Author: vitamiinpee

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!

This week, I’ve chosen to write about one of my favorite brands, which is Amazon. While this may seem extremely broad, that’s exactly why I picked it. With a company this far-reaching and complex, how can a company build a brand and interact with customers on social media? How do they choose what to post about when they sell a seemingly infinite amount of products and services?

The first thing I did was follow Amazon on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to see what my initial impression would be. I wanted to see if their posts were personal, impersonal, or a mix of everything. Their posts on Instagram are a little different from their Facebook and Twitter posts, but I noticed that Amazon’s Twitter and Facebook posts were very similar. Something I like about Amazon is that they clearly use social media platforms in different ways to maximize that particular medium. On their Instagram, they have a nice, eye-catching variety of photos and videos that showcase various products, services, and celebrities. They also show photos and videos of business owners who aren’t as well-known.

For example, I found an Instagram post of theirs that tells the story of Connie, a woman who lost three children to AIDS before treatment became available in her country. Years later, she was able to get life-saving HIV medication for the rest of her family and this is in part to Amazon’s charity called RED where people can buy products that donates money to the Global Fund to help AIDS. Amazon did a great job with this post, since it showed a human interest story to promote an important charity.

If you browse through Amazon’s Instagram, you can see some of their personality peek out. They are very big on supporting charities and entrepreneurs.  On their Twitter and Facebook accounts, it seems a little more centered around marketing, but they still have a nice variety of posts. As I was scrolling their Facebook page, I found a few different videos promoting various entrepreneurs, but also stumbled upon a post they made regarding a new partnership with Shark Tank which directly states their support of entrepreneurs, since Shark Tank is a show about promoting businesses and inventions.

I also wanted to see if they actively responded to customers on their social media and found this post promoting an Amazon Original music artist where Amazon appears to respond very well to a customer complaint or issue. If you go through more of their posts, you can see that Amazon seems to be really active at acknowledging their customers and their fans, which gives off a really good vibe. It makes Amazon seem personable and attentive to their customers, which is especially important given how broad their marketplace is. As of recently, Amazon just launched an Amazon GO store in Chicago and new ownership of Whole foods. Every time I shop at Whole Foods now, I get to use the Prime app on my phone to get shopping discounts. It’s scary to think that Amazon is taking over the world, but their social media gives off the impression that their brand is built around people and their ideas. Their mission is to make life easier and inspire entrepreneurs of all kinds.

Some things that Amazon might be able to do better is write a blog. It seems like they are making small video blogs about various entrepreneurs and charities, but I cannot find an actual Amazon blog with longer stories featuring people. Throughout this semester, one of the most impactful ideas has been storytelling through social media to build a brand through our customers and fans, so I wonder if Amazon could implement this feature more. However, to be fair, I did see that they are also showing talk shows and livestreams, so I think they are already getting there. Amazon has a presence on all the major platforms, but in some ways, I wonder if they really need to do much more than they are already doing. It really does feel like Amazon is taking over the entire world, and maybe that’s part of their brand image…broadness and worldliness. Over time, I think that this will just make Amazon customer support and customer responses even more important as the brand grows so that it doesn’t become some monster corporation that doesn’t show enough regard for the humans that participate to create such a large brand. If they follow the success of campaigns such as the “response video” phenomenon for the newest Old Spice campaign which got people involved from all over the world and really launched the brand.

Building a brand takes a story, and Amazon really seems to show one through their social media because they have always been built upon changing the world one service and innovative piece of technology at a time. Amazon really emphasizes entrepreneurship, which I think they will continue to do on every different platform they can get their hands on. I can’t wait to see what Amazon does in the future. While they may not have the biggest Youtube or Snapchat presence, they have a large platform on Amazon Prime Video with Prime original shows and movies as well as music, and the billion-dollar company called Twitch which is the largest streaming platform in the world. Amazon’s brand is simply taking over the world and we’re all along for the ride so we may as well participate.

For the past year, the Twitch Terms of Service was amended to be much more strict in order to protect against hate speech, harassment, and other forms of malicious behavior we may see on the internet. However, has the Twitch Terms of Service (TOS) agreement gone too far and silenced our individual voices by steering our language? Or has it helped protect us against bullies and the spread of racist and misogynistic movements?

A few days ago, I watched a fellow streamer get drunk and start slut-shaming his recent ex girlfriend who is also a streamer on Twitch. It was a jarring experience for many reasons.

First of all, there is very little barring people from doing this, since they can delete their video of the day while they are streaming in order to evade a ban. Technically, talking ill of another streamer is against the TOS, but this guy managed to flame the living hell out of this girl, attracting more viewers to his stream, generating more revenue, and hurting her reputation in the process. After this stream, he simply deleted his video and did not get banned.

A few days ago, I also put up with some severe harassment in my stream when a group of trolls started coming in making sexist, slut-shaming, racist, body-shaming usernames in order to spam my stream notifications across my screen. It was highly disruptive towards my stream because I had to stop my stream, change settings in my Streamlabs program, and then restart the stream in order to turn off host and follower notifications. Not only was I getting harassed, but supposedly I could get banned for people making usernames that violated the TOS because bad words were flashing across my screen whether or not I had control over the situation.

How is this fair? I’m the one getting harassed, yet I’m the one that could get banned.

