I was away at Web 2.0 Expo in New York this past week – a conference for those interested embracing and extending the opportunities created by Web 2.0 technologies. Ironically, it was the use of one of those technologies, social networking on facebook in this case, that got a huge amount of local press for our company while I was away.
It turns out that one of our games “Ka-glom”, is now the top game in the iTunes Appstore in Japan. We are encouraged to use Facebook, Twitter, digg and any social media tools to spread the word about our company and games, and to actively participate in online social networks and communities (including our own mobile social network). Because of this culture of sharing, a status update in Facebook by one employee about Ka-glom’s recent top status in Japan caught the eye of a network friend of a friend who works for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). By the end of the week we had a radio interview on CBC Radio 1, and were featured on the evening news last night. Apparently an article will also be in the newspaper next week. All this free press and publicity extended out over traditional channels, due to the power of social networks.
This video is the news segment that ran yesterday. At minute 13:34 you can see the segment on Magmic Games. You even get to see them panning around the desks of some of my awesome webdev team in their sanctum sanctorum. Very cool. http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News/Local_News/Ottawa/ID=1337696899
(And yes, we all have our “Toys” that decorate the environment. I’m a huge fan of ReBoot (the original series), so if you know where I can get more collectbles from that show…)