This blog will concentrate on the online PR companies have to face on a day to day basis, I will be focusing on three main concepts with online PR which are:

• Social media: Blogs, feeds, and communities
• Brand protection
• Media alerting service

The gaming industry has been growing ever since gaming slowly became more available for consumers through home consoles, this year the gaming industry is worth upward of $108.9billion (McDonald, 2017). Gaming has been growing over the years going from arcades to nearly every household having a console. Some of the wealthiest companies in the world are gaming companies, for example, Steam powered is worth $1.5 Billion.

With most households having a games consoles and games ranging from PG to 18, gaming has been gaining some negative press form the over the top violence in some games, specifically Grand theft Auto, this game on countless occasions has been blamed for outburst in kids, and violent behaviours in teenagers, some would go as far to blame it for some crimes that are committed. For example, it was blamed for a shooting of a grandmother by an eight-year-old boy (Kotaku.com, 2017). Even with this negative press gaming has moved forward and now the PR departments have got to worry more about consumer satisfaction as that what keeps customers coming back, and leading to companies stay afloat.

“Public relations (PR) is the way organisations, companies and individuals communicate with the public and media. A PR specialist communicates with the target audience directly or indirectly through media with an aim to create and maintain a positive image and create a strong relationship with the audience. Examples include press releases, newsletters, public appearances, etc. as well as utilisation of the World Wide Web” (Ipr.org.uk, 2017).

Power of the internet/blogs feeds, and communities

Electronic Arts are a great example of how to do PR incorrectly to your target audience, recently they have been caught up in a PR disaster, which caused more than 10,000 people to cancel a preorder for one of their upcoming game.

This post above from one of the employees of EA caused a large upset to their community. EA being a powerhouse in the gaming industry ranking 11^th overall within the gaming industry with over 74.41million visits to their website this month alone. This is a major mistake on EA part as they should think more about consumer satisfaction.

After EA realised they had made a huge mistake with that post, they decided to, to remove the feature and as they now need to rethink and reintroduce the feature in the future but more customer friendly.

EA will learn from this and will adapt their customer approach. What they should have done is not keep up with the trends of competitors but ask the customer how they would like the content given to them to avoid the negative press.

Brand protection

Electronic Arts have various different social media account, all of which have been varied which means they have been confirmed to be by them by the social media themselves. This helps brand protection as no one can damage them unless they decide to do the damage themselves. (Refer to power of internet)

Twitter page (9.53% of EA audience)

Reddit contact (21.93% of EA audience)

Facebook page (27.84% of EA audience)

EA YouTube (33.40% of EA audience)

Media alerting services

EA have adverts on TV, they also have paid advertisement on various social media, and these adverts pop up when you’re just scrolling through your feeds. The thing about the adverts is that it’s only aimed at people who have come up into coming into their target audience which the social media will have an algorithm that determines who qualifies. This system is great but even people who are interesting in the product skip the advertisement as people hate adverts on their social media. They also send out emails to when there is a major game being released.

Gamers view on EA

EA has always been known to be a money hungry company if you type in EA into the Youtube search bare this is what comes up:

Straight away you can see that the videos are negative. EA will have to work hard to gain trust from their customers again if they want to increase customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

In conclusion being a big company within the gaming, marketing does not make you immune to bad press. It also seems some companies (EA) have to work on their PR and communication with the people they are serving.

To end this blog post here some videos of things wrong with EA.