On Corporate Blogging, PR, and The Slow Demise Of Passion

What seems like a lifetime ago, I was a game journalist. I was one of the few who enjoyed the luxury of zooming around the globe to play the latest games, chatting casually over drinks with the industry’s key players, and getting a chance to make an impact on the way that the gaming industry moved forward. I consider myself lucky for having said opportunity, and I’ve done my best since to help others break in.

“Breaking in” is a topic of conversation that has been coming up a lot in my daily readings as of late. Twitter, in particular, has been abuzz with talks of what to do—a recent back-and-forth between Destructoid and the One Up’s Dale North and former Shacknews writer Aaron Linde jumps to mind.

It’s not an untouched subject by any means—it seems there’s a wave of posts and talk in the blogosphere about breaking into the game industry on a yearly basis—but for many reasons, the topic of breaking in always seems to drive a bit of traffic, even though the advice is almost always the same: don’t think about the money, enjoy the exposure, do it because you love it, and so on and so forth.

What I find most interesting about these discussions, though, is that the topic rarely turns to the subject of what comes after one has made it as a journalist. Unfortunately, in that profession, the money isn’t great. A few key figures make enough to survive on from just their main gig, but the rest of us usually float around on a contract or freelancer basis in an attempt to earn end’s meat.

For many of these people, game journalism is a passion that is worth fighting for. But for some, that passion ultimately dies due to simple numbers. If you don’t earn enough to survive, how long can you really chase the dream before reality catches up to you? Perhaps I’m a defeatist, but I ultimately opted to jump ship once I saw the chance. Many writers do this out of necessity. Some begin to write for more general tech outlets or rags. Some change subjects altogether. Some even begin to write books.

One of the more interesting but lesser-mentioned career changes for games journalists, though, is to jump to the opposite team and enter public relations. Given that we as journalists spend so much time dealing with the industry’s PR people, we get to know the PR side of the business quite intimately, and we develop a Rolodex of PR people and firms. When I ended my time with Ars, the most valuable contacts that I walked away with were not the industry’s lead designers, programmers, artists, and creative folk: they were the PR and marketing reps who I’d talked with, drank with, and worked with.

And so, with that in mind, I entered the PR side of the gaming industry. To me, it seemed the perfect transition from a job that never truly seemed “real” and “legitimate” into a profession that would hopefully provide a stable future. Sadly, I soon came to realize the old cliché remains true: the grass isn’t greener on the other side.

Initially, my move from journalism into the industry wasn’t a PR one. I took a job as a game designer at a large company in Toronto: one of the few that actually develops games. While my initial intent was to develop Flash games for the company’s marquee brand, I was thrown on a different project that falls much more in line with the type of gaming I’ve enjoyed over the past few years. NDA-clad and high-profile, the project continues to roll on. It’s an impressive beast that I was happy to spend some 10 months on, but alas, that’s a different story for a different day.

With my work on the project winding down, I needed to take on a new task if I was hoping to stay gainfully employed. I ultimately decided to return to what I knew best: using my voice to talk to the people. As a journalist, your main goal is to communicate your message to an audience concisely and effectively, and that’s also one of the main goals of any PR person. That’s why most extroverted journalists can take to PR rather easily.

Figuring that I could make the jump easily, I began working as my company’s main “mouthpiece” to the consumer. I was given the mandate to helm both the company’s main brand-based blog—a position I thought I’d have no problem filling—and the game’s in-game newspaper, as well as both creating and subsequently managing the brand’s presence in social media (read: Twitter and Facebook).

Having a wealth of experience working with the blogging medium, doing the social networking thing, and having spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours dissecting how other companies use in-game communications to convey information to players in an MMO setting, I thought that my new position would be a cakewalk. How happy I was to jump back into the fray as a blogger!

I began on steady footing, quickly taking the reigns and getting to know the product more intimately. I was already familiar with the game on a general level, but I swiftly became as much of an expert as I could, knowing the brunt of the expansive game as well as exactly where to turn for info pertaining to its many aspects. I learned the unique aspects of this business—one that melds physical product with digital gains inside the game world. I learned the roles of the various important people that are involved and who to talk to for what. I learned it all. As our product is five years old and quite massive, it’s nearly akin to jumping into World of Warcraft today with little previous exposure and trying to learn the ins and outs of every instance, item, and feature.

