Priority of Social Media over official forums

Your kids are getting older? LOL, well my kids also got me on to Facebook to share timelines and photos and stuff. They both got off it due to a combination of boredom, too many other things to do and my ex-wife's mother who started 'stalking' (their word not mine) them and their friends on Facebook. Still occasionally use it but its time seems to be passing.

They do realize there is a block function right?

Once I found out my Dad was stalking the crap out of my facebook profile, I blocked him and made my profile private. Simple.

My guess would be that perhaps more people are connected to their social networking than are active on their forums.

I would not even be surprised if there are ten people on social media to every one person on these boards, heck, it might be a thousand to one for all I know. But the real root of the thing is the breakdown in information output. Each official voice of soe ( be it twitter, here, Facebook, etc) ought to release the same information at the same time. I'm happy soe uses all means it can to bring in new folks and inform members, but having to check several places to be in the know is not ideal.

I will say that this has been less of a problem under Luperza's watch.

Things tend to be reposted here more briskly and with greater consistency. I also do not expect her to be able to control what her boss posts. I am married to someone that is high up in a tech firm, I have heard my beloved's none to happy responses to the dictates of those many levels below him. That's just real world business. The team manager doesn't dictate to the chief of operations.

So I do understand Luperza is absolutely doing her best- hats off to her for taking on the task that is massive in breadth and depth, and I think we will all agree that she is professional and never petty or snide, even when dealing with some of the more "colorful" board members.

Having said that, I do hope soe can adopt a more consistent series of steps in the way they inform new and current members, with the boards not being forgotten in the social media shuffle.

I have no issue with social media and use it as I see fit when I want to see it. That being said, the "official" forums are official for a reason. How can it possibly be a big deal for this to be a consistent place to post what is important. If it's that big of a deal for the team to have it in other places then use them all but maintain this forum as the main location. It is much easier to see a subject line here and to look for what is the news of the day or needed updates in a forum set up then to scroll through random items in a FB, Twitter, etc....

Thanks for your timely input.

First: Facebook has a recommendation part to it, where it will recommend posts to you based on what you post and such. For example, if your really into MMOs, it might suggest a post by EQ2 to try and get you to check em out.

Second: I am highly surprised no one but me knows how to order the Facebook posts to not be random. On the left you will see "News Feed" up top near your pic, click the down arrow, select Most Recent. That will show you EVERY post in the order it was posted.

Third: I agree Twitter can get overwhelming sometimes if you follow a lot of people.

Fourth: Them putting news on social media shows that they want to grow. Posting everything on the forums will only get EQ2 fans to see it, and no one new. As been stated before, social media has 10 times the amount of people on it than these forums do so I can see why they use it.

Just my 2cp.

*edit*
Just noticed it was an old post I replied to, I swear I clicked the last page! Oh well My comments stand.

Haha! My boss let his 3 daughters on Facebook with the condition that he be on the friends list. If they had tried to block him they would have lost their electronic devices.

I agree with those who choose forums. I hate Facebook and try not to use it at all. I don't use any others at all with the exception of AOL, which is my primary "social media" site and it's mostly not even that anymore since they took away all the real time communication years ago. I personally think as social media becomes more of a problem, people will finally buy a clue and start backing away, perhaps to more specialized sites like AOL again.

I actually had no idea AOL was still in business...... learn something new everyday! Shows just how much I spend surfing the web though.

I never understood the hate for social media sites like Facebook. I mean ya, they can get info from ya (very limited), but is that info gonna make them come to your house and rob you? That's what it seems like you think sometimes. My friend said he never joins because he wants to stay private, he don't want just anyone to view his profile.... then make the profile private dingus! lol. That's what I do, no one can search me (unless you know my full real name and are able to type it in, to hopefully find old classmates (found 1 so far!)), no one can message me, no one can do anything unless I approve of their "friendship".

*edit*
You have every right to hate social media, I am just throwing out my opinion on the matter I am not really trying to change anyones mind.

this issue has reared it's ugly head once again in SOE with the past Steam sale on Landmark Founder's Packages and Upgrades.

Omeed posted a half truth on twitter that anyone who had attempted to purchase an Upgrade through Steam would have known was not true.

it started getting passed around as the truth because a marketing official of SOE had said it could be done.

the tweet was later pulled with no explanation or warning or apology.

will you please hire an official Communications Director that can put together a program for your official and nonofficial lines of external communication as well as someone who will guide your social media usage.

it's frustrating to watch this company treat social media as the next big thing and the preferred method of communication in many ways. yet then refuse to hire a professional with corporate experience on how to run such a program. you can't have it both ways, ie., social media is super important, but really not so important as to have a professional strategize and implent a program.

