Report To The Stakeholders

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by robkelk

(In an effort to help, I've forwarded your questions to everyone else in my gaming group; if they reply, I'll post their answers here.)

First reply, from someone who does not regularly read forums.sjgames.com :

* How often do you visit the Steve Jackson Games front page/Daily Illuminator?

Never.

* Do you follow any of our social media channels?

No.

* What can we do to put the news in front of you regularly?

Release entertaining liveplays/podcasts of SJGames products being used via Youtube channels, think stuff like Critical Roll, Acquisitions Incorporated and so on. Every time say, Paizo, releases a new Adventure Path I can see a half dozen channels releasing play recordings of their games. The same is true of every D&D adventure book released by Wizards with even more players.

If there was some entertaining games being streamed/uploaded/podcast I would be likely to pay attention to them and thus, to SJGames products.

[Nymdok]

Originally Posted by philreed

So: A few questions.

* How often do you visit the Steve Jackson Games front page/Daily Illuminator?
* Do you follow any of our social media channels?
* What can we do to put the news in front of you regularly?

The world is a flood of information, and it is our job to make sure _our_ information reaches you. We have clearly failed in this instance, so we are left trying to figure out the best way to alert you to news about new games and expansions.

1.) Almost never. Im also a straight to the forums guy.
2.) I follow yall on twitter, but I (mostly)quit twitter so Im erratic there. That was the only 'mainstream' social media I tried to use. I also follow some of the 'SJG-GURPS' folks on twitter (TBC, RavenPenny, SJGAMES, Mook, etc etc so even though Im not active on twitter, I do go back and read thorugh those tweets.
3.) GURPS news right now reaches me mostly through either the Forums or Discord.

What might be worthwhile, is to 'sticky' the next 3 releases and the last 3 releases.

I knew about Discworld and I knew about Mars Attacks!

[Magesmiley]

Originally Posted by philreed

So: A few questions.

* How often do you visit the Steve Jackson Games front page/Daily Illuminator?
* Do you follow any of our social media channels?
* What can we do to put the news in front of you regularly?

The world is a flood of information, and it is our job to make sure _our_ information reaches you. We have clearly failed in this instance, so we are left trying to figure out the best way to alert you to news about new games and expansions.

I visit the SJG front page nearly daily. My track record is probably better on weekdays than weekends. My habit is to glance at the DI, and if it looks interesting, read the full article.
Maybe the IT guys give you some stats on how often the main page and DI are hit on various days of the week (and possibly even times of day). That could allow you to pick specific higher-traffic days for the ones you want in front of more eyes.

I follow on Facebook. I'm really not much of a Twitter person.

As far as additional ways to get eyes and spread the news:

Inserts/Ad sheets with different games inside SJG products. The Munchkin ones seem to focus entirely on Munchkin. Which makes sense to a degree, but it might be worth experimenting with putting a couple of other games on the inserts and see to what degree it affects sales numbers. Try other humorous games and some more serious ones to see what the effect the style of games has.

Some larger illustrations on the homepage for the DI. How much of an effect does a picture have on a viewer's tendency to view the full DI and maybe learn more about a game they would otherwise gloss over?

Maybe a "this week at SJG" blog and/or video series.

Better use of YouTube and video. One thing that would be very good is to make sure that there are "How To Play" videos for all of the company's games. I often visit YouTube for how to do things, games included. It also gives a chance to showcase how the games play, giving viewers an opportunity to see the game being played.

Convention presence. And by this, I don't mean just being present at conventions, but by having displays and/or events that catch the eye and make people want to stop by or find out more. It doesn't have to be everything, but having at least one significant piece of eye candy can really draw people in or get them to stop and ask questions. If people walking by aren't regularly stopping to look and talk, it suggests that the booth/event isn't standing out and might need some improvement.

[Parody]

Originally Posted by philreed

How often do you visit the Steve Jackson Games front page/Daily Illuminator?

Front page: never.

Daily Illuminator: in recent years, only when the title in the Illuminator forum looks interesting. Given that I'm mostly here for Car Wars, don't like Munchkin, and don't play Ogre it's been mostly noise I ignore.

I'm somewhat surprised that you haven't converted the DI forum posts to include the entire text of the blog post (matching the RSS feed).

Speaking of which, I used to use the RSS feed as my main way to view Illuminator posts, but nowadays I mostly use my mail program (also my RSS reader) to make backups of my email and access it initially on my phone.

Originally Posted by philreed

Do you follow any of our social media channels?

Not really; I find social media in general has such a low signal-to-noise ratio that most of my gaming-related use of social media is via people linking to specific interesting posts. Notably:

Facebook: I do use this, but only because some of my family members post all of their pictures and news there and nowhere else. Other than those family posts my news feed is filled with Facebook's ads and people reposting garbage clickbait. Due to this I've never bothered following SJG's official Facebook page or becoming a member of any SJG product related groups there, and similarly I don't follow any other publisher's page or fan groups either. (I think I'm a member of one fan group for one product, but it's not SJG-related and it doesn't show up in the feed very often.)

Twitter: I have an account but stopped using it years ago as the folks I see in real life don't use it.