Only as time went on, though, did I begin to make a horrible realization: corporate blogging and new media PR is vastly more difficult than simple journalism. Worrying about matters of taste, style, and readership response were the chief concerns as a journalist. In the world of corporate blogging, though, there’s so much more to worry about. Rather than digging for leads and chasing stories, now I had to spend a great deal of time chasing down project managers, speaking to team leads, and talking to coordinators in an attempt to find out just what updates are being pushed, what is broken on the site, what the audience needed to know, what I wasn’t allowed to discuss or announce, and so on and so forth.

“Disarray” is a word I now use on a daily basis. Trying to track down the countless individual projects that each account for a single bullet point on a typical MMO’s patch log is a challenge enough in itself, but the company’s rigorous bi-weekly game updates ensure that there’s always something being rushed in, and when people rush work in a corporate setting, mistakes and miscommunication (or a lack of communication altogether) happen with startling regularity.

Worse yet, much of the content that I write is supposed to be vetted by the legal department first, and there’s already been a few incidents where the copy was worded in such a way to create a, for lack of a better word, shitstorm. This means I don’t have the ability to fire off stories at my leisure or to immediately respond to issues in all cases, which has already created some problems, much to my chagrin.

As a result of this disarray and the general failings of due process and bureaucracy, planning coverage of the product has become a great challenge. One might think that having an inside look at content that is coming months in advance would help shape coverage and ensure that the corporate blog has all the exclusives that will drive traffic. But with shifting deadlines and unfulfilled promises, oftentimes the fan bloggers are ahead of me. And believe me, I now appreciate how complicated dealing with an eager blogging community can be.

I remember a particular incident that happened while I was working for Ars Technica that I now look back on in a totally different light. When Megaman 9 was first announced, it was initially announced only for the Wii. Capcom sent out E3 invites that year, and in the E3 invite information, it noted that Megaman 9 was actually also on display for XBLA and PSN. I received the invite and noticed the new information. Not seeing any mention of NDA or “keep this under wraps,” I did what any journalist would do: I shared the new information. The big players in the gaming blogosphere picked it up, and we had a great exclusive that drove some traffic.

Unfortunately, Capcom wasn’t happy about this alleged “leak.” We were asked to pull the story, and we did, even though we were not at fault. However, we were left looking at fault for Capcom’s screw-up, and the company went on to announce the info just a few days later.

At the time and until recently, I always resented kowtowing to Capcom and pulling the story. I was furious. We did so to remain in Capcom’s good graces. It wasn’t an editorial or a review, so we didn’t stand to lose credibility or stature. We were simply losing face, as though we’d made the screw up and jumped the gun. It’s the type of trade off that has to be made sometimes in a closed ecosystem like the game industry.

But the damage was already done: we stole their thunder; we ruined Capcom’s PR work—and it’s only now that I appreciate why what I did was actually a (potentially) damaging thing. The company’s PR people worked up a plan, and they had set up how they wanted the announcement to be made. Our making that announcement for them prematurely compromised their plan.

What effects that compromise had for Capcom are unknown to me, but from my own experience now, I know first hand that being rushed to announce something after the fan community has done so is not the way to do proper PR work. Announcements and unveils are the crowning moments of a PR department’s plans for a product—something that the PR department wants to control and measure—and I have grown to hate the scramble that follows such preemptive slips in my own work.

These types of slips happen regularly now. Features on the site and bug fixes will get pushed without any communication, and I lose the ability to control the announcement and drive us traffic because of it. There’s nothing worse than having a brand new feature slipped to the fans before a carefully constructed PR and marketing plan around the release can run its course. Aside from the hours and hours of lost work and planning time, hoping that the fans will evangelize the feature for you effectively and look at it in the right light without the proper “guiding hand” is not something any PR person wants to do.

