Before I begin to respond, I think it's great (and shrewd) that you took the time to compose such a long response to where this thread was going. It is probably more than we've gotten from BW at a hitch so far.
[quote]Jessica Merizan wrote...
Hey guys,
I just wanted to clarify a few things.
1) The twitter account is my personal one. No one is paying me to tweet on it and considering how much people are trying to extrapolate from replies I make that are meant for certain people (Twitter operates in a way that it's assume that while replies are public, people don't see them on their feed unless they follow both individuals -- or unless they camp on someone's profile which is what people are currently doing on mine). There's not a script I'm following and I'm not being "told" anything by PR. PR actually has very little to do with this situation, but I doubt you will believe that. [/quote]
You're a salaried employee. You aren't paid by the hour. Your job performance is rated relative to completion of products, not hours logged (although ideally that is meant to be taken into account, every salaried employee I know tends to work far more hours than they should). As a person who's persona is part of the job, of course your personal twitter feed would be a resource option. I can't say that it is something made necessary by your job description, but willingness to use it certainly makes you more attractive as a candidate for that job. While there may not be an official line by line script, you have stated multiple times that there are things you can and can't say. That constitutes a framework that is dictated to you. This entire site is PR. You are PR. So while somebody else from PR may not be dictating your activities to you... you are still PR. This is the public, you are relating to them.
[quote]
2A) Twitter is terrible about having forum like conversations but currently I'm finding that's how people are trying to use it. After sending thousands of tweets this week (no small feat, try it) yes I get fatigued and don't always say exactly what I mean. But it's worse when I know that everyone is camped out on my feed just waiting to pick apart something I've said and prove me to be a liar or the harbinger of hope. Neither of which I am. I am a community manager who is a trained anthropologist and I feel that at times like this having a dialogue is more important than ever. It would certainly be easier if I didn't say anything at all, but I don't think that's the right thing to do.
[/quote]
Fatigue is kind of like intoxication. It will lead you to say exactly what you mean at least as often as it will cause you to exaggerate what you actually mean. Napoleon Chagnone was a trained anthropoloogist too. [/quote]
[quote]
2B) My intention to that person was to say that more people need to vocalize their opinion, positive or negative. When we insulate ourselves in tight-knit communities, it's harder to see that most people aren't doing that. Not the same most people however, just most people in different situations. An example I used is the 90-9-1 principle or the 1% rule (which is all over the internet and I studied it during my master's coursework in media consumption at University College London, namedrop intentional as people have recently accused me of being unable to read and interpret statistics or data, something I'm very good at and pride myself on). [/quote]
Statistics are interesting. They can be very enlightening and very descriptive. But they can also be easily skewed. For example, by ignoring negative feedback or by steering conversations to only encapsulate positive feedback, you will end up with statistics that say one thing when reality says something completely different. Someone who is good at reading and interpreting statistics knows how easily manipulated they are.
[quote]
3) The above rule is quite simple. 90% of consumers will passively engage in the product through consumption (such as playing a video game). They might lurk on forums or read articles. 9% of these people will take it a step further and actively engage in discussions and talk. These are the people that you rely on for WOM sales (word of mouth). They'll "like" a post on Facebook, share it to their wall, reply to a forum thread, RT or reply to something on Twitter. Then you have people who take it one step further and create content based on the original product. These are your fan artists, cosplayers, and even as simple as someone who starts a forum thread or makes a youtube video.
3A) An example I gave of this on Twitter is 3 products that I enjoy: Dominos pizza, the television show The Venture Brothers, and the Mass Effect Franchise. While I spend an embarrassing amount of money on Dominos every month, I don't discuss my purchase online with my friends. I haven't "Liked" their page on Facebook and I'm not a member of their community. I'm still an important consumer and I vote with my wallet. However I'm in that 90% that Dominos is constantly trying to engage with pizza ordering widgets to share on my Facebook wall etc. But I'm not biting. On the other hand, I'm a much more vocal consumer of the Venture Brothers. I'm in the 9% there. I've been a member of several fan sites, tuned into their livestreams and donated money during their charity drives, I tweet quotes from the show and am involved in discussions with other fans I met online. And finally, long before I worked for BioWare, I was in the 1% of this community. Even though I didn't go on the forums much (other than lurk), I created costumes, spread my love of their games at conventions, actively participated in their facebook initiatives etc.
3B) This doesn't just apply to people who like something. This applies to consumption as a whole. The 9% vocal minority isn't a bunch of naysayers. It's literally just the vocal bunch out of the entire group. It includes people who like, dislike, and are neutral. The media has just latched onto "vocal minority" as if it's a bad thing. It's not. It's just the way consumption works. Go look at any Facebook page, specifically their "People Talking About This" (PTAT). We consider 10% a great number. 20% is off the charts. But it rarely goes above that. It's just the way things work.
