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Social marketing: It's hard to trust newbie posters with very strong opinions.
DarkPony
Member Posts: 5,566
In these times of sneaky social marketing where "word of mouth" has become just another tool for marketing departments and specialized companies, we can't allow ourselves to trust any new poster with a very strong opinion on a game anymore.
People are actually getting paid to make accounts on boards like this to trash games and praise others and it's virtually impossible to recognize those posts from honest, disgruntled first posters who made an account because they really felt to 'let people know'.
There are probably even long time posters amongst them too.
If you take a look at the Rift forums at the moment, you'll notice an influx of new posters being very, very hard in their criticism. Some of the threads are over the top and get locked, others will run their course. They will have influence and push certain buttons in certain minds however. I think it's a very bad thing for communities like ours, it's a kind of abuse.
So honest posters, 'read with care' and never stop scrutinizing someone's intentions, and dear new mmorpg members, we do want to know your opinions but for the love of god; make sure that your opinion is well informed and constructive. Otherwise suspicious geezers like myself are forced to dismiss you as shills.
♥
p.s. I'm not a Rift fan; polished it may be but it isn't my kind of game.
Comments
hehe how little do you know about social marketing:D the problem is people has forgotten/never learned to read. you can pick out most of the social marketers. it's easy to see what is real and what isnt if you actually learn how to read the comments. social marketing is nothing more then an extension of SEO. google it and you'll see it's been around for a pretty long time already.
Then we also have the shills defending their home products. The pattern is to ignore the content of complaints (marketing people never even acknowledge that a negative exists) and directly attack the credibility of the poster to discredit the complaint.
Where it gets funny is that many of the so called "important" sites are mostly populated with forum-rats (term used affectionately) who could care less about the hyped games. They're mostly here to keep up on the buzz, and play the occasional forum-pvp.
actually, this is done to keep up their "street cred". a noob forum acct is almost useless to a social marketer. if they have a post count of 300+, then their comments are "worth more" to the social marketer. AFAIK "serious" social marketing has been around for the better part of the last decade, it's just that people never learned to read the posts from the point of view of social marketing.
the "art" of internet marketing is far more creative then most people is aware of:D
The only thing that happens is that sites and mods of sites are biased towards companies that buy add revenue. So articles and moderation on those sites is in favor of games.
Compare the threads locked that were against games to locked threads that were in favor of games and tell me where the bias is.
Don't bite the hand that feeds you is their rule.
Individual posters who get paid to trash a competitor? No, I wish. Not to mention it is both illegal and not effective.
Journalists who write articles on high traffic sites on the other hand...I'm pretty sure the person who is writing the articles for Massively about Rift is getting paid in one form or another to post only positive info. They would never approach single individuals because it would come out faster than you can say "conspiracy".
But if you buy add revenue, then articles on that site might suddenly be a bit more positive. Those are under the table agreements that do happen. And because there is no written agreement or individual contact, no one can prove it.
Hyping your own game is not illegal, trashing a competitor is.
Yeah, this isn't a real thing. It's just something people like to say because it lets them vilify other companies, because for whatever reason some people love it to be us vs. them.
Like the above poster said, no, that is both not permissable and a terrible strategy anyway. Drawing people to your competitors forums by creating tons and tons of active threads which end up filled with people explaining the virtues of the game? Sounds like a winning plan to me.
The posts PRAISING a competing product on another game's forums actually have at least an inkling of potential to have some marketing effect, because it at least gets exposure about the game out there into a forum that contains people who may not already be aware of it. That said, since we've already concluded all of those dudes bashing a game on its own forums are not marketing dudes, it's reasonable to assume there's at least an equal number of dudes doing the same thing in reverse, so still, the vast majority of the posts, likely all of them, are not marketing shills either. I will at least grant that it isn't totally preposterous in this case, though (more preposterous is the belief that there aren't tons and tons of idiots who love bashing games who will do it on their own, though).
He is not talking about spambots
He is talking about intelligent professional people payed to spread the word of mouth.
This is not a myth.
Company i work in, used to spread its product that way years ago, and now they are making mil$ a month.
That's actually not what he's talking about. He's talking about people starting flamewars on, say, the Rift forum, by just saying stuff about how the game sucks lol hahahaha. That is not intelligent and professional, and it's pretty obvious that there are tons of people who do that kind of thing all the time on the internet, even when a product is not involved.
But yeah, certainly viral marketing like you are describing exists. What the OP is describing would be... terrible, terrible marketing, to say the least. Clearly the image you want to present of your product is that is filled with rabid assholes who love to insult everyone who doesn't play their game. Literally you see people in those threads saying "This almost makes me ashamed to have played that game." Great marketing!
If there WAS such an ad post, it would not start with flames, but rather something in the vein of "Hey guys, I know this may annoy a lot of people, but I've been playing game X (I know, I know, but listen!), and I think it's good for reasons Y,Z,A. I'd definitely recommend giving it a shot at least, blah blah blah."
