Engagement Begins at Home

Gamesforgirls

This week, two stories on the front page of Digg.com caught my attention:

“Games 4 Girls” What an INSULT to Female Gamers!

Ready to Get Annoyed: The NYT is throwing around the term Web 3.0 already.

Then there is the recent announcement that one of the largest communities in Second Life has decided to ban PR and Marketing firms who insult the community by declaring some kind of “first” in Second Life, disregarding all the people and business who were actually there first.

Everyone in advertising is talking about engagement these days, but engagement starts at home. Marketers, especially creatives and planners, need to engage themselves in the very communities and cultures they are marketing towards. They need to understand the environment, the people, and the social rules of the community in order to be effective. Anyone truly engaged in net culture would know that “Web 2.0″ is a universally despised term and avoid “Web 3.0″ like the plague.

Reading a “cool hunting” brief isn’t going to suffice, either. Sure, you can understand the basic functions of a community like Second Life or MySpace just by reading a brief, but unless you really engage you won’t understand how frustrating it is to get pinged with excessive friend requests from bogus MySpace profiles, or how obnoxious it is when someone astroturfs your blog, or how female gamers hate, HATE being stereotyped as only interested in Bratz and Disney games.

You have to join the conversation before you can have any affect on it.