Feature: Using Social Networks For Marketing, Community Response

Author: by Staff

In Gamasutra's latest feature, marketer Duane Brown discusses crafting effective marketing for games via social media, and points to one of EA's Tiger Woods successes as an example of the right way to proceed. Writes Brown: You may remember a video called Tiger Woods Jesus Shot, which was uploaded to YouTube by a player of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08. If you look at a few different search results, you'll see that this video spread across the video game community and even onto some non-industry publications. People are even still commenting on the original video to this day. If EA wasn't watching its brand and video games, the company's response video might not have happened in the first place. It's hard for any company to get social media right, right out of the gate, but EA is trying. I'm sure EA has learned a lot since this incident took place. Its response video has now even surpassed the original and become the number one spot when you do a search on the video. Brown concedes that it took EA a year to launch its response to the video, but it wasn't too late, as Brown explains: Now, I'll be the first to admit that it took EA over a year to respond to this video. However, the company's use of creativity and understanding the subculture that exists on YouTube allowed it to respond and in true gamer style. EA didn't just want to send out a press release -- it wanted to own the number one spot on search results and leave gamers cheering. This example shows how one company was able to interact with its audience cleverly and make marketing gains -- but as Brown writes in the feature, live today on Gamasutra, there's more than just clever videos to crafting a meaningful social network strategy for your game.