[/quote]
Traditional studies of consumption haven't moved quickly enough to understand or reflect how an audience like the video game audience. When you try to apply those ideas to them, it's like trying to use a monkey wrench to solder a PCB. This audience is far more plugged in and far more willing and interested in taking part in things like BSN and twitter. They are far more interested in making hilarious Youtube videos about Paragon Hitler Shepherd (I could watch that vid for hours). Consumers of dominoes pizza will either keep ordering dominoes pizza or switch to pappa johns. You're comparing apples and oranges here.
[quote]
4) Honestly, if you want people to communicate more, you have to stop ripping apart everything. I'm speaking in generals here, most people don't do this but we remember those people who do the most. I have devs who don't want to write blogs for me because they don't want to lovingly craft a nice post and then watch it get picked apart and analyzed to death. There have been countless times this week that I wanted to stop talking because people were misinterpreting things I said such as my tweet in reply to one specific person that was taken out of context. One tweet that I made when I was tired and it was poorly worded. And seeing people rip it apart in the forums made me want to stop tweeting for good. Make my account private and just use my public one for generic information and boring updates. But I didn't because I know that it's awful when a few people ruin it for everyone.
[/quote]
Hmm. Stop ripping apart everything. What I'm getting from this is "Like it or shut up." A dissatisfied consumer will not have positive things to say about the thing that dissatisfies them. We're not insisting on lynching the goalie who missed the kick here. We're insisting that the goalie admit he missed the ball. But that goalie keeps denying his team lost the game. And that is where a lot of vitriol is coming from. It isn't unreasonable to think that BW should want to try to accentuate the positive to sell more games. But this event is one of the greatest failures I've seen in consumer products since New Coke. I'm hoping that you have the ability to print out all your tweets and the entirety of this forum from about 2 weeks before launch until... well, that remains to be seen. It should be studied for years by marketing and product development majors. It is unique in how poorly the product performed, how much access to the companies spokespeople the consumers have had, and how much effort those spokespeople put into denying that they'd just dropped New Coke on the market again.
[quote]
I respect that even if I personally disagree with the end goal of RetakeME,
[/quote]
This is an important phrase. This tells me that ultimately, the goals of RetakeME are going to abandoned. Whether you realize it or not, I think this is a tipping of your hand.
[quote]
How can we expect to have a conversation about this when people are slinging around jargon
[/quote]
Such as the appeal to one's own authority as a trained anthropologist?
[quote]
You're making yourselves paranoid and rejecting anything we have to say.
[/quote]
Except that you aren't really saying anything. All I've heard is "We love the endings. They're so deep and cosmic and original. If you don't like them, you don't get them." and the oft repeated "Now tell us what you loved about the game, let's keep it positive."
The last one being an intentional steering of the conversation to negate, ignore, and drive off a cliff any negative feedback that you can.
[quote]
It's one thing to be skeptical (as a consumer, it's smart to be an informed buyer) but it's another thing to lead yourself to believe that someone is actively trying to pull the wool over your eyes. We aren't. I'm not. I'm losing sleep over this and regardless of what you may think I'm not getting paid to sit and type this out. And any PR person would tell you this entire post is a mistake to write and publish.
[/quote]
The wool was pulled over my eyes when I was promised an ending that wasn't A, B, or C. Saying that you aren't trying to pull the wool over our eyes doesn't mean that you actually aren't trying to pull the wool over our eyes. I'm sure this job is calling upon every resource that you can muster, but that you are losing sleep over this is nothing more than an appeal to sympathy. Most of the BSN users have jobs. We all lose sleep over them at times. Very few of us get to appeal to the sympathy of our clients/customers about that loss of sleep when it is our company that has made the big error. As a salaried employee, you are getting paid to type this out. Everything you do relative to bioware product is part of your job description. Again, you're appealing to sympathy here. It would probably be career suicide for you to not do your utmost best to contain and control the community response to ME3. Any PR person would also tell you that desperate times call for extreme measures. Except, you and bioware keep picking the wrong extreme measures to take.
This is not meant to be a personal attack on you or an insult to your character. Your job, however, requires you to entwine your persona with the product (the product being not only ME3, but also your CRM work). That's just the color of the creature. Which makes criticizing either the game, the CRM work, or the companies overall response difficult to seperate from what may appear to be personal criticism. And this is by design. If you are likeable enough, then it will be harder for people to criticize for fear that they will hurt your feelings or what they consider some form of friendship with you. And this is by design. The ole "put a friendly face on it" trick. And it works very well. Except for when a product fails to perform this disasterously among a consumer base that has this much access to a company spokesperson. Perhaps an unprecedented amount of access.
My favorite part of the game? The part where BW learned from their colleagues and admitted that they made a mistake, that the endings were a cheesy rip off of about a dozen other products, and put everything they had into winning back their disenfranchised consumer base by issuing retcon DLC that makes all others seem like toothpicks to a redwood. Thereby, they restored my faith in a company that used to make me think "Bioware, of course I want the latest bioware game. They are everything I dreamed of when I used to dream of making video games for a living!" That's my favorite part of the game.
Ce sujet est fermé
Retour en haut
