Ian M Rountree

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Marketing Strategy

Building a website is no longer the end of your work as a web-enabled business. In order to really shine, you need a complete marketing strategy and platform to raise your business above the crowd.

The Meta Game

June 13, 2015 by Ian Leave a Comment

There’s a lot marketing professionals can learn from gaming as it is right now. Gamification, as an ideal, seems to apply to business planning the most – and I’ve heard it discussed around the longer, broader process of enterprise growth… But a few of the less-obvious ideals, especially from fast-paced games, apply to marketing strategy as if tailor made for it. In particular, the idea of a “meta game” surrounding an existing game’s play and development strategy.

What is “The Meta Game?”

In gaming, particularly in eSports, “the meta game” describes prevalent strategies, expectations, and often becomes the minimum viable method of play for a given game. In most modern online games – and even in a number of offline or solo play titles – these strategies grow and change effectively on the pace of the publisher’s content release cycle. As game development and play go on, the understanding of what each tool within the game can be used for, what’s most efficient, and what works under what circumstances. Changes are made, in response to this understanding, as well as to accommodate for new content such as additional features, characters, items, encounters, and so on.

In some cases, “the state of the game” is much more volatile than others.

It’s easy to pick out a few central genres that benefit from growing metas; MMOs like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV (which I play regularly) release content at scheduled intervals, which increase the potential of the player character, add new instances or raids to complete, and provide new tools either in the form of items or new abilities. However, MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) games, such as DOTA 2, League of Legends, Smite and – recently – Heroes of the Storm, tend to have a much more visible meta game surrounding their play due to a number of factors.

  • Games involved in eSports circuits tend to have much more visibility on them, and benefit from being less static,
  • This visibility promotes faster development cycles from the publisher,
  • Faster dev cycles mean even high end players must regularly relearn the game – either in part or in whole – because of tiny or sweeping changes,
  • Huge game populations outside the professional circles also provide an enormous amount of data from which to draw balancing information.

Basically, the meta moves faster where there’s more visibility, in part because broadcasting benefits from never showing the same game happen twice. Constant balance-and-rebalance efforts from the publisher ensure no one plays the same game in a tournament twice.

To understand the meta game, understand “balance” as applies to games.

“Balance” is an ideal that developers strive for in any situation where multiple options exist for play. Whether that’s a broad range of characters a player can choose to use, larger libraries of items they can acquire to make those characters stronger as games go on, different abilities and other meta data that can be applied to a character before the game begins – or during… There’s a lot of flux possible, and even when players understand what works “best” for their purposes, the ability of the best participants to react to their opponents’ virtual curve balls is still an issue.

The meta itself must change, that’s the nature of it. As understanding is created about what’s strong, what’s weak, and what works in general – at every angle – the developers make changes to adjust for those strengths and weaknesses. Portions of the game seen as weak are often augmented, or buffed, to make them viable. Others – seen as over-powered – are nerfed, or reduced in value such that they’re in line with the remaining content as much as possible.

Because of this, “balance” is not in any way a destination; it’s absolutely a path. The steps along this path are the individual content releases for the game itself.

The meta game is a three-way tug of war.

Many gamers hate this “buff-and-nerf” cycle particularly because it creates gaps in their knowledge. There’s a need to constantly iterate through the available data and get to the content on the end of the rope. At some point when a new change happens, someone gets to be the first to try it out, to either do the metrics and statistics against other options to see if those are important, or to actually play test it and come up with inventive ways to react to the changed state of play. These pioneers are important, because they find novel uses for mundane things, and further the understanding of their use for the public.

The public – the second group in our tripod – by and large are not innovators, but they do create value for the gaming community. Their involvement – either by way of providing revenue, or promotion of the game itself – is integral to the game publishers’ overall strategy. It’s this larger group who spend the lion’s share of time just acting in the game, either conscious of the meta or unconscious of it. Publishers can collect huge volumes of aggregate data from these behaviours, codify that data, and understand what their work’s been affecting within the broader game.

Very often, though, this later creates problems for the developers – who made adjustments aimed at balancing the game. If something unexpected happens, either in a major tournament or off in the far reaches of casual gaming, they need to account for it somehow in a future update. And so the cycle continues.

In short, the public pulls from the pros, who pull from developers, who pull from both the pros and the public. With all three legs of the tripod generating and sharing data in one form or another, growth happens fast and effectively.