They have stated a few times that SOE employees twitters in no way reflects the company. Many of the employees have been misinformed on many things and posted wrong information. Another example is Dave Georgeson (the Director of Development for the entire EQ franchise) had posted wrong info about when Tinkerfest was going to happen. Made people excited and people started doubting OFFICIAL sources that said otherwise. You shouldn't do that. Always go with the official sources, don't believe everything you read on employees twitters.

Yes it sucks that miscommunication happens but it does happen unfortunately. I do agree they should have apologized and given the correct information though, that was wrong of them not to. If you don't want to be misinformed, don't follow employees. That's the only tip I can give you. Don't even direct questions to them, direct them to the official EQ2 social sites. And yes, the people responding on the official ones are also employees, but the chances of them being well informed is MUCH higher, they usually look up information to be sure and be right.

I am not defending them. What they did is pretty lame. But they are human so we can't ask for a whole lot.

I always thought the welcome screen should highlight the top 5 active forum threads of the day. Seems to me forums have rss feeds that have this information and the game could easily consume and provide that elevation.

2cp

The problem with that is that it still links back to the forums, which is still trying to push the forums as the primary outlet of information. It isn't clear (because we don't have the information available to us as players) whether the forums has a greater active percentage of the game population than the other routes of information dissemination. Having the information within the game itself (especially announcements) via the in-game mail, or perhaps through another route that does not just redirect back to any one of the external sites (including this one, as it is external to the game), makes the discussion about which external site should get first dibs the information superfluous, since none of them would be first and the people that are actually playing the game regularly will be the ones getting the initial information, via an in-game medium.

This doesn't mean that the information would never appear on the forums, social media sites, twitch, etc. - that would be silly, and it wouldn't fit what they've expressed as their intent (which is to make sure that information is widely disseminated to all of their information channels). Those sites just wouldn't have the initial push of information. Someone that only logs on every few days would have their choice about where to get info, since it shouldn't take more than a couple of days to get the information out to the external sites.

A move like that would send a message to the playerbase. That message would essentially be this:

"If you want the very latest information, and you don't want to wait until it propagates to the out-of-game sites, then log in. SOE wants you in its game, and they want you to want to be in their game, so SOE is going to give players that log in the ability to get the information first. The information will eventually make it to the out-of-game sites, so those that either don't want to log in every day or can't log in every day will still get the information through other channels of communication - SOE isn't forgetting about those fans of the game that log in with less frequency, nor about those future fans that don't yet know that they love the game."

I don't see how a move that encourages players to log in to get up-to-date information could be construed as a bad thing - especially if they figured out a way to make the mails from SOE not count toward your mail limit.

I really like the in game mail idea, but barring that in case folks had overflowing mailboxes, perhaps a few info boards or an npc in each major town or near the broker that when clicked, gave an in game pop up of the latest news from soe. Sort of like an in game extra extra, read all about it thing.

A copy of in game mail should go to my regular email as well, but that has been asked for and not implemented since about day one. Which I don't understand because it should take a coder less than 30 minutes to implement/test/et al.

Ironic though. If you want official information, head to the forums, where you can follow the link to the social media page, to read the latest news, and then return to the forums to research to see if that information is accurate.

I think there may be others looking at it in the way that I perceive it. SoE, you know where to find my wallet, we established that years ago with EQ-1 and kept that relationship going. We meet at the official site when I need to purchase services, upgrades, subscriptions, it's well established.

Then, you conduct some of the promotions and give out some special news, I find you off in the street, working some corner with the social crowd. You come home though every month to visit the bank and remind me about our special relationship.

Now I understand that our financial arrangement needs to be kept private on the up and up, but I don't feel so special when others tell me about something I missed when you were out with your friends in the social media crowd.

Hmm... When I go to Facebook I never get recommendations. Seems like a hit or miss thing. I have glanced at my wife's page when she is looking at it. She doesn't get them either. Is it an opt in feature or something? Does Ad-Blocker also block those? I don't know but I can tell you it seems to be hit or miss if you ever get it.

Reordering by "Most Recent" still doesn't give me everything. I use that button everyday. If you think it gives you everything you just don't know that you are missing a lot of stuff. Nice try but I still don't get the posts I want from the restaurant across the street EQ2. Just baby pictures and political rants that I never respond to. Telling me how it is supposed to work vs. how it really works doesn't matter. (And the guy with the restaurant posts three or four times daily - I have to purposefully search him out and comment - still never shows up. It is a known issue with Facebook.)

Just because social media has millions of people registered doesn't mean you are every going to reach anybody besides your own fan base. As I already pointed out, at least in my household we never see "Recommendations". Of the people that get them how many ever look at them and how many are relevant? Nice little fact for you folks as well - the number of actual users for a social media site vs. those who use it are small. Check out the numbers for Twitter. Only about 1/5 of the people who sign up for an account ever use it and an even smaller number use it regularly. It is a nice fantasy that somehow you will reach a lot of people with social media, but unlikely.