a long time to develop. That is why their focus is on cultivating relationships and slowly reaching out to their respective communities.

While Bert is pleased with the success of the blogs, they don’t draw the same amount of traffic as the Graco, Rubbermaid and Sharpie websites. As Bert freely admits, they aren’t meant to draw the same number of visitors. They are intended to complement, not compete. They are vehicles to engage their biggest fans. They are part of an overall social media strategy based on long-term conversations and not hard sell traditional advertising.

And herein lies Newell Rubbermaid’s success. Their social media strategy reflects the unique nature of their individual users, even while adhering to a consistent broader marketing strategy. It is a delicate balance, but based on customer feedback, it appears to be a formula that is working.

• Social networks are “unstructured conversations” than can yield valuable data to generate sales and reduce costs.

• Unstructured conversations are gaining currency for leading CRM companies.

• Social CRM or CRM 2.0 rests on the interplay of customer interaction and company rules.

In flush times, social networks are a hard sell. In hard times when companies have little money to spare, selling social networks is even more difficult. That’s why I want to return to the subject of a previous posting about social data mining.

Social networks can yield rich customer data that companies can use to reduce customer support costs and increase sales.

It’s a compelling argument but I gather it’s still new. Few of the social networking companies I spoke with this past fall at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York highlighted social data mining, and even fewer were building applications to support it.

But times they may be a changing. CRM giants like Oracle and SAP are now building tools to help companies take advantage of social networks’ “unstructured conversations.”

Oracle (blog) has built a suite of tools that “leverage the collective knowledge of the broader sales community” to help a company complete sales rather than merely tracking the sales pipeline. The net result Oracle claims is higher productivity, better leads, a shortened sales cycle and increased sales.

Mark Woollen, Oracle’s VP of CRM Strategy explained to me about how social CRM is “giving context to unstructured conversations.” Especially in this economy where growth is hard to come by, Woollen believes that social CRM can help drive business and improve margins.

SAP is using CRM to map relationships with their customers. They gave me an online demonstration of how they are leveraging the social network Twitter to improve customer support. Their software tracks key words in tweets for content and sentiment to help service reps resolve issues before they become problems.

Both Oracle and SAP acknowledge a transfer of power is taking place. Unstructured conversations between customers are redefining relationships between customers and companies and challenging companies to look at data in different ways. In creating new applications, they are grappling with issues of standardization and monetization.

Michael Thomas, director of CRM and social media strategy at Neighborhood America and national president of the CRM Association believes “larger corporations are getting interested but are still getting their arms around the ROI. They can’t do effective CRM without collaboration. It’s a bi-directional flow. You have to be in position to react.”

This game change in managing customer relationships is central to what CRM expert Paul Greenberg addresses in his presentation -”What the Hell is CRM 2.0?” According to Paul, the difference between CRM 1.0 and CRM 2.0 s the difference between:

• Businesses producing products and services for the customer, and businesses aggregating experiences, products, services, tools and knowledge of customers.

• Focusing on customers and focusing on all iterations of the relationships (company, partners, customers), specifically on identifying, engaging and enabling the influential nodes.

• Technology focused around operational aspects of sales, marketing, support and technology focused on both the operational and social/collaborative which integrates the customer into the entire enterprise value chain.

It’s one thing to identify the elements of CRM 2.0; it’s quite another to implement it. As Greenberg recognizes, CRM not cheap, and it’s hard. “Not a lot of companies are doing well in tying the pieces together.”

And what about concerns about privacy? All this data mining raises the question of privacy and how your data is being used. It’s what Derek Grant, vice president of sales at the web marketing automation firm Pardot (blog) calls the “creepiness” factor.

Greenberg makes a distinction between trust and privacy. Companies can act responsibly even if they mine data. While I don’t support the sale or transfer of personal information to a third party, I generally subscribe to Greenberg’s contentions about user participation in a social network.

• They have no inherent right to be a member.

• There are risks associated. There is no complete, guaranteed privacy.

• While they retain ownership of their profile, by signing up, they are providing a limited license to the social network to use that profile as an asset.

• That profile well may be used commercially with their permission.

Beyond addressing issues of privacy and trust, CRM 2.0’s success rests on an understanding of the interplay of social customer interaction and company rules as Paul Greenberg points in his discussion of HelpStream (blog).

Their approach involves distilling key points of an online conversation, applying recognized company business rules and workflows to address them, and then notifying appropriate personnel to solve them. It’s the follow up that often gets lost. What’s the point of mining data, if the data is not put in the right hands to address the issues that are raised.