Your industry is in one of these three positions. Period.

No matter what your position is. it’s worth trying to understand who’s pulling from you – and who you’re pulling from. Whether it’s tools you use, build, or pioneer the use of – or inspiration and information that you, as a knowledge worker, add value to in order to generate revenue.

Understanding where your position is within this tripod is intensely valuable. Should you be the one creating tools? Should you be leading the way – gaining visibility for your industry and your work? Should you be following the lead of industry giants and providing a different value to your clients than they’re capable of? All three of those positions are important for keeping the array propped up.

Understanding the meta game isn’t just useful for you, it’s useful for everyone in your organization.

I highly suggest you read ESPN’s profile on Faker, a prominent League of Legends player from Korea’s SKT team. The pull-out, right in the middle of the profile, features an insanely insightful comment from Faker – one that’s easy to lose in the hype, biographical text, and imagery surrounding it.

“My strength is in understanding the flow of the game, when to fight and when not to fight.” – Faker

And further down, another from a teammate;

When I mention Faker, kkOma furrows his brow. “It’s a team game,” he says. “When the team doesn’t do well, Faker doesn’t do well. He looks as good as he does because there’s a baseline set by the rest of the team.”

Bingo. That’s the other side. The onus is on every player – in LoL, that means five players usually – to understand the metagame, how it applies under the current conditions of play, and act accordingly. Their understanding must be such that they – individually and as a unit can operate as needed to ensure success.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: gamification, gaming, meta game, sociology

Grudge Purchases

October 10, 2014 by Ian Leave a Comment

Grudge Purchases
Not trendy, but probably effective.

I often wonder, riding the bus home, whether its intentional that all the advertisements I see on the bus are for “grudge purchases” or services.

Debt relief. Chewing gum. Public service messages about abuse. Last choice jobs.

I’m certain the collection of sentiments isn’t intentional at all, but it is curious. After all, with all the sexy businesses like web services, marketing agencies, and real estate moving into the social web – there’s a gap that has to be filled, and these businesses are taking the opportunity where it exists.

Wait… Why aren’t these businesses doing social media again?

It’s an opportunity thing. Where’s the space to talk about insurance – a grudge purchase if there ever was one – in the midst of all the Occupy Wall Street furor? How could a debt relief agency find the air time to make a dent in people’s awareness as anything other than yet another tag-along subject?

So, if you can’t do social or inbound marketing, what do you do?

You find captive audiences. On the bus – or any other public transit – you’re a certain kind of captive audience. There isn’t much to look at if you’re used to your city. The road might be too bumpy to reliably read a book. Your eyes end up wandering – you people watch, you try to look out the window, but eventually you’ll probably catch sight of the ad banners just overhead.

Their job isn’t to make insurance look sexy – grudge purchases never are. Their job is the same as the simple (and occasionally described as insipid) app Yo – a weak smile and wave from across the street, just to remind you these services exist.

It can’t be tracked. ROI’s hard to calculate. So why do they still exist?

Stab in the dark? Even when your business is based on reliability and pacing – and not explosive profit and innovation – remaining in motion and maintaining that pace is important.

Because “what else would we do?” is still a valid argument, and similarly, doing nothing is not an option.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy, Social Media Tagged With: debt, grudge purchases, insurance, preparedness, relief, sexy business, social media

The Mechanics of Ambition

August 4, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

.Time Machine. - .sandhu | FlickrSome time during the mid-nineties, we decided culturally that ambition was a bad sign in a person. That the seeking of wealth or achievement for its own sake was an indicator of selfishness, or greed, or a lack of awareness of one’s fellow humans. While one hundred per cent of these statements may be true, I think more broadly that we’ve lost sight of something very specific related to the idea of personal achievement.

Ambition isn’t just a feeling of need to achieve or acquire on its own.

It’s a process. Knowing your limits, setting the boundaries – and then trying to expand them. Ambition isn’t achieving a goal; it’s consistently setting newer, higher goals, every time you strike a milestone in your life or work.

  • Get a promotion? Start working toward the next one.
  • Trade up on homes? Look for things that make the new home better than it was when you got it.
  • Finish writing a book? Pick your adventure – write a second one, or make the first one a real killer for sales.

There are all kinds of choice to be had for personal development, but it all comes down to a simple process:

  1. Deliberate over a goal.
  2. Decide on achieving the goal.
  3. Make a plan of action
  4. Enact your plan until your goal is achieved.
  5. Deliberate over an advanced goal.

