Zwillinger

But...but...

What if I want to be evil...

Companies that view it as a liability would be better off investing their time in teaching their employees proper social media management and security. IMHO that is.

Ideally, that's a great idea. I'll look into seeing if that's something we can do that won't require monopolizing my staffs entire day.

We will do what we can with the manpower and resources we have available.

Yes, we're trying to grow another outlet. There's strategery in them thar hills.

The "code generator" wasn't generating anything at all. It was pulling from a static database of codes. It was also programmed by a third party and was a standalone tab on our Facebook page. Something we don't have the option to do on Twitter.

Interesting bit of Community Management science.

No matter how much you promote forum engagement through contests or other carrots, the most amount of players you'll ever see actually registering for your forums is 10%. That's 10% of the entire user base. Ever. Of that 10%, maybe 5% actually actively participates. I've personally seen this across multiple games and shared multiple experiences with my peers that reflects this as being pretty accurate, no matter the game. It's true for CoH (uncannily accurate actually) and I imagine it will remain constant for any other game I work on in the future.

The people who *want* to actively participate in the forums are going to do so, regardless of any carrots we dangle in front of them. Because you care, because you're passionate, you want to be involved with the future of the game.

Like I said previously, we'll have things that are exclusive to the fora, such as the voting for the Retro Sci-Fi costume set as an example. And we're going to definitely use other Social Media platforms to drive people to participate in the forum discussion as much as we can (we regularly link to forum threads on Facebook, Twitter and G+). I want for there to be synergy between all of our Community outlets, which is why we treat them all as equally important.

FWIW, I agree.

I am faced with two options:

• Do nothing.
• Do something that I don't particularly like but some will find fun and that will increase our audience via another social media platform that has a proven track record of reaching customers.

Like I said. Just as soon as we have NON UNIQUE promotional codes working in the Paragon Market, we'll start utilizing it. We've brainstormed many ideas for fun promotions, we just need the functionality.

On a weekly basis, we reach (actual reach, not potential) about ten times more people on Facebook than we do on the Official Forum. I have numbers to show this. Why is this? Because your average user is more inclined to check Facebook at work/home/on their phones/on the toilet/wherever than they are the fora.

There's a lot of things we can do to promote/encourage forum use such as securing mobile skinned fora, however that kind of stuff is out of my hands and squarely at the mercy of Seattle. I've requested it, but something like upgrading fora software is an org wide decision that affects more than just CoH.

Social Media is something we (Paragon) have direct control over. It's measurable, it's accessible to everyone and it's tapping into a huge market that we otherwise wouldn't be able to here in our walled garden that is the forums. For example, did you know that social media is huge in Brazil? We can track the number of people who visit the account sign up page from Facebook from a country like Brazil. That number is very interesting to watch, to say the least. To say that we'd be foolish not to do everything we can to have a great engagement on Social Media platforms would be an understatement.

I understand that some of you are *very* resistant to Social Media. People say that Facebook is free...it's not. You pay with your metrics, your clicks, your likes, all of that information that allows companies to more effectively market to you and people who also match your similar demographic. You have to decide if that information is worth the convenience that services like Facebook offer, the ability to connect with people around the world in a moment, to share your life experiences. For me, that answer is yes, to a degree, for some it's no, and I grok that.

I've said this before; we're not going to stop promoting and growing our social media presence. It's not the future, it's the now. Social Media is here and it's a HUGE part of building strong and vibrant Communities. We're not going to stop interacting on the forums, in fact that's the main reason to come to the forums, a direct and more personal way to interact directly with the team that makes CoH. There *will be* exclusive giveaways. There *will be* exclusive media content. For all venues, not just social media.

And just as soon as they get that functionality working, we'll take advantage of it.

Until then, we'll be utilizing whatever means we see fit to promote our different social media channels.

I am pleased to announce that we are planning on making an announcement about announcing the announcement of the date of the Issue 24 announcement page.

Soon™.

Thanks!

Anything that helps our Viral Reach is great!

I believe that's the Elemental Order chest piece, found under Robes if you've unlocked it.

Tonight.

For those looking at the OP: The 29th date is in reference to the fact that it's already tomorrow in the British Summer Timezone.