Worse yet are the legitimate internal leaks, which complicate everything. I now fully appreciate how difficult leaks can be for a company. We have a particular fan site that watches us like a hawk, and some of their members have found ways to find out information prematurely every time we push a release. By digging into the source files of the game, they are finding out information about new features coming well before I’m allowed to announce them. This means that I am almost always second to the story, and as many journalists will attest to, being second to the story and not having an interesting spin makes your take on the story irrelevant.

Due to the popularity of this particular fan site, I have almost no chance of beating them to the punch and winning my traffic back. The hardcore readers have been trained to go to this fan site rather than the corporate blog, and it’s going to take months and months of consistent, exclusive coverage on the corporate blog to win them back.

And the worst part is that, unlike in the gaming blogosphere, there is no “best practice” for linking sources. Most blogs today are very honest about linking to original sources: it’s a key part of the “honor” of blogging. There is no such honor in the rabid fandom of my company’s game, and as a result, I now find myself almost fighting against the fanbase in order to stay viable. That’s no way for a man who is supposed to be promoting the product to those very people in a friendly and encouraging way to act. The fan site has become my rival, a thorn in my side rather than a helpful extension of my own marketing platform. How can one embrace a community that is ultimately a pest at best, an enemy at worst?

Of course, not helping matters is the fact that I need to drive traffic to the blog for the purposes of building advertising revenue. No longer is the company blog worth maintaining solely for improving community relations and ensuring that players new, old, and lapsed are exposed to all the great new content we’re making for our game. This, in many ways, is a complete conflict of interest, and many headaches have been and will continue to be wrought from this oxymoronic duality.

The end result of all this disarray and pressure is that my coverage just isn’t up to snuff. If I was producing coverage like this for Ars when I was working there, I’d have been tossed out quickly. The quality, breadth, and depth of the coverage leaves a great deal to be desired, and in many ways, I am often ashamed of the mistakes that I make and the poor PR work being done as a result of the aforementioned issues. Most of this goes unnoticed by the consumer at large, but it pains me to know that plans aren’t being executed and returns aren’t being maximized because of disarray and pressure. It also pains me because much of my day is spent trying to right wrongs.

Through all this, though, I have grown to develop a sincere appreciation for what companies like Microsoft and Sony have managed to do. Both the Major Nelson blog and Sony’s PlayStation Blog manage to effectively communicate key information to the consumers while building traffic from the existing blogosphere. It’s an impressive feat of PR and marketing, and one that I don’t think enough big companies in other industries and individual consumers in the gaming industry appreciate.

Orchestrating coverage at a corporate level is incredibly hard—I can’t even imagine how difficult it is for a larger corporation, particularly Sony. While Major Nelson’s blog is more self-contained, Sony’s PlayStation Blog pools PR work from many different members of Sony’s large corporate community, including third-party PR folks from game companies making Sony games. This level of coordination is nothing to scoff at, and it shows that the management behind Sony’s US new media PR knows at least a little about building a blog worth following.

When it’s all said and done, I’ve learned a lot in this new position. I’ve discovered a whole new side of the business and developed an appreciation for it that I didn’t have before. This is the future of PR in a lot of ways (or at least a part of it), and there are clearly many hurdles to be overcome, chief among them the whole idea of monetizing the company’s community blog. Of course, this is just one example in one particular company.

That’s my story—an anecdote about moving from journalist to PR mouthpiece. If nothing else, I hope that I’ve shed a little bit of light on how things can work on the other side of the fence. Anyone entering the PR side of the game industry—or at least this new media side—should be wary of what may lie in wait. The grass isn’t greener on the other side, and although the paychecks may end up being greener, so to speak, your new position may not end up being the kind of respite from the craziness of day-to-day freelance work that you’ve been hoping for.

Part of me does miss being on the other side, because at the end of the day, the only person I ever had to answer to was my editor, and everything I wrote, I wrote for myself with passion and determination. I can’t say the same anymore, and that’s something no writer ever wants to admit. For without passion and determination, how can one hope to engage an audience? That’s why fan blogs will never die: as passionate as a PR department can be—Capcom’s Unity blog comes to mind—the fans are the ones who do it without the pay check solely because they love it. I miss working under the same pretense.