Last week, I wrote a little bit about the Twitch TOS and how all of my guildmates except me got banned recently due to a raid leader saying a racist phrase in a fit of rage. Even though my guildmates didn’t say anything that violated the TOS, the words still got broadcast on their stream, so their channels got chain-suspended that night.

I cant help but find this frustrating. For an entire year, I have had to be extremely careful with everything that goes onto my stream. So much so that I feel like my individuality gets suppressed because I have to be so careful about not only what I say, but what other people say on my stream. If someone says something wrong, I have to disrupt my stream, kill my viewership, and delete the video of the day in order to avoid getting banned.

I really wonder how harassment will ever get handled on Twitch. As a female who is competitive at a game, I get more hate than the average female streamer because I am a threat. Sexism and harassment gets a lot worse the higher up you go in a competitive atmosphere and it’s no wonder why the population of female gamers in Esports is basically zero. What do you guys think we could do to prevent users from using VPN’s, creating alternate accounts, and spamming people’s streams with horrible words? Trolls don’t just say bad things in chat now, since they can get easily banned from channels. Now, they make usernames made up of bigoted, hateful words and follow streams in order to get attention and possibly get streamers banned. Please comment with your thoughts on this issue. What do you think Twitch can do to amend this predicament? Are their TOS actually helping or hindering us?

This week, I’m going to discuss a blog post written by social media strategy expert Danny Brown this past October 2018.

The first thing that caught my eye about Brown’s post was the display photo for the journal entry. It is a picture of the gorilla character called Winston from the wildly popular Blizzard game called Overwatch. The title of his blog post is “Aren’t We All Nerds in Some Form or Other?”, which resonates with me due to my lifetime identity as someone who nerds out about everything she can get her hands on. Whether it was my interest in classical music, theatre, medieval reenactment, or video games, I’ve always held the opinion that we can be nerds about anything we like. While I have struggled with self confidence issues throughout my life due to the high standards for female appearance in the media, I have never struggled with confidence about who I am as a person specifically because I’ve never been bored with myself. I can always find something new to be interested in and learn about, which is why Danny Brown’s blog post resonated with me so well.

In his post, Brown tells the story of how his aunt used to take him on weekly train rides throughout the summer to Burntisland. He describes how, as a kid, he’d see trainspotters but didn’t understand why they found trains so fascinating, since it’s “just a piece of metal that takes us from one place to another”. I can relate to this sentiment, since I remember as a kid feeling very confused as to how anyone could find interest in things like sunsets, hot-air balloons, or computers.

As I grew up, I went through some real hardships with health, love, and loss. Through a lot of soul-searching, I came to the conclusion that everything can be interesting. According to Brown, “everything is amazing”. He became fascinated by museums, movies, soccer, and and comic books…anything he could get his hands on. He even developed an interest in the construction of a particular bridge across River Forth in 1833. Brown uses his journal entry to illustrate how anything can be amazing and that we all need to be trainspotters. One of the things I appreciated most about his post is that he pointed out how we have only explored maybe 7% of the world’s oceans. This is an exact sentence I used to say to people when discussing my propensity for curiosity in the world and exploration. My exploratory nature is part of why I love video games with expansive worlds.

Just the other day, I found a tiny nuance while exploring Azeroth. I was doing a world quest in the region of Dustvar and went to go kill an elite mob inside a small house. When I was killing the mob, I looked over at the wall and noticed that there was a portrait of a character. Once I was done, I walked my character over to the wall and saw that the eyes on the portrait moved depending on where I was standing. I immediately messaged a friend about this and asked if he had noticed this portrait and he hadn’t. I was blown away by the small details in the game and wondered what kind of coding it would take to design such a detail.

World of Warcraft is full of small details that people don’t always notice. Our world is the same way. What I love about Danny Brown’s point is that we can all be nerds about anything and at least appreciate the nerd in one another. 

Technology and social media go hand in hand. As technologies change, so must the ways we use them. I can understand the importance of making strategies for social media based on social data and analytics, but overall, I believe that we need to balance that with having no predetermined strategy at all. I like the way that Mark Schaefer described the field as “barely controlled chaos”, since that accurately represents social media and marketing in the rapidly-changing landscape of technology.

In some regards, having a plan can be helpful just like creating an outline for a research paper. If you create a social media strategy that involves a posting schedule, finding your voice/tone, and the kind of content you are sharing (i.e. videos versus links, text, and images). For example, there are some studies that show that videos are the most ideal posting format for viewer engagement, but it’s still good to create a variety of flat images and videos for the people who don’t have time to watch videos at work. Photos are also good because people can save them easily on their phones for quick access later on. Figuring out when the best times to post is probably the most trial-and-error piece of the whole ordeal, since that is completely variable on your particular audience. I used to read articles on what times of the day would be ideal to post to Facebook and the studies always came back showing that I need to be observant of my own particular audience, which requires that I simply post more often in order to continue testing theories.

If organizations don’t have a social media strategy, they could benefit in making one in terms of creating good habits and structure that they can adapt to any new technology and social media platform. While it’s all subjective, it’s helpful to understand the basics of developing a strategy in order to sense when it’s okay to divert from strategies as well. It’s similar to the concept of classical music. Every great composer of classical music became masters because they learned the rules well enough to learn how to break them in innovative ways. I believe that the same is true for social media. Overall, I think that we can benefit from creating some structure in our social media posts, but that we should also branch out of our schedules and content types in order to have a more natural and less robotic social media presence. This way, we will be more open to changes in technology while still keeping good habits when posting content.