WEEK 9: Starring you in Social Media!

I’m sure you want to get back to what you’re doing. Props to Chris Dahlgren for getting the first post this week!

Step 1: Select a brand or organization that you are interested in monitoring. The organization could be your case study for assignment 2. Other members of your team might look at similar or competitor organizations. Alternatively, choose any organization that you are interested in.

Step 2: Perform an analysis using one or more of the free tools that you can gain access to.

Step 3: Write a reflective blog post describing your experience a) using the tool(s) that you used and b) presenting any interesting insights that you found from your search. Are there any recommendations that you would make to the organization?

The organization I’ve chosen is Rockstar Games. I think this fits in nicely with the release of Grand Theft Auto V (woo!).

Rockstar Games is a multinational video game developer as well as publisher, based in New York City. Founded in 1998, they are owned by Take-Two Interactive and are most famous for their video game creation, Grand Theft Auto. The estimated sales from their most prestigious game series is at 125 million, expected to rise even higher thanks to the release of GTAV just yesterday!

Through this blog post I’ll be looking at both Rockstar Games and their product the Grand Theft Auto series. Part of my analysis will hinge on both the company and the organisation and product as I believe are strong indicators of their social media success.

Omigli

Rockstar Games

Omigli’s search functionality pulls up 376 results in the search. This is quite a bit and whilst it is a bit inflated due to the nature of the words in the organisation’s name it is still a lot to consider. More often than not the content is directly referencing the organisation’s name.

Grand Theft Auto

Omigli brings up 632 threads for this search query. Once again, the words used are somewhat open to searches however a lot of the context in this search does bring up reference to Rockstar Games’ creation. I believe at this day and age it is significantly more difficult to find mentions of actual grand theft auto (Someone stealing a car) through this search engine than the game series itself. All 10 mentions on the first page are of the game series.

Grand Theft Auto V

Social Mention

Rockstar Games

Some of these stats provided for Rockstar Games are very very promising. 36% strength (Discussion in social media), 5:1 sentiment (Positive to negative mention ratio), 27% passion (Repeat mentions) and 51% reach (Range of influence) are all phenomenal! What does it all mean? Rockstar games is getting a lot of discussion out there about its products and the range of services it offers. Obviously today the hot topic is their latest game. At least 30 seconds as the average wait time between mentions is also quite strong.

Grand Theft Auto

57% strength, 11:1 sentiment, 21% passion, 61% reach. All very healthy indicators of the success of the Grand Theft Auto series no doubt inflated by the recent game release. All these numbers show a strong influence in social media. Would you believe the time between mentions is 7 seconds? That’s quite good, although it doesn’t hold a candle to say, Microsoft.

The office of Rockstar Games New York

Addict-o-matic

Rockstar Games

Once again lots of hits for Rockstar Games and their products. Understandably there isn’t anything for Twitter, probably due to their name having two separate words instead of one. Once again, the amount of information provided for this simple search just exemplifies the level of reach they have across social media and the fact that they are capitalising on this to push their products.

Grand Theft Auto

Another strong contender in the social media connections. More than enough information is floating around Web 2.0 than you’d have time to read about. As I have stated before, it’s all probably influence by the fact that the latest game has been released yesterday but people have been circulating information on it for the past year.

Overall the use of these tools was very efficient but they did not introduce any new information that I didn’t already know. With my understanding of the organisation and their connection to social media, they are doing everything correct. Rockstar Games is well known for their connections with social media and online communities, as their main target market uses these items on a daily basis. It all comes down to the fact that gamers will browse the internet and their products are for gamers.

Further exemplifying this is their own blog to cater to their audience called the Rockstar Newswire as well as their own developed social hub, for all lovers of their video game series. They’ve taken a big step forward in differentiating themselves from their competition by creating their own social hub, known as the Rockstar Games Social Club. Check it out if you get the chance!

As usual the obligatory references. Conor Farne Sang and Aden Jones will be my front runners for today. Please check them out as they ALWAYS have insightful information.

USELESS FACT #9

The word “Karaoke” means “Empty Orchestra” in Japanese.

WEEK 5: Do not feed Social Media, it may bite!

Here’s the 5th week of questions. We must all be blogging aficionados by now!

