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So I sat down last night to write my 400 words on my marketing tragedy. It allowed me to really site down and reflect on the last two years of my life… and a bit of 2008. I often find that I don’t site down and reflect on the past enough. I’m always just looking to move forward and forge ahead to the next goal in life. However, with the rain coming down last night in the background… I just thought about what has been. This lead me to really think about what I learned in the last few years and how that applied to my marketing tragedy:

Mind you, I’m getting ahead of myself and should mention my first lesson of 2006. I’m freelancing because you can’t escape office politics. I tried to avoid it but the one person who didn’t like me became my boss and fried me. It was a hard blow to my confidence and made me question myself for weeks to come. However, it taught me a valuable lesson. You need to stand up for what you believe in, even if you are the only one. Anyways,…

This is only a small part of what I learned in those three months in 2006. The lessons learned would stay with me and form part of my manifesto when it comes to freelancing and running Creative Traction. Even this past weekend, I remember one of those lessons and past on a potential project because it conflicted with what I believe in.

Here is the latest news and stories having an affect on our industry over the last week. Our readers share bookmarks with the BandwidthCamp community by tagging them BandwidthCamp on del.icio.us (a social bookmarking tool). If you’d like to participate, sign-up for delicious and share articles you think the community might find interesting. Enjoy some light reading over the weekend.

Is “Virality” Baked Into Your Game Mechanics - or a Marketing Afterthought?

The Sims & IKEA Are An Exercise In Tasteful Product Placement 

More Hidden Streetwear In GTA IV

Zappos Shows How Social Media Is Done

Here is the latest news and stories having an affect on our industry over the last week. Our readers share bookmarks with the BandwidthCamp community by tagging them BandwidthCamp on del.icio.us (a social bookmarking tool). If you’d like to participate, sign-up for delicious and share articles you think the community might find interesting. Enjoy some light reading over the weekend.

Selling Music Through Games 

Q & A: Mind Candy’s Michael Smith Talks Moshi Monsters

More Hidden Streetwear In GTA IV

Zappos Shows How Social Media Is Done

Nintendo Hopes Its ‘Wii Fit’ Works Out

Tipster Thursdays is a monthly feature covering technology and how you can incorporate it as part of your marketing plan. We’re going to look at different pieces of technology like Twitter, Pingie, Prologue, SmugMug, Qik and delicious and show you 5 different uses for the technology. This weeks column is going to look at Facebook Pages.

..,Facebook Page is a unique experience where users can become more deeply connected with your business or brand. Users can express their support by adding themselves as a fan, writing on your Wall, uploading photos, and joining other fans in discussion groups. You can send updates to your fans regularly — or just with special news or offers. Add applications to your Page and engage your users with videos, reviews, flash content, and more.

Facebook is becoming a larger part of everyone’s marketing plan as we move forward. With their efforts put towards localization (here, here and here) of Facebook outside of the US. Having global brands for video games on Facebook makes sense with 60+ million active uses around the world and 60% living outside of the US.

Imagine if Microsoft’s Xbox team setup its own Facebook Pages to send out updates to its fans on new screens, game news and trailers. It could just include a link back to the studio’s site or your other Facebook pages on Facebook. Or what if you were EA and used Facebook Pages and other social networks to launch mini-versions of your game… EA is planning something like this. The key to using Facebook Pages from a marketing perspective is to think about it as a two way communication platform. The question you need to ask yourself is “How can I let the fans of my game keep up to date on the latest information”, which could be the following:

1. Use Facebook Pages to help launch mini-versions of your game. Check out what EA is doing.
2. If you run an MMO or virtual world. Use Facebook Pages to launch a Second life herald type publication.
3. Launch a re-mix competition for one of your game trials with Facebook Pages.
4. Engage your fans & customers with a place they can get the latest trailers, screens and information about your game.
5. Launch a video series focusing on one of the side stories in your game.

Keep in mind that everyone on Facebook may not like your brand, company or game… and you’ll need to be prepared to react to negative statement on your Facebook Pages. If things do go wrong you can read my Gamasutra column, Online PR For Games: There Is No Going Back Now, and learn how to react. However, I think the positives far out weight the negatives when it comes to using social media as a marketing tool.

Mike Manuel over at media guerrilla has a great post about what Sony has learned in the last year since launching their American focused blog. Until recently, Sony has been very quite when it came to blogging, social media and when to engage their customers. Sony learned a lot in 2006 with their “first” blog and almost a year and half later they have come full circle. One of the interesting lesson was:

 …very early on they learned their @name comment replies were helpful, but just getting lost with volumes like this, so they developed a custom WordPress plugin that allows their authors to reply in-line to all the comments…

The Playstation guys were sharing at the NewComm Forum. By the end of the session, the PlayStation guys had shared 15 lessons learned over the last year. Check out the post and you might learn a thing or two.