Gamers Strike Back
Last week the gaming and marketing blogosphere was abuzz with articles on a negative piece on the popular video game, Mass Effect. The game was incorrectly decried as pornography and for showing "full frontal nudity." Neither is correct.
What is most telling is one of the talking heads making the attack, author Cooper Lawrence, admitted at the end of the interview she had never played or even viewed the game.
What a lot of the marketing blogs missed, which is important for PR and marketing people to know, is the blacklash that has been going on in the gaming blogs. Specifically, the gamers stuck back.
Cooper has a number of books listed on Amazon. They are now being panned by a wide audience. Her books now have an average rating of 1 to 1.5 stars on Amazon with hundreds of negative comments. (There were more, but Amazon prunes aggressively). Her most recent book is being panned. And it is not just a few hundred energized reviewers, a quick glance has 1,000+ people endorsing them. Even the "positive" reviews are damning with sarcasm and fait praise.
The attacks aren't stopping with bad reviews. Gamers are a tech savvy audience on a whole and they are tagging her books with comments such as ignorant (1300 people), bias (729 people) and hypocrisy (1,021 people).
Update since I started writing this post. The author now says "she misspoke".
What can non-gaming companies learn from this?
- An engaged user base can be a powerful tool - If the users hadn't responded so aggressively, the misstatements would most likely not have been corrected. An engaged user base can be a powerful asset - so you need to interact with them
- A reputation that takes years to build, can be torn down in a few minutes-You are the only safeguard to your reputation and brand. The commentator, with poorly informed public comments, has tarnished her brand and it will take quite a while to build it up.
- The walls are torn down-The speed of response to this incident was electrifying. What are the likely crises you will face and how will you engage them? You no longer have the luxury of time, so make time to game out the tough questions. If you don't, who will?
Posted by Mark McClennan on January 28, 2008 at 2:15 PM