Instagram: Never bothered with an account there and only found out SJG has one there due to recent posts in this thread. I'm a little surprised that it hasn't been completely absorbed into Facebook already.

Google+: Apparently I joined a Car Wars group here at some point. I only found this out by launching the phone app to check to see, since I haven't been on G+ for months.

YouTube: While I do have a Google account (like most folks with an Android phone) I've never bothered following people on YouTube and on my desktop machine I'm almost never logged in to Google services. (It's easy enough to either bookmark a channel or remember the channel name.)

Medium: Never really thought about them as a social media site (it's just one of many blogging platforms, much like LiveJournal) but someone brought it up in that context. Another site where I've never had any desire to have an account or follow anyone. Also (FWIW), almost all of the posts I've read on there are from software developers so I wouldn't have expected a tabletop game company using it. Their layout bugs me in much the same way as the adaptive sites that decide that, because my web browser window is narrower than it is tall*, I must be on a phone or tablet so they remove all of the UI and resize the text to only fit a few lines per screen "page". :P

* Yeah, it's more involved than that, but it happens surprisingly often nowadays if you use what used to be called Aero Snap in Windows to make half-monitor-width browser windows.

Originally Posted by philreed

What can we do to put the news in front of you regularly?

Everything should be readily visible from the Illuminator, the individual product line pages/sites, and these forums. It really bugs me when SJG posts only appear on one site that isn't on sjgames.com and I don't find out until someone here posts a link. I don't want to have to follow you in so many different places, seemingly only determined by whichever one a particular staff member happens to like.

For example, over the time CW6 has had more active playtesting, reports and pictures of different playtests have been posted on Facebook, Twitter, and BoardGameGeek by SJG-related folks. Each of them were later referenced here, typically by the person who posted them but not in an announcement of them doing said playtest, and that's how I found out. Since these were public posts on those other sites, it would have been good (IMO) for each of those to have had a "We did (x), check it out here!" post in the main forum. Ideally (again, IMO) it'd be the other way around: you'd put posts on the forum or the main site with the story and pictures about said playtest and link to that post from the various social media outlets.

I don't see how driving traffic away from your main site is helpful to you. The site you can control should be the main one you use for informing folks about things, and the others should be places you can let people know about what you're doing so they can come to you for more information. But that's just me, and obviously I don't have numbers for how well posts in various places turn into sales for SJG.


Hopefully some of this rambling helps. :)

[PK]

Originally Posted by Anders

Phil, does SJG post their releases in the forum for promoting new releases on RPG Net?

We have not been, but that's hardly a winning marketing strategy! So starting now, I'm going to be crossposting all of my new-release announcement threads over to the RPGnet Hype Machine forum.

I don't plan on including a link between the two posts (since they'll be identical), but I will have a link to these forums in my RPGnet sig.

[GM Joe]

Originally Posted by PK

We have not been, but that's hardly a winning marketing strategy! So starting now, I'm going to be crossposting all of my new-release announcement threads over to the RPGnet Hype Machine forum.

I don't plan on including a link between the two posts (since they'll be identical), but I will have a link to these forums in my RPGnet sig.

That's wonderful! Hopefully it will help with the GURPS is Dying meme.

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by Parody

I don't see how driving traffic away from your main site is helpful to you.

Just posting links to other sites doesn't drive traffic here unless those links are REALLY enticing, and "More playtest feedback" isn't, especially. The point of inbound marketing is to put enough content out in the world that people become intrigued and then direct them back to your home site for the full story. But it only works when there's plenty of "hooks" out there to bring people in - and you can never count on your home site being sticky enough to hold people there outside of the most dedicated fans. Even in this thread, we're seeing people I would classify as serious SJ Games fans saying they only check our daily news blog once a week or less.

[Steve Jackson]

Thanks, all, for the useful comments. As a direct result of this thread, we had a work session today that will lead to at least a dozen changes on the website. None of them are showy or spectacular, but all together they will help some of the problems pointed out here. And yes, you will be able to subscribe to GURPS-only and Munchkin-only lists (there's already an Ogre list). Car Wars deserves a list too, but perhaps not yet.

[Buzzardo]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

Thanks, all, for the useful comments. As a direct result of this thread, we had a work session today that will lead to at least a dozen changes on the website. None of them are showy or spectacular, but all together they will help some of the problems pointed out here. And yes, you will be able to subscribe to GURPS-only and Munchkin-only lists (there's already an Ogre list). Car Wars deserves a list too, but perhaps not yet.

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

Great, thanks for listening!

What Owen said, with the addition that I'm especially pleased to hear more mailing lists are coming. I like mailing lists.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

Thanks, all, for the useful comments. As a direct result of this thread, we had a work session today that will lead to at least a dozen changes on the website. None of them are showy or spectacular, but all together they will help some of the problems pointed out here. And yes, you will be able to subscribe to GURPS-only and Munchkin-only lists (there's already an Ogre list). Car Wars deserves a list too, but perhaps not yet.

That's great. Will the GURPS list (and the others) be pushed out through an RSS link? If so, I can scrape that feed weekly and it'll get top billing on the GURPSDay list, which gets reasonable traction. I can even start reposting the GURPSDay blog list at RPG.net, ENWorld, and The RPG Site, which I've not really done much of.