media guerrilla

The case study chat with the new media team behind Sony PlayStation’s blog went well yesterday afternoon at the NewComm Forum, we actually covered a lot of ground - everything from content development and technical design to community management tactics and measurement. By the end of our session, the PlayStation guys had shared 15 “lessons learned” over the last year. I won’t re-hash all those here, I think some of them were fairly obvious and well documented, but there were a few lesser known/lesser discussed tips that shook out that are worth mentioning, here are three:

Sorry, Your Clever Blog Name Doesn’t Matter

Well, it matters less than you think, especially for big brands, big companies like PlayStation. Fact of the matter is that most people are typing “playstation blog” or a simple variation thereof in the search engines to find the blog. A lot of referral sites are also attributing/linking to the blog with the same simple terms, so, you know, if you’re working on a blog right now, don’t kill yourself over-thinking the name. There’s a good chance people won’t remember it or use it anyway…

Publishing Ain’t Pretty

Get comfortable reading and using html because most of the visual editors on the major blog platforms, well, suck. It’s not a huge hurdle, but for the uninitiated, it can *really* slow you down, especially when you have posts with special formatting like bullets, different font sizes, colors, etc. Consider creating a quick reference sheet for frequently used html styles/tags.

Ditch the “@Name” Comment Reply Practice

Sometimes, the more comments your blog generates, the more difficult it is to participate in the comment threads - at least not in as meaningful of a way as you’d probably like. The average PlayStation blog post is generating 135+ comments; 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 (read more about that here). This has added significant value to the health and utility of the discussion threads - and the good news is that if you’re using WordPess, they’ve opened-sourced this particular plugin so you can use it too.

[Photo credit to Ryan Lack]