St. Mary's crab festival, 6.9.02
So here is a living lesson in Internet Marketing Strategy. I work for a company that subcontracts from another company to produce a product which is eagerly awaited by a demographic which spends a lot of time online. This particular demographic spends time scouring the message boards and fan sites attempting to collect information about the product. We now run and maintain the ‘central’ site for the product, containing information about the design, pictures of the product, rules, changes, and explanations for how and why the product works.
The site went up in early May; it has not been updated since then.
The top-level company decided, months ago, that we were releasing too much information too quickly, and so they asked for a detailed list of what we would be publishing, when, and how much. This list was delayed for several weeks while E3 was happening, and then forwarded on to the company for review, comment, and approval. There has been no word since that time.
I am amazed that a modern marketing department, based in a company with such a strong online demographic, would choose to overlook/discredit/ignore such a powerful and focused medium. Especially considering that there is little or no overhead involved with online marketing. A focused, interactive article/talkback magazine format would be tailor-made for this project; somewhere that fans can go to read about different aspects of the product, then be allowed to comment in a moderated format directly following the article. Thus, potential buyers of the product would feel included in the release and be able to interact with the developers.
On other fronts, here are some pictures of the backyard, from 6.7.
Thinking more about the VPN research from last week, and I read now that A. I can get a 60GB FireWire external drive for somewhere around $300 these days, or if I choose, a FireWire CD burner for the same amount. So I think the idea of doing the VPN to the home machine is out; I’m just going to buy some kind of CD-burner for Scout here and possibly a copy of Retrospect Express or another catalog program, and just catalog the hell out of the entire collection via the Mac. One thing is sure, I need something to boot Scout off of so I can clean her up and get her running well again.