Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, your thoughts on the Grammy nominations, what Carl Froch’s wife was looking for, or Jayson Werth possibly signing with the Red Sox, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
Back in Coffee Talk #250, RPadholic SlickyFats asked me, “Do you get invited to events or do you have to actively seek them out and invite yourself?” I wanted to answer that question in a Coffee Talk column to pull back the curtain on the videogame business and for self therapy. When I worked at Happy Puppy, GameSpy, Yahoo!, and G4tv, event invites were pretty much automatic. When I freelanced for high-profile outlets like FHM, GigaOm, Amazon, GamePro, etc., invites were pretty frequent. These days…not so much.
No matter what you’ve done in your career, PR people will forget about you once you stop serving a large audience. Their job is to promote their games to as many people as possible. Once you’re no longer useful to them, they stop calling, they stop returning your phone calls, they stop sending you games, and they stop sending you press releases. That’s just how it works.
Obviously this is a source of frustration for me. I’m trying to build and grow a web site. I need support from PR people. They control the information and coverage opportunities. On one hand, I completely understand where they’re coming from — I’m not as useful to them as I once was. On the other hand, I naively hope that people I’ve known for more than 10 years will help me grow my site. At the very least, I’d like to be invited to events that are miles away from my apartment. To be fair, I suck at self promotion and I hate groveling for stuff; I need to get over this in 2011 for the good of the site.
The good news is that I have several relationships with developers that many of you like. I will try to pull in favors for video interviews and stuff. Recently I was chatting with a pretty famous developer and he asked me what I thought about a recent press release. I told him, “I don’t know. Your flacks took me off the mailing lists. I don’t get your games or press releases anymore.” He was surprised and a little pissed off. He asked me if I wanted him to “fix” that situation. I declined. I’ll try to “fix” that myself next year.
So yeah, I get a fraction of the coverage opportunities I used to get and it kind of sucks. I’m going to try to change that in 2011. Also, I’m making a list and checking it thrice — I will never forget the PR people that still send me games, email me press releases, and invite me to events…nor will I forget the PR people that completely dropped me.
Thanks SlickyFats! This was therapeutic.
I can understand them not sending you free stuff anymore, but taking you off of their press release list is rude. There is absolutely no reason for them to go out of their way to take you out of an automatic mailing list. It's not costing them anything to email you after all.
Lol yeah.
these are my favorite coffee talks…when ray actually tells us cool stuff about the industry. I wish i had some influence or could help facilitate the site's growth, other than making amazon purchases. Ive actually thought many times about winning the powerball and giving ray seed money (and a tessla roadster) . This site is the best place on the internet to come for rational discussion regarding all things geek, i just wish more people knew about it…maybe we could all chip in and get ray a superbowl ad? Maybe we could get nightshade to fly to cleveland tonight and streak across the floor, with "rpad.tv" across his chest, during the opening tip? Much like shoeless joe jackson, im confident that if you build it, they will come…but god damn im impatient. Im at least glad that nate is in a position to help you creatively
I have been asking all of my friends who are about to start Christmas shopping to go through here to get to Amazon. (As a matter of fact I am about to FB that)
That is greatly appreciated! Thanks!!!
You guys do plenty just by reading every day. The Amazon purchases and RPad.tv swag buys are brilliant too! I super appreciate everything you guys have done. It's on me to figure out how to grow the site and monetize it.
I would have totally used that guy to get back in. It is nice to know people and when they can help AND offer I will accept, but I wouldn't call them up expecting any favors.
It sucks that PR people are like that…..scratch that, it sucks that ALL PEOPLE are like that. I have worked in restaurants for years. I would hang out with employees in and out of work for years, we would have them over to the house or go out with them, but if the restaurant closed or sold or they quit, we never heard from them again. They are all just 'friends' of convenience.
Well, they're just doing their jobs. There are some PR people that I consider genuine friends. I understand why they can't help me. It just kind of sucks.
I do want to point out that I don't expect any of them to help me. I learned that long ago. I remember longtime videogame writer Andy Eddy telling me about PR people dropping him. That shocked the hell out of me. The dude has been writing about games for decades. A lot of PR people wouldn't have jobs if people like Andy didn't grow the editorial side of the business. If a guy like that can get dropped then anyone can. Andy has been writing about games longer and better than anyone else in the business.
Amazon links are showing up anymore. Mine says "The Webpage is no Available" while in Chrome. In FireFox it half way shows up but is unclickable.
Is this just mine??
IE amazon is working.
I guess its just mine because it doesn't work in my IE either. Says "This page cannot be displayed"
boooo that sucks. well the video game deals are action games. you get a $10 online credit for future video game purchases. Are you looking for a gam in particular?
I can understand getting dropped from some of that stuff, but would also have to agree with Sandrock that not getting emails about stuff anymore doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It isn't a whole lot of effort to basically be added to a listserve, or something similar to that.
So…NASA has discovered arsenic-based bacteria. Hmph. I was hoping for the corpse of Abin Sur.
You can easily kill it with Head and Shoulders shampoo though… right?
That sounds awfully familiar… wasn't that from some evolution-type movie where Orlando Jones was the token black guy?
-M
Exactly… it was a fairly geeky reference.
I'm sure it will spawn zombies or something.
But those zombies will have shiny, luscious, bouncy hair!
Having major site problems. I've been frantically trying to fix things for the last few hours. Stay tuned!
are you changing something? is there problem with the code? will batman foil the joker's latest nefarious plot? stay tuned….
Several features just stopped working. This scared the hell out of me since I haven't changed anything since yesterday. (I also didn't want to pay for a restore.) It appears to be in order now. Anything look off from your end?
no sir, everything looks as it should be
Phew! I was really freaking out for a few hours. I'm pretty sure I lost 5% of my hair. Thanks for checking! Things look normal again here too!!!
go to bed, you being up at 5:55 am, having worked "frantically on the site for hours" concerns me…we will hold the fort down, and i promise not to steal anything this time