Not "LOL RIFT IS GONNA KILL WOW BYE BYE"
Actually there is a lot of this going on in the forums. Yesterday for example there was a post something like buy rift now, guys first post huge wall of text of why the game is so great. This right after the flame war from don't buy rift same thing guy came in first post i hates rift.
It has been par for the course as of late. You see it a lot. I don't know if these guys are being paid or what. However you can tell right up that they are post designed for a flame war. I know one of them was up to 15 pages long before it was locked the other about nine pages long.
I don't know if these guys are creating new accounts because they have been banned on a permanent basis, or if they are using a new account knowing full well its going to get banned quickly for trolling. Or heck maybe they are being paid.
All I can say is it this rift garbage is in every forum now. I saw somebody say it was in the wow forums. I know its in the soe forums.
All I can say is it needs to stop. All we seen for the past 3 months is rift this rift that. Now that its launched same thing. So these guys we know are not playing the game, they are just robots regurgitating the same old garbage. I understand the haters posting about the game, but if your a true fan-boy you going to be playing the game and not 24/7 posting on these forums trying to get folks to go play it. It would not be so bad but every 5 seconds theres a new rift thread on these forums, never seen so much viral marketing of a product.
Oh well crawling back under my rock.
One simple solution against the spam-bots and trolls in official forums is to only allow subscribers to post on them. This works for the most time.
And the not official forums like in here or other general game-forums... well... you have to take anything with a grain of salt.
Trials are the best way to learn about a game, and if there's no trial, then simply stay away from the game in question, if you're not sure about it.
Sadly, it is the inevitable fate of any communications medium that it becomes corrupted by advertizing.
I wish I could say I was immune to it, but at least one game I tried was probably a result of being targetted with social spam.
All you really can do is try to learn to spot the symptoms, keep a politely skeptical view of peoples motives, try to remember whose opinions you trust and be prepared to move on to some other forum when the signal:noise ratio gets too bad.
I typically assume that when there are posts praising a game as super awesome before it has even released, the people making the posts haven't played it long enough to know what they're talking about.
But on other side
I posted topic on Reddit , recomending people to preorder Witcher 2 on GOG , listing all benefits.
And I was shot down as viral marketeer...
So you can really never know ...
I'm amazed that you believe that anyone involved in internet marketing, let alone social marketing would be even vaguely interested in forum posts, post counts etc here. That goes for the OP too. Absolute nonsense.
Given how long it can take to really get into and appreciate an MMO, I'm usually suspicious of the new account that is overly positive. Like "OMG!!! I just started playing X and its the best game evah!!!!!!1!!!OMG!!!"
It's the interwebz, believe in nothing, or no one.
Look at the THREAD first impression of rift here in the Pub, suspicious all over but its aloud and mmorpg do nothing about it do i have to say more?
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
It exsists and does quite well. Essentialy the companies that are contracted for this advertise themselves as "well directed advertisment", that doesn't waste your advertisement time with random hits that are typically meanilingless like banner adds and similar.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Some people have a personality such that they do that every few months or so, with a different game every time.
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A lot of times it's just an overzealous fanboy, and not real viral marketing.
The ones that annoy me most are the "Game X is in trouble, everyone is going to Game Y" type spams inserted randomly into conversations. Not only are they astroturfing, they're actively trying to undermine confidence in an existing game. That, to me, crosses a line from something that is not just rude, but should be criminal (were it not for the fact that it would be completely unenforcable)
I agree. These are the worst types. They don't want to see a game (MMO or other genre) succeed, they just want to destroy it.
I would rather have newbies putting glowing reviews for games and see them succeed, than someone who is just trolling and wants the game to be destroyed.
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After this thread i dont trust any of you anymore your all payed trolls:P
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
They done a good job with Darkfall by thousends they came for years to forums Darkfall, luckly Aventurine who made Darkfall is a survior company.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
I still have a hard time believing that any significant amount of posting (positive or negative) is done by companies themselves.
Of the stuff that *is* done, I imagine 99.9% is done by companies who have zero sense of how woefully inefficient it'd be to post on forums in order to generate positive or negative impressions.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Agreed. Few companies if any are that petty. That certain trolls who gets banned all the time make new alts is another thing but they are just fanbois or haters, not paid employes with the mission to grief the competition.
If a company actually would pay someone to manipulate a forum like this they would not use some moron who can't post a single post without being reported 3 times. They would hire someone slick who could manipulate people without getting banned and probably not even suspected. It would be a lot more effective.
But I really doubrt anyone here get payed for stuff like this. A single employee could do some posts here on their own initiative of course but even that is rather unlikely.
When someone make a troll post and have 3 posts before on the forum I always try to figure out who got banned and made a new alt.
I don't like to think this way. It's a bit too suspecting conspiracies for my taste. Maybe I am naive here.
Bottom line for me is: use your brain. If an argument is reasonable, it doesn't matter whether the poster is a member of the company or not. I am not influenced by opinions. I make my own opinion based on what I experienced. Period. Even if the companies send in 1000s of people saying how cool a MMO is, I am STILL not swayed in my opinion. So what should it matter to me?
Be true to what you find is right. There is no other thing to do.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert