Friday, January 16, 2009

Face Book and Marketing

Yet more for you to digest today.

I am spending some time learning the new "social networking" protocols. like Face Book, and Twitter. The game industry we are in has been cornered and forced into a niche by a number of circumstances. Most are not the industries fault, so this is not an anti-game industry rant.

What my thinking is that we have to sally forth into the world and try to draw some people over to take a look. At conventions we are competing for a static pool of players. Our ability to grow is going to depend on bringing people to gaming. Susan has art that people "out there" like. I need to spend as much time s possible reaching out with her work and get them to follow the bread crumbs back to us. She also has her comic abilities that she has been itching to get back to.

With her art I have gotten good success on Etsy and now I've added Imagekind to the list of sites to watch/maintain. I am hoping that these sites will get people over here. We have also started the My Online Comics site to reach to another audience into our family of sites. Now I need to get our community to help spread the word on these to the non-gamers they know. I am just not sure how to do that.

I have started using twitter to announce projects completed etc. The few actual followers I have acquired are one DS person and a lot of art followers. It has the advantage of being quick and easy, plus I can use the feed on here to let you guys track what I'm doing. I paste the updates into the future LJ DS news blog using Mars Edit and post that twice a week. I'm trying for Monday and Thursday for the mass announcements.

On sites like flickr and Facebook you can share images and try to lead people back to the sites. If any of you are on one of these, let me know as I am starting to learn them and would be glad to "friend up" with you. I just put up my facebook info on the right column here. I am relying heavily on Sue, and others, for materials, so I don't expect her to do more than her current Blog.

The marks mysteries podcasts have a large audience and would be a great thing to do, but honestly between writing, recording, rewriting, rerecording and editing they take 40 plus hours for a twenty minute episode. At least they do for me. The positive aspect is we are close to 10,000 downloads.

A big problem we need to overcome is that DS is now a big daunting game, especially if you have never played table top rpg games. I need to find the time to create a new game that gets back to the simplicity of the original DS. We can even use some of the lessons learned to avoid some of the pitfalls and bumps we have had in DS. That way the new people will have some game to buy, learn, master and then move to DS - Hopefully.

Basically I want you guys to understand why I'm doing a lot of what appear to be unrelated blogging type stuff. If you understand it, maybe I can get you guys to go forth and spread the word among friends, family and beyond.

If you guys have any thoughts, suggestions etc. please drop me a comment.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heya :)

I don't get to play a lot, but I do love Dragonstorm. I love how you can customize the game to yourself.. (for a reasonable price, of course.)

I'd like my friends to join, but I'd also like to try and advertise it... apparantly I have a fanbase still and if I can coax some of them to come over and play with us, that's one more player than we had before, right?

Sue's art is fantastic, and personally is one of the reasons I gave it a shot to begin with. Now I'm a full blown card sponsoring addict! >_> <_<

I have a new CD coming out soon and I'd like to "pimp" DS with it, if I can. I'll hopefully get to speak with Susan on the idea. Being on con gaming staff this year, hopefully I can steer some gamers over to the WCDS table, too.

MarkEllisHarmon said...

Are there samples of your music hiding somewhere on the web that I can hear? Pop a link right in here!

MarkEllisHarmon said...

I should also have said: Yes! one at a time is a good way to do it. I just got interested in the music idea and lost my way.

Anonymous said...

flaredragon:
I just listened to Anguish. You play beautifully. I had a different reaction that the title would indicate as I felt no anguish; rather, I was soothed by the melodic line and transitions. To me it conveyed that sense of coping with the day and resolving to continue with hope. Do you have a CD that is available? I would very much like to here more. :)

Anonymous said...

See, I was so taken by the music that I misspelled "hear." *facepalm*

Anonymous said...

@Mark: Absolutely. You can find my most recent work on my FA page here:
http://www.furaffinity.net/user/flarestarfire/
In the gallery anything with a horse with music note icon is one of my songs. The artwork on the site (being FA) is not PG so NSFW if you're going to dig at work. Many tracks of my older work can be found here:
http://www.dragonnetworks.net/users/flare/mp3s/
The name of my new album is going to be "Resurgence", and it's around halfway done. I think the art that Susan is doing for me now would go great for this theme, and using my graphics art prowness along with the other 2 images I have commissioned, I think I could make something that would grab folks eyes, get Susan's name out, and get them to search out my cards, thus leading them to Dstorm, listing all the appropriate links in the inside cover. I would need to know what rights I have (if any?) over the work I commissioned to make this work. I'm certainly open for negotiations on that front.

@DS flunkie: Thanks you for your kind comments :) I am a self published horse, and currently I have 3 CDs in publication if you can call it that. Under the Stars was my first, Duality my second, Crossroads my third. The only thing I have copies on hand of at the moment is Duality, but that would not stop me from printing more. I have not been on the con circuit lately so my publicity is limited to my (admittedly broad) circle of friends. I know Boojum asks me every year if I have a new CD out so I've got fans inside the Dstorm universe as well ^^ *whinnies bashfully*