I was recently given an assignment via Twitter to collaborate with a group of students from another university, in order to come together on a social media assignment. The assignment was to create a definition for a social media-related term, as well as a listing of best practices associated with that term.

This post is not a detailing of those conclusions.

Recently, it has come to my attention differing thoughts on the whole concept of virtual identity and how it can be used to market a product. In this context, virtual identity is the person, or (perhaps more correctly) persona you present yourself as when you have an otherwise anonymous face on the internet. This definition alone doesn’t cover all of the application, of course; some people with a virtual identity are up front about their presence being a fabrication. And when it comes to marketing, people quickly raise arms against the practice, most familiar with its usage in “sock puppeting”.

A sock puppet is exactly what the name implies; it’s a virtual identity that is standing in for a real person, but in this case it is used to present a product in a positive light while masquerading as an objective consumer. I’m not going to try to condemn or defend this practice as ethical or not, at least not here, though I will refer you to an article on European legislation that forbids it amongst other potentially deceptive advertising practices as illegal. As a personal aside, if you do decide to pursue this route, learn how to speak online as a person first and advertiser second; ironically enough, a strong professional vocabulary can be a weakness in these attempts, as the impacts of professional indoctrination are generally what make sock puppets stand out as unnaturally polished and leads them to being outed. For further reading on using virtual identity as a deceptive marketing practice, I’d recommend this Wired article on the matter, from May 2007. It’s dated, but the contents are still relevant.

There is plenty of study on why deceptive marketing practices are bad out there on the internet, so I don’t want to draw this topic out too much; instead, I want to look at positive application of otherwise “false” identity, and some examples of how it can be used to success, and perhaps promote thoughts or even discussion on how someone could even successfully position a product using social media with this in mind. Check back for the next installment where I present some such examples of virtual identity in usage with social media to promote their associated products, and some analysis on how similar methods can poetentially be utilized.

We were last tasked with writing an entry concerning the history of our chosen product; however, as I essentially summarized it with my introduction of Magic: The Gathering, I decided to use this opportunity to track down and present some of the first advertisements for the fledgling Pro Tour. I will try to update later with more information about the context or the players presented in each spot, or just overall commentary on the campaign… Though I think much of it speaks for itself.

Some of my fellow classmates have expressed concerns on how to better receive traffic for their posts, as encouraging outside interaction is an integral part of this entire assignment project. Therefore, I’ve decided to use my “personal” post for this week to give some advice on making this happen.

Click here for an AP article by Christopher Toothaker about Venezuela’s recent ban on violent video games in order to decrease the crime rate.

According to the report, some parents are just ecstatic over the new law. Why wouldn’t they be, as they’re getting official byes for their potential failures in properly educating themselves and controlling access to the media their children access?

Okay, it’s Venezuela… not getting to play Halo probably isn’t high on the governmental grievance list. Still, it’s always chilling to see these bans and censorship of media push through (pun intended). I could proselytize over the reasons why, but it’s a nontroversy that some irrationally still consider a debate, that being that violent video games instill these negative values in children. Personally, my adolescent development was filled with games of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, but my urge to brutalize my fellow man is less about Ken spin-kicking Ryu in the face repeatedly and more about the persistence of indefensibly stupid ideas as grounded, proveable reason. However, this constant desire is easily supplanted by the fact that I am not psychologically malformed by my media, even though video games were a constant fixture in my life when it supposedly counted most. But don’t just take my word for it; studies that have been cited as so-called evidence have, been repeatedly proven to be non-contextual instances of intellectual dishonesty, or even outright fabrications.

But as Carl Sagan once said (and Donald Rumsfeld more recently made common vernacular), the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. To add a little balance to my spin, we should pause to consider that successfully crossing the uncanny valley just might push us into territory where these fears are credible.  The problem I see there is that this adeptly-named “valley” is less like the distance between two locations on earth and more like the distance between two galaxies; it’s theoretically possible, but the visual detail along with the behavioral and intellectual dynamics are so far and away from modern technology that it’s not too practical a contingency to plan for just yet. However, I could very much be mistaken; games like Lionhead Studios’ Project Natal presentation Milo may just be the first of many waystations on the journey across.

Ultimately, regardless of how peaceful or violence-torn your country is, media censorship is not the answer; instead, it’s a scapegoat to distract the masses from an incompetent government that approves unreasonable legislation. It’s a sign of a failure of the people to assert their rights whenever their government intervenes to protect the citizenry from itself; it’s pretty terrifying to imagine living amongst those who actually look to and encouraging their government to behave this way.

When last I discussed Wizards of the Coast’s recent Magic: The Gathering marketing push called “Here I Rule”, I mentioned that it is primarily the “casual” play demographic that keeps the game’s professional, competitive play funded. It’s not as simple as this two-party summary implies; the company itself has publicly defined and discussed its psychographic profiles, even assigning playful nicknames such as “Timmy” and “Spike” to them; public reception to this transparency has been so positive that players willingly accept and even proudly acknowledge their psychographic labels as summaries of who they are as a player. For example, I am actually a psychographic hybrid, Johnny/Spike; this means that I play with a little bit of personal style and flair as Johnny, but my primary concern is to play competitively as Spike, and so when Wizards designs a quirky, unique product that has competitive viability, I’d theoretically be part of the target base.

Here’s a link to an article that I’m (thankfully?) not going to comment on, as I think the reporter does a proper job in the story itself. Many of the links to the right are listed as ‘Webcomics’; if you’re not sure what that means, and its relevance to social media, then click the link below to find out.

Penny Arcade moves beyond online comics by Ben Fritz reporting in the L.A. Times

Questions and commentary welcome in the comments section.

That’s the latest marketing push from the product I have chosen to be my campaign focus for this semester. The product in question is a collectible card game called Magic: The Gathering, produced by a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. called Wizards of the Coast.

To borrow Kotaku‘s comment on the matter, PC developer Valve tapped into a veritable public relations gold mine earlier this week. Valve, noted for the creation of the Half-Life series of first-person shooters as well as the innovative Steam content delivery system, earlier this year announced the release of a sequel to their successful survival horror shooter Left4Dead. This was a surprise to many players, because if there is one thing that most Valve fans have always found wanting, it’s the speed and frequency of their new releases for existing game franchises, something that the company has faced a lot of criticism over due to the slow drip of episodic content for its Half-Life series of games. Ironically, with the case of Left4Dead, a new title had barely taken a year to reach development, which prompted an inverse of the standard complaints; Valve had promised its users downloadable content extensions for the multiplayer shooter, and many players loyal to the original game feared that Valve would abandon those projects to instead create content for their most recent title in the series.