This weekend, along with gorging myself on thanksgiving leftovers, I participated in the open beta for Star Wars: the Old Republic (it’s a new MMORPG from Bioware set in the world of their acclaimed Knights of the Old Republic ‘verse).  The weekend beta was open to anyone who wanted to sign up. It allowed bioware to stress test their systems and try and find any last minute bugs in time for the game to ship the week before Christmas. So from a tech perspective, these guys got a WHOLE bunch of really great data, and feedback for free. This feedback ranged from how good was the voice acting, were the missions engaging, to bug reports (some of the best from the chats were characters’ pants not rendering). This type of data is invaluable to companies that are all competing to dethrone WoW from the top of the MMO heap, especially when they are trying to follow up two HUGE successes (KOTOR 1 & 2), and when they are playing with a much beloved series (Star Wars, although it’s debatable how much love will be left after Lucas is finished… but I digress).

But the biggest thing they did was expose the game to a HUGE number of people that hopefully are now totally sold on the game, and will now go run and tell everyone else, and who are HUNGERING to get the game fired back up so they can keep playing. I am definitely one of these people. I have the game on my christmas list, it looks fun, and I wanted to give it a shot. THEN I actually got to play the game and I am completely changed on it. I have become what marketers like to call an evangelist for the game. I now want it BAD. And what’s more I want it now. If I had done this a month after release as a “free to play for the weekend” type deal I would have enjoyed it very much but I’m not sure if I would have been raving about it. But now I want it TODAY. It could be a factor of the ‘scarcity’ principle of sales, not entirely sure, but the fact that I can’t get it makes me want it more.

And I heard the same thing from everyone else one the chat. Granted you have to be VERY confident in your product (but to be honest if you’re not then you shouldn’t be launching it), but this tactic of having a wide range free test drive before release is great. It exposes a lot of people to the game PRIOR to launch and ideally will create a legion of evangelists, most likely people who did not ALREADY purchase the game who are now going to do so, AND encourage their friends/family to do the same thing, which will significantly boost first day sales.  Also it create a LOT of great buzz on the interwebs. Look at me, I’m writing about it right now, and so are a large number of other bloggers/web zines/et cetera.

So.. in closing on this love letter to SWTOR, I have to say, well played, Bioware, well played.

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I’m probably not going to add anything new to this discussion, but I wanted to point out this issue that I think anyone who spends more than 5 minutes online needs to be aware of.  I first saw this over at Dvice.  I’ve done some research online and didn’t come up with anything new to this story as the deal appears to be both fairly new and being kept fairly hush hush.

image detailing the deal between google and verizon that could end net neutrality

Essentially it boils down to Google and Verizon working out a deal where some websites (google) can pay the ISP a small fee to make it possible to have their pages load quicker than another webpage. Another option on the table is that ISPs will become like cable providers where they only carry a set number of pages (abc, cbs, nbc, usa, syfy, etc) and for a small fee can get access to others (hbo, showtime, etc).  Either way this spells really bad news for small businesses, internet marketers, and everyone who accesses the internet.  Right now you can use PPC and a bank account to help rank a page somewhat in Google, but the biggest pull for Google is relevant interesting content.  Content that is getting reposted, pingbacks, and dumped on slashdot/digg.  Having this great content can allow a small business or a basic blog to beat out larger companies, this is fantastic! This means that you have a much better chance of finding what you are wanting, and it gives a certain amount of survival of the creative (ie- successful internet marketers are the ones who are creative NOT necessarily the ones with the largest checkbook). Another implication is the paying by companies to have bad comments/reviews about them load slower than their websites which would in turn decrease visits, and then not rank lower in google.  This takes away a significant amount of the power from the internet. It frankly puts us in the same ballpark of China censoring the internet, except instead of a unified government we’re going to have whomever can pay the most money.  I’ve tried to make this a reasoned argument, putting up a few thoughts based on the limited information coming out about this deal.  I strongly urge anyone reading this to get themselves up to date on this deal and take action. Visit this site for some more.  I found this quote over at alternet.org.  As they pointed out is amazing how fast a company with the motto: “don’t be evil” can slide down the slippery slope of profit:  ”Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can’t pay.”

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A few weeks back I was invited to talk to an upper division marketing class at the University of Montana on how they could incorporate new media and social media marketing into their final projects.  One of the groups had a VERY commodity product, and one that at first glance was/is pretty boring. The group was disparaging of trying to find a way to use the “cool” technologies that I had just spent an hour talking about (twitter, facebook, blogs, foursquare, yelp, etc).  I gave them a pretty simple answer that they loved and I thought I would talk about it here b/c it has recently come up again for a current client.  That answer is Mascot.

The student group had beef jerky.  Now except for the “SNAP INTO A SLIM JIM!” commercials of the 90′s beef jerky while admittedly delicious has never really been what one would consider Hight Tech, or a candidate for social media marketing.  But a beef jerky mascot on the other hand could be.  I told the group to create a rancher or possibly even a chicken (a la Chick Fil A with their cows) but don’t just create a little image of this mascot, but go full out. Make a backstory for this mascot, mascots are a chance to go completely creative.  Maybe Hotrod the Chicken (maybe it’s spicy jerky) grew up with Monty (the U of MT mascot) and they picked on the younger Slash (the Missoula Mauler’s mascot),and back then he was just called Rod. but one day Monty stole Rod’s girlfriend b/c Rod was just kinda boring. And on that day Rod changed his name to Hotrod and vowed to NEVER be boring again! (ok, yeah, a little simplistic, but you get the point). So now we have this cool backstory and graphics for Hotrod, this is where the new media comes in.  At no point has there existed a technology to immediately connect with people and actually interact with them on the scale that we now have with social media. So use it! Create a twitter feed for Hotrod showing him doing all kinds completely outrageous things (like surfing ON a shark off the Great Barrier Reef). Create a #hashtag for Hotrod’s out there to post about their adrenaline fueled activities. Create a facebook account and fan page. Treat Hotrod like he was a real person, responding to emails, joining adventure clubs and talking with people.  The biggest thing is to treat him as a larger than life celebrity and people will know him, and then by extension your product that Hotrod supports in the same way that sports stars endorse wheaties, or Ashton Kutcher those cameras that he’s got. The great part is that except for some app devo, and some graphics Hotrod could exist completely on free social media sites.  Give him a twitter feed showing pics he took while jumping out a plane, or scuba diving. You could prbly go several months before you would even (if you really want to) need to create a costume for you mascot.

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