MMORPG marketing: try not to lie to bloggers

ATTENTION: all game marketers: don’t do this…

Hi Adam,

Although we do not know one another, I notice we share many contacts on LinkedIn.com (Karl Blanks, Ben Jesson, Jason Duke, Paul Billinghurst to name but a few I’ve had the pleasure of working with).

Funny; I don’t recognize those names?

I guess if you’re one of those people who just adds every person in the world to your LinkedIn, maybe you’d not have noticed. I don’t do that – I know all my LI contacts personally. I even wrote that on my LinkedIn Profile – all you have to do is read it and you’d see!

I do not have a premium LinkedIn account so could not send you an inMail.

Why not? You work in marketing/PR. How cheap are you?

I hope you don’t mind me contacting you in this way, but I recently stumbled upon your website – http://t-machine.org.

I work for [redacted to spare his shame] and we’re just about to launch a Facebook version of our online MMORPG, [redacted – I’m not going to promote their game].

I’m reaching out to influential bloggers within the gaming space and consider you to be one of the top, most active out there. Our Facebook version of the [redacted – I’m not going to promote their game] is due for release on the 1st September 2011.

If you’re interested in reviewing the game or fancy an inside scoop prior to release, please let me know and I will forward you our press release.

Many thanks,

[redacted to spare his shame]
Online Marketing Manager
[redacted to spare his shame]

Flattery will get you everywhere. Except when you’re trying to trade off someone else’s reputation, where it won’t. The blatant mail-merge aspects of this email immediately turned it into a rejection, headed straight for my Spam folder.

I don’t promote titles until/unless I’ve actually played them, or I know the authors extremely well. He might have done a good job to drop the fake “we share friends” line, and pre-creating an account for me.

Putting the “you can review this if you want to” right at the end really doesn’t sound good; over-worked journos may be more interested in a pre-written article, but voluntary bloggers generally care more about the personal value of what they write. IMHO and IME; YMMV.