PlayStation

In January 2007 we began working with PlayStation’s corporate communications team in an effort to develop a comprehensive social media marketing program.

Our Client Services team began working with PlayStation on the heels of a very high-profile marketing mistake — the company’s branding team had just months prior launched a fake blog called “alliwantforxmasisapsp” that was quickly discovered and ‘outed’ by game industry fans and media worldwide. As a result, the company was in a dire position and needed to quickly begin rebuilding customer loyalty, trust and confidence in the PlayStation brand. Our recommendation (and belief) was that PlayStation could only do this using dialogue building strategies and tactics.

It’s with this in mind that our Client Services team devised and began implementing our initial social media strategy, which focused on the development of a corporate blog called “PlayStation.Blog.” We worked with Patrick and the PlayStation PR team to analyze where opportunities for dialogue existed online and how the content strategy for PlayStation.Blog would map to the discussion trends we identified — also, where we considered there to be conversational gaps. Additionally, we began developing a roadmap for content creation, which included a mix of media types, including audio, video, photography, and artwork.

In parallel with our content development efforts, our Platforms team began working with PlayStation’s IT team on the design and development of PlayStation.Blog. For this project, we used WordPress as our primary publishing platform along with several ancillary services to help augment and extend the content strategy, including Flickr, Viddler, Delicious, and Twitter.

Two plugins were developed to fill specific gaps for the PlayStation.Blog. The first allowed for a main header rotation to be added to the homepage of the site. The second filled the need to allow authors to reply directly to comments in line rather than author comments appearing at the end of the comment thread. PlayStation graciously allowed us to release these plugins back to the WordPress in a show of appreciation to the open source community that made such an incredible platform for this program.

In June 2007, we launched PlayStation.Blog, and it very quickly became a go-to resource for the entire PlayStation ecosystem. In fact, PlayStation.Blog is arguably considered *the* most active and highly trafficked company blog in the world. As a result, our team is actively involved in day-to-day maintenance and monitoring of blog performance. Our team has actively tuned this platform to grow capacity without the need to exponentially increase hardware spend.

The success of PlayStation.Blog enabled Patrick to hire two full-time community managers, as well as continue to build out the social media program to include a social networking strategy, an influencer outreach strategy, and an online/offline events strategy, among other things. The PlayStation social media program has been widely recognized for its creativity and success. In August of 2008, the PlayStation and Voce teams were profiled on the cover of PRWeek (full PDF of story). We’ve also received several awards and accolades, including an award of excellence in the use of new media by the Society of New Communications Research, as well as a Webby Award nomination for “best blog” in the video game category — we’ve also shared the PlayStation story at several industry conferences, including most recently the PRSA International Conference.

Services Used:

+ User Interface Planning, including wireframes, content structures, and functional specs
+ Interface Design, including home page, post pages, archives, registration
+ WordPress Platform Development including custom themes and plugins
+ Hosting and platform support, including server health monitoring, plugin updates and platform updates.