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Startup Diary – Marketing Tools

Posted by Tadhg | Mar 27, 2009 | Filed under Press, Startup Diary

Marketing for an internet startup (whether it be social games or some other venture) is a complex challenge. While the ease and cost of communication has fallen through the floor because of the internet it is becoming harder to reach an audience. There are many companies using the same free channels that we do to try and get their message across, and so the Internet creates a wall-of-noise.

Marketing is also not just broadcasting, it is research: Where are your audience, how do you find them? How do you engage with them? How does a social games startup manage its marketing, spread its message and engage with users?

This is an article about some ideas we’re trying out and how we’re looking to approach users.

For a small company like ours, the Internet is life itself: Our games exist on the internet as do our users. The Internet represents many new marketing opportunities and is often called the inheritor of television and other mass media. This is likely true, but if it is then its shape is radically different to its forbearers. Television and other forms of publishing are broadcast media but the Internet is conversational. Television perpetuates the idea of a mainstream culture but the Internet has no mainstream and is a blizzard of infinite niches. Television is a one-sided monologue but the Internet is a billion dialogues.

Internet-based games are no different; it is a mistake to think of them as an extension of retail games. Retail games are another broadcast mainstream model. On the Internet there are no mainstream; only ever evolving niches aggregating towards particular destinations for a time before moving on. Channels are irrelevant. Categories are irrelevant. Genres are irrelevant. Genre is a useful term to help understand the landscape, but reliance on it is irrelevant to companies like us who are working trying to build something new.

Social games companies are not broadcasters: We’re user aggregators, collective builders, conversation enablers and niche creators. When we market we are lot looking for the transient attention of the huddled masses, as television does, we are looking for the one in a thousand user who finds relevance in our message. That person wants to build a relationship with us. They want to have a conversation with us, and we want to have a conversation with them.

So we use the Internet as a means of distributing our products, engaging with our community and conducting an ongoing conversation with the people interested in playing our games. We don’t just want to talk at them, we want to talk with them. We also want them to talk with each other.

And we also want to talk about the social games industry with our peers, to see where it stands and see what interesting insights we can find. That’s why we’ve started #socialgames on Twitter, a Linkedin group, and this blog.

Wordpress

Our primary marketing tool is this website and its blog. A blog is essential for any company, regardless of size, and creating and publishing one helps to get your message out. A basic mistake that many bloggers make is that they treat their blog as an extension of their press release channel. We have republished a press release or two as a part of the blog, but the blog cannot simply be a press channel. To write a blog means you have to continuously provide material that starts and maintains conversation and debate.

Our blog is really the core tool of our present marketing effort. We use our blog to talk about our products, our ongoing quest to build a new type of social games company and provide research and analysis about the social games industry. Our blog also allows readers to comment on our articles and get in contact with us which directly. Or blog articles also distribute further than just the blog itself through social networks (see below).

This site cost nearly nothing to develop other than time. We chose WordPress.org (the version that you install on your own server) along with several plug-ins. The WordPress developers describe it as “a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability” and it is. It’s well supported by many applications (including blogging tools such as Windows Live Writer) and there are many plug-in tools that you can install to extend the power of your blog.

Among the plug-ins that we use are:

• Akismet to manage comment spam
• Google Analytics to track site performance
• All In One SEO which is good for providing summary snippets and tags for search engines
• Feedburner to create a more sophisticated RSS feed. WordPress, like all blogs, supports syndication of posts, but it is usually better to use a service like Feedburner for all the extras that it affords.
• A Twitter plug-in
• A Friendfeed plug-in
• ShareThis, a plug-in that allows easy submission of articles to services like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon
• Disqus, for commenting
• Facebook Connect, also for commenting

We’ve also begun appending #socialgames to every article to help the twitterati find our latest posts.

Social Networks

There are four social networks that we use: Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Twitter

Aside from the wall of noise that this produces, Twitter is actually a smart tool for those that know how to use it correctly. In a recent post we talked briefly about how to use Twitter and some of the tools that work well with it like TweetDeck.