Select an organisation, (describing its sector, their business, services etc…) and using the concepts introduced to you in the lecture (also the readings and additionally info), identify some of the major legal risks to that organisation as a result of their participation in Social Media.  Justify why those risks are particularly relevant (e.g. risks for QUT could be different than that of a Dental Practice) and provide scenarios of how some of these risks could apply and what the organisations Social Media Policy should attempt to address.

Once again the obligatory picking of an organisation. My chosen organisation this week will be Microsoft, due to their almost infamous social media presence. I hope it provides some interesting perspective. Looking into possible risks of importance, I’ve chosen a few including Wrongful Dismissal, Defamation (statutory risk) and Reputation Risks. To corroborate this, I thought I’d go ahead and show how they have actually been affected by these risks.

Wrongful Dismissal

Earlier this year, there was an incident involving a Microsoft employee and his use of Social Media that prompted his resignation. In a sense, he was not terminated by Microsoft but as a result of his tweets, the employee’s future occupation prospects were on the line. I refer to the Adam Orth incident. To give you an idea of what happened, here is a screenshot of the tweets. (Click the image to view the source)

Adam Orth’s Twitter FAIL!

For those of you who are having a hard time understanding, he was tweeting via his personal twitter account with regards to Microsoft’s Xbox One video game console. The console was revealed earlier this year alongside a list of features, with many of these features not getting on fans good sides. The list of features went on, but the one these tweets are referring to was that the upcoming video game console would be required to have a constant internet connection in order to be used. Well, looking at these tweets, you can see why this would be a problem. Not everyone has superior internet! Even so, Adam Orth caused up quite a bit of embarrassment for Microsoft and despite that he wasn’t officially removed from his position as Creative Director (It would have been more hilarious if he was their PR manager!), I’m sure these out-of-office tweets surely did pave the way for his resignation.

Not that anyone’s going to miss that arrogant attitude… hehehe…

Defamation (statutory risk)

I had a bit of trouble trying to flesh out this one and will try my best to explain it fully. It’s not one that Australians will know about because it has ties to American politics. Personally I’m not a big fan of politics but in the United States it’s the next biggest thing to Jesus! A Microsoft employee forgot they were using the company twitter account when they blatantly attempted to knock down a highly conservative poltical commentator, stating that she was less intelligent than Robert Reich’s (@RBReich) daughter. His details are not important to note in this context of defamation.

Attacking a politician

The reason I was not entirely sure of this is because it could simply be seen as a stupid incident by a stupid individual. I decided to draw defamation from this as the intention of the tweet was to misrepresent Ann Coulter, painting her as a uneducated and backwards individual. Those who were not paying attention could also see this as an opinion on Microsoft’s part, posing a very very sticky situation for them. Politics is a tricky subject, so when you’re a broadcasting your thoughts to the public, you don’t always want to alienate one side of your audience, ESPECIALLY if you’re a company!

Even so, please let me know if you disagree with this selection or if you know of any other instances of defamation with Microsoft.

Reputation Risk

Ahh the final one, the reputation risk. Twitter must love loathe the fact that a lot of these mishaps and scandals happen through them. At least in these cases they are.

Make a profit off a celebrity’s death

Microsoft took a serious beating with this doozie of a tweet. Despite being part of one of the smaller PR accounts for the big company, it certainly hit home. Where is the reputation risk? This tweet exemplified the ideal that it’s okay for Microsoft to profit off the death of a celebrity; someone that the community adored (Matter of opinion, though it’s undisputed that she had a lot of fans) and someone people did not take to kindly having her death exploited. The exploitation comes in the form of “Hey, buy her album through our own service!”

Whilst it wasn’t the actual intention of Microsoft, it did represent them as a money grabbing corporation. Despite the old saying “Any press is good press”, there are some things that people do not forget. I’m sure this is one of them.

Hopefully I’ve hit the right points. Aden Jones beat me to the first posting for this week, so check him out. As always, my twin Conor Farne Sang will most definitely have something interesting to say! As always, please comment on the post with your thoughts and suggestions!

USELESS FACT #5

Hug it out!

Human contact through hugs lowers blood pressure, improve memory, releases stress, and reduces the risk of heart disease.