Looks like this video has been out there since last summer, so I'm pretty slow to find this but I thought it was worth a post.

It's quick, it's simple and an entertaining way to show our modern relationships with brands in our daily lives.

Great work by an agency out of Atlanta, 22squared.

A lot of folks are talking about bringing in Community Managers these days.  Who else is going to answer all those annoying questions on the boards and keep up the witty banter on your Facebook & Twitter? (I kid) 

Honestly, who is the best person for the job?  You want someone that can  write fast, so do you get yourself an out of work journalist on the cheap?  Then again, You need someone with some heavy duty communication and relationship building skills though.  Maybe a young up and coming PR pro?  You could always hire within and give that new whiz kid in the office a shot. after all, he seems to glow with your brand's personality and swagger and does well with the corporate high ups.  Of course a lot of this depends on your brand and your product.

This is the best part of a position that hasn't competely emerged yet.  Since there isn't and understood "right" answer yet, it allows people to get messy and throw ideas around.  In the issue of community building, I find myself looking towards the video gamers and the people who make said games.  These communities have been around for a while as have the mass chat boards, fan clubs, and community events including them.  This gives them a bit of a rare head start as far as relationships with communities go.

More specifically, I have been looking at Capcom, the maker of the world famous Street Fighter & Mega Man franchises.  Both games hold a special place in the hearts in most of us that grew up as Nintendo kids.  These legendary series' are still alive today and as you can imagine have a powerful community surrounding them both in Japan as well as the US.

How did Capcom fill their need for a Community Manager in the States?  They hired Seth Killian.  Seth's background is interesting, but nothing out of the ordinary. Working at a university in the physics dept., working in publishing with books on fascinating topics such as gender relations from 1872-1874, and even a German to English translator.  Nothing screams Community Manager for a video game company yet huh?

thanks G4 for the photo of Seth in front of this SFIV banner

Seth's occupational background might not sing the song, but that's not how he got his current gig.  What I've left out is Seth's passion for the arcade fighter Street Fighter 2.  The game that re-invented the American arcade and even put out one of the worst big budget movies starring Jean Claude Van Damme in a time when that was pretty kick ass.

Years before he started working for Capcom Seth spent years helping create the American Street Fighter 2 community by helping host and setup the fan made and very popular EVO Championship Series of tournaments which became famous for it's gathering of gamers from accross the globe.  That and Seth is really freaking good at the game itself.  Many would argue that the Japanese gamers didn't even take Americans seriously until Seth came around.  The guy is so good that they named a character in the recent Street Fighter IV game after him.  Yeah, I said it.  Not just a character but the final and impossibly difficult to beat final boss of the game. 

When Capcom was looking for someone to bring their community together under the brand's own website, they looked within the community itself and hired one of their leaders.

  By doing this, they took advantage of one of difficult ingredients of a successful Community Manager.  Trust!  Seth was already trusted by the community.  By bringing him into this position, Capcom had just made a promise to the community.  Capcom knew that since Killian was already a trusted part of the community, that he was bound by that trust to listen and speak for the community even though he was now getting a paycheck.  This can get tricky, but in Capcom's world, it seems to have been a success.

Seth's also highly respected within Capcom (if that wasn't evident by the character naming thing).  Capcom understands that his position isn't just a community baby sitter, but a funnel of information from the most important source, the gamers and fans themselves.  He is able to speak to the devlopers themselves to share the community's messages regarding hiccups in the game, overpowered or underpowered characters or parts of the game that well well or ill recieved.  It's this mutual respect and understanding that makes things run so well.

The power of the community isn't just in getting them to buy into the next game, but better judging what that next game should be or even fixing their existing product and making it better. 

Capcom and other gaming companies are in a very unique position in that their communities are already so large and so vocal.  However, with the the speed of which communities are beginning to form with the help of social media juice, it's not a leap to figure that it won't take long for other companies to catch up.

Let me know if you've had any experience with Community Managers.  Is Seth's story a rare one?  What qualities have I missed?  Feel free to leave comments and thanks for reading.

Found This pic of a McDonalds Guerrilla ad in Canada over at Ads of the World.

Just shows that marketing can be remarkable outside of a computer monitor.  I appreciate advertising that upsets the usual walk to work with something that makes you smile. 

It's smart, simple and gives people something to talk about.  Just gotta make sure that it doesn't stay up long enough to melt into the background again.

Nice work!

The second Annual Ugly Chrismtmas Sweater Party is coming up and It's something that you don't want to miss.  It's a huge party at Tower Tavern in Martini Corner and the proceeds go to Operation Breakthrough.  It was a great time last year and they raised over $7,000.  Come have a drink with me and bring your Ugliest Sweater.  You can get all of the details at kcswaterparty.com.

(My cat Zelda makes a cameo towards the end)

You also have to check out the video Ramsey put together over at his site.  One of the best event videos to come out of KC!  This should be fun!

I picked up my mail the other day and I saw that we had received our first Christmas card. Blue envelope, hand written address, pretty stamp, approximate size of a holiday card, all gave me the green light to rip this baby open.

Ever since I was a kid, I've liked the idea of Christmas cards and I guess it's from that childhood memory of helping my mom tape up all of the cards around our doorway that gives me those warm fuzzies about them now at thirty.

I ripped the card open and nothing was odd until I actually opened the card. Looks like I had been duped a bit and this was another piece of direct mail for AT&T's cable service.

Am I angry that I was duped? Absolutely not. The idea was to spend more on the look and feel of a holiday card, send it out around Christmas and in doing this garner a larger open rate.

I'll be the first to tell AT&T that it worked! I opened it! However this is where I stop, because I don't want their cable service and have no need for the product.

What I'm getting at is not that this is a blog post against direct mail. AT&T has been spending a lot on me lately. I've gotten some very high class snazzy mail from them lately and it hasn't gotten in my way, made me angry or annoyed. It's just not something I needed.

My thought instead goes to the amount that was spent on me and the campaign and how that money could have been spent elsewhere and the message could have landed in better hands.

How could AT&T spend money to better know me and my needs? Could they have known that I just signed up for Time Warner only weeks ago and wasn't ready to be advertised to? Would money spent instead on Social Media listening software like Radian6, Spiral16 or Social Radar been a better bet than buying a list?

I know that direct marketing has a place still in a marketing mix, but so many questions are being asked about the worth of a social media buy, that I think it's only fair that we ask the same questions on our more traditional buys.