Friday Protip: Newsfeeds and Dev Trackers

by Sanya Weathers

“I don’t trust what most “official sites” have to say.”

This sentiment is currently on all of the message boards I handle for Mod Squad clients, and I have seen it on every message board I’ve ever modded/joined. Fact: There is a certain type of person who wouldn’t believe a company spokesperson if she said the sky was blue. A subset of this personality type will go out of their way to go to the company spokesperson and say so. It makes no sense, but this is one of those things you cannot change no matter how open and honest you are with your customers. Some people cannot be changed, and you should always remember that your communication is primarily for the silent majority – the lurkers, the casual readers, and the ones who pass on your news.

The solution to dealing with the sort of person who won’t believe you lies in knowing who they do trust: Fan sites, fan forums, snarky opinion sites. The identical announcement you’ve got on your forum, reprinted on someone else’s forum verbatim, gains an aura of respectability. Your job as a community person is to get your information out to those sites, as painlessly as possible. You won’t be able to handle this job with mere press releases, and a good thing too, or you could be replaced with a PR intern.

The full answer lies in forming relationships with the people who run these sites. Today’s protip – make it easy for these people. Not all of them are technically savvy, and building a dev tracker that reprints “red name” posts is beyond many members of your fan media. So build it for them. Give them the tools necessary for stalking you like a wild lion behind a limping gazelle, and provide one click downloads of your art and video assets. The more places with a particular message, the better off you are.