I know that I have only touched the surface of CRM 2.0. And I recognize CRM is far a field from corporate communications. But I feel that highlighting CRM’s role can help legitimize the tools that PR professionals are trying to implement. It also is a recognition that PR professionals need to appreciate the value of data in measuring success.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: CRM; CRM 2.0; Paul Greenberg; Social Networks; Data Mining; Oracle Social CRM; SAP; Helpstream; Michael Thomas; Neighborhood America; CRM Association; Derek Grant; Pardot;

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• Social Media can be measured by its short term and long term value.

• Conversations are the cornerstone of social media.

• Success is defined by the piece of the conversation you own.

• Successful campaigns must be placed in the context of long term conversations.

In a highly competitive market where brands are seeking to capture mindshare, the key is to determine what part of the conversation you currently own, what part of the conversation you want to own and what part of the conversation you are able to own given the competition and the attributes of your brand. To that end, you must look at your product or brand and ask:

What is it?
Who is it for?
Why do they care?
How is it different?

Answering these questions will also help determine how broad or narrow you may want to play in the online conversation. Owning a small portion of the conversation may yield the highest level of extended engagement and generate the most buzz.

Conversations are well and good, but what about clients seeking short term, immediate results. I can’t deny my bias. Launching social media campaigns around user generated content, viral videos, casual games, promotions may generate spikes in website visits and online sales, but I am not convinced they have lasting value or build engaged customers without conversations. Once the campaign is over, how do you continue to engage the users you reached?

In using social media campaigns as part of a marketing or PR strategy, I offer up the follow considerations in helping evaluate a potential campaign:

• Long-Term vs. Short-Term – How does it relate to the conversation?
• Continuity — What steps are in place to maintain connections and continuity after the campaign?
• Scalability — Is it scalable?
• Amplification — How does the campaign extend to other marketing efforts and other channels (both new and traditional)?
• Payoff — What is the pay off for the user?
• Employee Engagement — Can employees be engaged?
• The Community — Does the community match the marketing strategy?
• Technology — Does the technology match the user target?
• Celebrity Endorsement — If you are using a celebrity, is there a direct connection between a celebrity endorsement and the user, channel and particular application being used?
• Refreshment — Does the campaign or interactive website have rich, refreshed content?

These questions are helpful in setting expectations and putting campaigns in a larger context. No doubt, ordinary campaigns can yield extraordinary results, but extraordinary campaigns are really extensions of conversations that you should be having.

As for effective social media campaigns, I will save my rules of engagement for another posting. But I do recommend checking out the 2008 Forrester Groundswell Award Winners for some excellent case studies.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Conversations; Campaigns; Forrester Groundswell Award Winners; Social Media;

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I understand the fear of being fired for failing at something experimental. I recognize that ROI is elusive. But when others are circling the wagons, is it possibly the time to pull the trigger and help position your company for times when conditions are better?

Of course there are other factors to consider when implementing a social media, including expertise, resources, company culture, and what the competition is doing. I am only suggesting that the current recession may be a rare opportunity to take a risk.

Let me get back to you.

Believe it or not, social media is changing the face of gaming.

In keeping with the Halloween theme from this past Friday…Heeee’s back, or rather I’m back.

After a two-week break, I have cleared my head and hopefully have sharpened my blogging strategy. But before I turn to other planned postings, I wanted to wrap up my thoughts from my previous posting about last month’s Southern Interactive Entertainment & Gaming Expo (SIEGE) conference held here in Atlanta.

• Aided by social media, marketers are using non-traditional games to engage new audiences.

• A game to be a game requires modeling, simulation and role-playing in a prescribed context.

• Games must be compelling first, brand extensions and promotions second.

Based on feedback from gamers at SIEGE, it is clear that gaming is evolving and increasingly integrated into marketing strategies. But what is the social media angle?

From a user standpoint, they are highly interactive. Results are immediate, and they lend themselves to extended periods of engagement. They also build community. From a marketer’s perspective, they can build brand. While ROI remains elusive, games are sticky. Marketers can track traffic and measure their usage. If compelling, they can be viral. Users will devote time competing with themselves as well as with others, collecting points, downloading badges, rating and inviting friends to participate.

In short, gaming is an ideal platform in a new media strategy. Once more, gaming is dynamic; its user base is expanding, and its functionality is evolving especially with greater emphasis on downloadable, browser based games.

At SIEGE, I spoke with Danny Miller (blog) a GA Tech student and president k2xl.com. He believes there is a paradigm shift taking place. The gaming market is attracting more non-traditional gamers who are increasingly engaged in games tied to political campaigns, marketing efforts, and education initiatives.

Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Celia Pearce spoke with me about gaming’s widening social demographics. The core group of 18-24 year olds is saturated. In the U.S market, there has been less focus on older and younger users, but that might be changing. Habbo Hotel, aimed at teenagers, is now the biggest virtual world attracting 90 million users. On the other end of spectrum gaming continues to attract Baby Boomers. I was surprised to learn that the percentage of Baby Boomers in the gaming population is greater than the percentage of Boomers that make up the overall US population.

So what actually is a game?

Ian Bogost (blog) is an assistant professor at Georgia Tech and a founding partner at Persuasive Games. He believes that games require modeling, simulation and role-playing in a prescribed context. As opposed to toys, Kevin O’Gorman on the Game Art and Design faculty at the Art Institute of Atlanta believes that games must have prescribed rules, in a prescribed space with prescribed goals.

These definitions are useful as games evolve and take on new roles. These new types of gaming include:

Casual Games –Video game targeted at a mass audience and are typically distinguished by their simple rules. They require no long-term time commitment or special skills to play, and there are comparatively low production and distribution costs for the producer. Casual games typically are played on a personal computer online in web browsers, although they now are starting to become popular on game consoles, too.

Serious Games – A serious game is a term used to refer to a software or hardware application developed with game technology and game design principles for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. Serious games include games used for educational, persuasive, political, or health purposes.

Alternate Reality Games (ARG) — An alternate reality game is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions. The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time. An ARG evolves according to participants’ responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game’s designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG or simply MMO) – is a video game, which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously. By necessity, they are played on the Internet, and feature at least one persistent world. MMOGs can enable players to cooperate and compete with each other on a large scale.

Gaming and Marketing

Whether a game is a game or merely game-like, it can be your “most successful or your most risky marketing strategy,” says Lukas Bradley, president of Th.ru.st Interactive who sat on a SEIGE adverigaming panel. Th.ru.st specializes in multiplayer games, virtual worlds, and Rich Internet Applications.

Companies are using games as promotions to attract customers, as content to engage visitors, as viral campaigns to generate buzz and as tools to train employees.

But over and over again the gamers I talked to stressed that games must be compelling first, brand extensions and promotions second. And just because the game is compelling, doesn’t mean it serves to extend the brand. In considering a gaming strategy, you need to ask yourself whether the tone and content of the game fulfill the brand promise or is it a game for a game’s sake.

In the end, the link between gaming and brand building has grown stronger for two reasons. One is technological. Web 2.0 is making it easier and less costly to create and distribute games. The other is cultural. In our entertainment focused society, it is only natural that marketers look to “playing” games to engage customers and extend the brand.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: SIEGE; Southeastern Interactive Entertainment Game Expo; Celia Pearce; Gaming; New South Media Buzz; Bernaise Source Buzz;

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This is a busy week, but I wanted to call your attention to a webcast I am hosting this week,Thursday Oct 2nd at 10:00 AM EDT. It’s a roundtable I put together that includes PR and marketing representatives from some of the world’s leading brands with corporate headquarters in greater Atlanta.  These representatives will discuss their companies’ use of social media. 

To listen and/or participate, please log on here.

The live, on-the-record webcast will address the growing importance of social media and how marketing and corporate communications are leading the way in advocating its adoption. The panel will showcase greater Atlanta based companies but the issues they face are global in scale.

PR Newswire is sponsoring the event, which will be hosted at Coca-Cola’s headquarters.

The panelists include:

Adam Brown, Director, Digital Communications, Coca Cola Company (blog)
Debbie Curtis-Magley, Manager of Corporate Public Relations, UPS
Bert Dumars, Vice President E-Business & Interactive Marketing, Newell Rubbermaid (blog)
Jennifer Martin, Director Public Relations, CNN (blog)
Michael Pranikoff, Director of Emerging Media, PR Newswire

Listeners will be invited to submit written questions for the panelists to address.

As the former head of corporate communications at Atlanta-based EarthLink, I have long been interested in understanding how companies are using social media as a business model and a principal marketing channel – especially for companies based in Atlanta.

PR and marketing professionals are recognizing the importance of social media, but questions persist on securing management buy-in, identifying best practices, and determining a return on investment. This roundtable is an opportunity for some of Atlanta’s biggest companies with some the best known brands in the world to share how and why they are using social media. This is not to minimize the many smaller companies that are using social media, but larger established companies face a unique set of issues.

I hope you can listen in.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Social Media; Atlanta Social Media Roundtable; Atlanta; Adam Brown; Jennifer Martin; Bert Dumars; Debbie Curtis-Magley; Michael Pranikoff; New South Media Buzz; Bernaise Source Buzz;

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