BandwidthCamp

I’m happy to announce that my first in a three part column was published on Gamasutra today; The Art and Science of Public Relations. Here is a few paragraphs from the article:

“Online public relations is providing greater tools and opportunities that are equal to, or even eclipse, what is currently available today. You can now reach anyone in the world with an Internet connection in an instance. You can build communities around your product and increase your goodwill.

However, the public now has the same power if they feel you are not telling the truth. A message, good or bad, spreads fast on the Internet, and you don’t have the luxury to ignore or pretend it doesn’t exist anymore. For example, Sony’s fake PSP blog from late last year, which we will get into in our next column.

In this column, we are going into the different areas that online public relations cover. In future columns we’ll cover how to use these different areas, how to do it safely, bridging the gap between online and offline PR and lastly, what tools to use to track your messages once it’s out there.”

Enjoy the article as well as the new piece.

Just a quick post for today. JoyStiq has a piece from the Game Development Conference and where our industry is heading in 2007 and beyond. The top five trends in gaming are the following:

1. Games are going to be used to build brands
2. The rise of user generated game experiences
3. The definition of games and gamers widens broadly
4. Ads + games goes premium
5. Licensing becomes less adhoc

You can check out the post and see what everyone has been saying. A lot of these trends have been talked about to death over the last year and make sense. I just wish there was something new to this list. What are going to be the trends in five or 10 years? That’s what I would want to know.

Today Kotaku reported on a rumor that Sony might be announcing achievements and Mii like features next week at GDC. Sony wasn’t happy about Kotaku posting this as a rumor and attempted to blacklist them. The two sides have resolved the issues and should be on good terms now. However, with all the mistakes that Sony has been making over the last year couple years, I hope they learn and know they have a lot of ground to make up for. The Internet has changed the playing field and you’ve to treat everyone as equals, regardless of the size of the media site.