Twitter is really a publishing platform, because of the way that it allows users to easily follow anyone they like without the need for approvals. With Twitter the person tends to carry more value than the company so there is an element of self-promotion involved. The twitterati (a nickname for Twitter users) are less interested in companies spooling press releases compared to flesh-and-blood people with whom they can connect. Simple Lifeforms’ own Twitter account does not yet have many followers. Alan (@alanodea) likes to keep his tweet stream low and only really consist of members of the business community. I (@tadhgk) on the other hand, have gained about 800 followers and is quite active on Twitter.

With Twitter it is easy to publish a link and get a few readers to generously re-share it. It is also easy to reply to a post, send a direct message or otherwise contact a poster. What Twitter lacks is the ability to thread replies into conversations. All too often we’ll get replies back to posts that make no sense or we can’t remember what the replier is referring to. So Twitter is great for broadcast (which is why a lot of celebrities are jumping on board) but not for conversation.

Friendfeed

Friendfeed is similar but different to Twitter. Friendfeed automates the publishing of links from services that you add to your account and its definition of ‘friends’ is similar to that of Twitter’s followers (i.e. anybody). The Friendfeed community tends to be more reticent about to connect to a new friend unless they are recommended by others for sharing quality material. Nonetheless it is essentially a broadcast tool in the Twitter vein. Friendfeed’s biggest advantage over Twitter is that it threads conversations and allows users to register likes, dislikes and comments in a logical manner. Friendfeed is thus more conversational and tends to build themed topics rather than fire-and-forget posts like Twitter.

However while Friendfeed is been popular with the early adopter technology crowd (like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray), it is not with business people, game players or normal internet users. Friendfeed’s biggest flaw is essentially that it has an image problem. Many prospective users (such as those on social networks like Facebook) don’t really know that sites have feeds that can be imported into other sites, and when they do they don’t always know how to get Friendfeed to work in their favour. Friendfeed’s primary usefulness is often relegated to a republishing service. We use Friendfeed to pass posts from the blog or twitter to each other, into Facebook and other similar tricks, but we don’t use it to hold conversations that much as the users don’t seem to be there.

Facebook

Facebook is well known to everyone as both a sharing site and where social games are actually played. However as a marketing tool Facebook is more challenging than Twitter or Friendfeed. Facebook has 180m+ users but those users are organised around a person’s real life friends and not followers as in Twitter and Friendfeed’s case. Marketing to your friends is not really the same activity as marketing to the public because friends don’t always share the same likes and dislikes, and they can find friend promotion off-putting. So Facebook marketing between friends can’t be too message-driven.

However Facebook does offer the capacity to set up a company identity, with its Facebook Pages and Groups. By signalling themselves as Fans of a Page, Facebook users are tacitly acknowledging an openness to information. Recent changes to Facebook’s design also mean that content published to Pages of which a user is a fan will start to appear in their own Facebook feed as well, which will help to acquire more fans. Facebook fans are thus becoming more like Friendfeed friends. We have a Facebook Page where people can find out about our company and our games.

LinkedIn

Lastly, we’re using LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an odd network in some respects. It graphs professional communications rather than friendships or broadcasts, and people use it mostly to find jobs or telephone numbers of potential clients. LinkedIn has a small amount of sharing functionality (such as their equivalent of status updates and blog republishing) but it seems largely unread by users. One thing that LinkedIn does not have is a strong set of external tools to help bring its groups to the desktop, whereas Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook all do.

Where LinkedIn may become interesting is in its use of groups. We’ve set up a LinkedIn group to discuss social games but it remains to be seen whether groups in LinkedIn really have any marketing value or not. The prospect of being able to share into the business community is strong, but it depends on whether the community is actively using groups or simply attracting members who want to be seen.

Conclusion

It used to be the case that companies struggled to market and advertise their message,  paying considerable sums for advertising or attracting free media journalists in some way such as through controversy. That paradigm still exists but its influence is being destabilised by the conversational Internet. There now exist many tools that you can use to get your message out so the challenge becomes having something interesting to say and being willing to talk to people who respond. Traditional games companies have held their users at arm’s length (this applies to any kind of company really) but the value of word-of-mouth and social marketing is now such that nobody can afford to be so reserved any more.

You can follow more of our immediate thoughts, hopes and dreams on Twitter:

@tadhgk @alanodea @simplelifeforms

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