Don’t be a Rube.

First, some required reading - Shel Holz hit a home run with this blog post on the continued existence of the audience. This is an older post, but it took me a bit to get to it.

Next - and you’ll have to bear with me on this - is a link to an article about Magic: the Gathering. It is a miracle that the EASCI blog has lived a life free of M:tG references thus far, but gosh darnit this time I couldn’t resist - not because of the article itself, but because of the audience response, and the subsequent responses of the author. So to that extent, you don’t need to actually read the article if you don’t want to. Here it is, though, and the forum response as well.

I understand if you can’t commit - Magic is a game that perhaps more than most personifies both geek culture and youth culture, and it can be hard to read any of this with a straight face. But, for the purposes of this post, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard, so here’s the summary:

1) Rueben Bresler, aspiring Magic professional (yes, they exist) and career Pro Tour Qualifier (think Nike Tour in golf) participant, writes an article about an “Elemental Control” deck for the tournament format for the upcoming round of qualifying tournaments. He acknowledges that his starting inspiration was a deck played by Hall of Famer (yes, there is a Hall of Fame) Raphael Levy at Grand Prix Birmingham, and then proceeds to make a variety of fairly questionable changes to the deck. This is a question of personal preference - Ruebs likes a certain type of deck, and shifts the focus of the proven-successful deck into a less-proven-but-arguably-more-consistent version. He claims that this is the defining deck in the format, and will be the most successful in the upcoming PTQ season.

2) Pro-level players, as well as many people at the same “aspiring pro” place as Mr. Bresler, respond on the forums, asking (for the most part) intelligent questions about the variety of crack he was smoking when he decided that he had “defined” the format with an arguably sub-par version of an already not-quite-best deck. Rueben, and two friends of his who have also been playtesting the deck, are pushed onto the defensive, and eventually publicly lambasted by a well-known and well-liked member of the competitive Magic community.

3) Rueben returns to the forum, backs away from the language stating that he had created the best deck, and claims that he is never going to try anything like the article again. He does not suggest what he’ll be sticking to instead, but one gets the impression that it will be, if nothing else, safer. He also says the following:

if you want a deck that will win you a ptq, then perhaps someone like pat chapin or gerry thompson is a better read for you. unfortunately, they are pemium [sic - “premium”]. but you get what you pay for. my articles are free. ‘nuff said.

This is in reference to the fact that some articles on the site require a paid subscription to view. This is to help support the content side of a website that is, at heart, the online store for a gaming shop in Virginia. (Bonus Lesson! - the fact that it leads on web content on collectible card games is a huge factor in the store’s success in the real world.)

I’d like to emphasize that I’m not trying to pick on a kid. Rueben is young and headstrong and probably would crush me at Magic. What’s interesting about the exchange is the near-universality of the mistakes made by Rueben. This is how public relations (and in particular, corporate blogs) go wrong time and time again. As a thought exercise, you might want to replace “Rueben Bresler” with “US Airways” and “Elemental Control” with “reduced routes” or “luggage surcharge” in number (1). Or (closer to EASCI’s geographic home), you could try “Hewlett Packard” and “changes to the printer division and the rollout of Print 2.0.” What are the justifications? What is the language that gets used to describe the shift? Who in the corporate blogosphere has risen above the level of matriculating student discourse about a card game?

That in itself is a bulldog of a question, but we haven’t even done any analysis of the article or the forum spat. Let’s break it down:

The Audience

Shel’s point about the audience is that even the traditional “passive” mass media audience is still a channel with expectations. You can enter that channel with any type of message you want, but you must acknowledge that you’re only ever going to please some of the people some of the time. The way that social media changes the ability of the audience to mobilize is, in Holtz’ mind, the new secret sauce of messaging. Either way, the core lesson remains the same:

But any communicator who starts planning without identifying the audience is headed down a road to failure.

In the same way that a corporation would be talking to, presumably, a segment of that mass audience, Rueben was writing to a pretty small niche in the world of gaming consumers. They expect and receive excellent writing about the game. So there was a miss in terms of tone and form of address. The forum responses tell us as much.

Don’t speak or write because you can, because you must, because it’s “the job.” These are horrible reasons to thrust yourself into the public eye. Write to inform, or not at all. Audiences will engage and evangelize if it’s truly awesome. If it’s not, no amount of pith on your part with make it so.

The Reaction

Having missed, or at least stirred the pot, Rueben’s handling of the forum reaction was not that great. In a very real way, this is the bigger deal. We’ve already talked about tough times meaning that every customer touch point is an act of service recovery. Everyone is expecting cookies and tasting chalk. Negative reactions to news/advice/product rollouts are to be expected - the true impact of a communicator’s job is found in the conversation that follows. It didn’t help that a couple of devotees of the deck suited up and jumped in with words aplenty…but the reaction should have been managed a great deal better by the author as well.

I don’t know what it is about corporate flaks, but the complaints of consumers are frequently treated with a “ha ha, well you know us, we’re smarter than you.” This from actual professionals, brand managers, and (in this case) writers of strategy articles. And yes, the fact that I can glump Rueben in with a bunch of people who get paid a ton of money as virtual ombudsmen is a very bad sign.

The audience in this case mobilized, pressed for clarifications and answers, sought to engage, and they got slippery or downright meaningless replies. Strike two.

The Surrender

Even worse, though, is Rueben’s quote, above. Here’s the dirty truth of mass media: content is worthless. Amazing writing gets done for free every day. Yes, yes, advertising support, brand recognition, blah blah blah. Even on a site like Star City, where subscriptions help pay for the content (whether “premium” or not), the audience expectation is not “it’s free, therefore oh well if it’s bad.” Like everyone everywhere, they’re looking for a story, an edge, an insightful tidbit. The resignation of role that happens in Rueben’s quote is unacceptable. What are you “giving away” to the audience? Will they come back for a second helping?

Epic post, I know, but as Porkypine says, I’ve been mullin’ at it for a spell.