Now, I know this is fairly reductive, but it’s the very motor of personal success. We work hard, we achieve (on our own behalf or on behalf of others), and we move on.

When did this become a bad ideal? Sounds like kaizen to me.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy

Kaizen and Application Level Lifestyle Design

August 1, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

One of the intensely appealing things about the current app economy is the sense we get of kaizen from the aps we’re downloading – constant, consistent improvement in their features and value propositions.

If we opt in early, we get to see the growth, the longer we use an application. If we opt in late, we get to see a mature version of the thing we’ve heard so much about – often at the same price, as the early adopters finance the enjoyment of the majority.

Strong revisioning practice powers this in software; the idea of taking a feature set basic enough to get a job done, calling that 1.0, and working up toward your dream. Every process in between initial betas and 2.0, or even 3.0 and 10.0 is powered by a simple, 3-4 step iteration process:

  • Describe the function
  • Apply it to the existing features
  • Gather response from users
  • Describe new functions

In this way, application developers can call every choice they make the right choice. Even if a feature fails, or is unpopular, under this model, it counts as an experiment rather than an accomplishment; and experiments only fail if you learn nothing from the doing of them.

What I always wonder is why we haven’t applied this theorem to our lives yet in a conscious way?

I’ve spent the past month working toward getting back in shape. I’ve busted my knee twice, damaged my shoulders by pushing too hard on a workout, and been out of commission with delayed onset muscle pain for nearly a week. I’ve dug out my weights, started eating somewhat differently, and modified my sleep schedule to accommodate for the occasional first-thing-in-the-morning run. It’s been difficult, and injury is not my favorite thing in the world.

But I’m continuing to work at it – why? Because I believe in kaizen as a personal ideal as well as a working ideal.

It’s an iteration process. Every time I make a change, run a little faster, or work a little harder, I mark the results and adjust my course. I make optimization moves – not just to my own process, such as finding the highest-energy points in the day at which to work out, but also finding better routes walking to the office (and shaving 10 extraneous minutes off the trip in the process).

Why is this a big deal?

Because it’s an awareness trap. By not paying attention to when I hit the milestone – when Ian 2.0, or 3.0 appears – I’m making the work of getting each maintenance release out far more easy.

We consider so many things by their end results; weight loss goals, study for degrees, getting that black belt, learning Esperanto, and so on. These goals are ambitious for a reason – they make us want to exercise our need to accomplish, to build ambition toward a goal. However, I’d argue that as we divide our attention more, we’re losing the ability to maintain the salience of these large goals in the face of all the many small steps it takes to achieve them.

What would happen if, instead of broad goals, we began to make the work of improving – the process of kaizen – a central part of our personal planning?

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: design, development, house md, lifestyle, quotes

Posterity

July 27, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Everything we do on the web must come from a view of posterity. How else are we going to avoid putting drunken college photos up on Facebook, leaving something embarrassing on our work computers’ web history, or continually attacking others?

The largest part of this is that the net is nothing but posthumous in some ways. It’s an archive of past activity. The current trend of real-time computing, instant collaboration, and social media has changed how swiftly things become the past – but everything on the web is a past action. You liked this. You tweeted that. You blogged this. Everything is past-tense. Everything is posted – it’s placed into the record, upon publication.

When I write, I always consider how a given post will look next year, the year after – five years out, ten years out, and so on. I didn’t always write this way; when I was journalling, rather than blogging, I often wrote for the moment. For the ephemera. The unfortunate consequence of this is dissatisfying publications, arguments with friends, being misunderstood – or worse, professional consequences later in life.

You don’t even have to go out that far. Not everyone can, or needs to, plan on a lifelong scale; few people need to live their lives more than a few days in advance. In which case, think of posterity anyway.

How will what you do online influence people an hour after it’s posted?

How will your tweet be perceived two hours from now?

How will your industry see your blog entry after you’ve been picked up by a major aggregator?

What does your legacy look like now, with you at your most active?

What would it look like if you took a month off, starting right now?

When you hit publish – and don’t get me wrong, I want you to hit publish – consider… What will you think about what you posted, immediately after you’ve posted it?

Delete’s always an option. But then, are you participating in revisionist history?

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: archiving, Blogging, posterity, social media, the great index

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