Choosing the Right Social Game for Your PR Strategy |

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Continuing my discussion on social gaming, I turn to the question of matching the right game with the right PR strategy. At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, I had to chance to hear Frank Lantz speak on a social gaming panel. He is co-founder and director of Area/Code. His firm has created both offline (real world) games like The Big Urban Game and online ones like Parking Wars based on the A&E show with the same name. What links these social games together is their social dimension, their power to build community and generate buzz. They also reflect the blending of new and traditional media.

Choosing the right game depends on your budget, timing and objectives. In one respect, Frank is not the best to ask for advice. He likes “constraints,” so what others may see as obstacles, he may embrace.

Here are three categories of social games to consider:

Games as Events – Real world games connect people to their physical environment. They also tend to be newsworthy. Games like B.U.G. generated a lot of earned traditional coverage in local media markets — especially during the weather segment. The challenge is accessibility. These games involve a great deal of logistics but engage only a few hundred to a upwards of thousand participants at a time. You have to build the crowd. It reminds me of the nerve racking days of my early career when I tried to generate media coverage by staging events for political candidates. Crowdbuilding can be unpredictable. Real word games are repeatable, but they generally are a one shot deal for their participants. In short, they are a burst of publicity, but have limited long term engagement.

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Online Games – Online games on the other hand can generate publicity, but the bigger driver is community building, user engagement and brand extension. They connect users to online environments like Facebook. At their best, they can generate tens of thousands of users and millions of page views, but they require long lead times. Given time restraints, building a critical mass of gamers may require game sponsors to use incentives, promotions or celebrity involvement. They also require an exit strategy. You don’t want to alienate the very people you worked so hard to attract in the first place. Games can generate avid fans who my want to continue playing long after the show or campaign they were created to support has ended. You need to determine how and if the game will continue. There is also the issue of handling cheaters and rule breakers. Cheating is a common occurrence. The lack of effective community management to oversee rule breakers can generate ill will and unwanted negative publicity.

Mobile games – Mobile games are another category. Until recently, the challenge was not the number of mobile devices. It’s that everyone had a different device. Games had to function on multiple platforms creating design and feature limitations. That may be changing with the growing popularity of the iPhone and the growing number of gaming apps. It is now possible to create a richer gaming experience reaching a wider audience on a common platform.

Social games have a track record of success. Done right, a game can catch fire and generate a billion pages that Traffic Wars did last year. The risk is of course is building a game at considerable cost that does not capture people’s imagination, fails to generate media coverage, and does not sustain a community. What is acceptable metric? It all depends – 500 really engaged users or 500,000 casual one time users.

What is most critical is game design? As they say on TV, don’t try this at home. It is a complicated formula involving artistic and engineering considerations that impact the player experience. As I advised in my last post, finding the right firm to communicate your message in the right game must be a key driver in your strategy.

Let me get back to you.

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