A few weeks ago, I attended Blizzcon 2018, yet I only went into the convention once for approximately two hours.
Many people have questioned my decision to go to a huge annual gaming convention and spend the entire time sleeping all day and staying up all night, but it all paid off in the end because I knew that networking was the key to my career. I attended many parties and events where I talked with people I knew in my industry, which led to my most important encounter yet.
On Saturday November 3, I went to Blizzcon for a few hours to watch the MDI All Stars tournament with some of my friends who play professionally for the Esports brand Method. After the tournament, I went and sat with some of my friends who played in the tournament. We watched the WoW PvP tournament, and as we were sitting down, we were approached by a guy named Jah who said he was the creator of Raider.io–the biggest and most prominent website in all of WoW in tracking/comparing Mythic Plus score. Every single person who pushes M+ keys uses Raider.io to view their score and compare each other. Even when we are all in the game, we use Raider.io score to judge who we bring to our groups when we form groups with strangers. Raider.io is the currency of M+ and I met the guy who runs it.
After talking for a while, Jah gave me an exclusive Raider.io shirt that I ended up wearing on a recent stream of mine. When I was going live, I posted a picture of me in my new Raider.io shirt to my social media and tagged the official Raider.io Twitter. In doing so, I made contact with Jah online and then sent him a direct message on Twitter. We soon started talking, and I inspired him with my ideas that I had learned in my Strategic Social Media class at UNM where he could really do a lot with his website to tell stories about prominent players in M+ and use this in combination with social media such as Twitter and Instagram to promote his brand. Before I knew it, I spent the week not only working on homework for my classes, but interviewing prominent members of the M+ WoW community to show him how much great content is out there.
As of about an hour ago, I got officially tagged in a post by Raider.io that they had 
partnered up with me to publish my new Player Spotlight series of interviews. I could not be more excited about what this means for my career because I’m so passionate about this Esport, but also passionate about this community and promoting lesser-known players who have stories that need to be shared.
I have been using skills that I learned in my Strategic Social Media class and sharing information with the creators of this website in such a way that it’s all coming together now. Our first article is coming out some time this week once they get it developed on the website and I couldn’t be more excited to see my work published by one people who really changed the WoW community for the better by making a unique scoring system that was not in the game. Raider.io score is everything to M+ players and now I am working with them to integrate people’s streams into their Raider.io in such a way that will really promote the Esport and storytelling.
I’ve been thinking about this process and feel really proud. I made contact at Blizzcon with the man in person, Tweeted about Raider.io a few days after Blizzcon for one of my streams, and then made contact through private messages. We collaborated over discord together to create a great story about a player named Barokoshama who plays an elemental shaman and defies all odds to complete very high level content. I can’t wait to share the story with you all when it goes live and I’m thrilled that what I’ve learned in this class is already benefiting my career and portfolio. Throughout this class, I’ve been thinking very hard about how to humanize a brand and draw inspiration from some of the more successful brands on social media, so it is thrilling to have the opportunity to apply this to my favorite website and help them build an incredible brand. The best part of it all is that I never even planned any of this. I simply met Jah and my passion for journalism and WoW poured out…and now I am writing interviews with some of the best players in WoW and it’s being published on an official website. I graduate in less than a month and the future is looking bright. Let the storytelling begin!
VITAMINPEE 