PR people beware - know thy audience

BY: BRIAN ROBBINS  |  General Rambling, Online Marketing

There’s a very interesting Interview and Responses up on Slasdot today. They a series of community chosen questions to Blizzard presumably to be answered by the developers themselves.

Interviews like this in the past have been extremely successful for both the interviewee, as well as the Slashdot reading audience. Generally the better the interviewee knows the audience, the better the responses and thus the more “geek cred” the interviewee can build.

Unfortunately for Blizzard it looks like their PR team got in the way and sanitized all responses into non-informational PR speak, and the Slashdot community is calling them on it. Already there have been over 400 comments to the post (a large number very quickly even by Slashdot standards), and not a single one of them has discussed the content of the answers.

Every single comment appears to convey the same message: Blizzard’s PR people answered these questions, not the developers, and they obvious don’t know the audience. 400+ people have said this!

I’ve never taken a PR course but it would seem to me that one of the most important lessons is that you have to know who your audience is, and you must speak to them. Sending a bunch of PR-laced watered down responses may work for mainstream media, but at an uber-geek website like /. it’s not going to fly, and the audience is going to call you on it.

Of course, maybe Blizzard does know their audience, and they don’t care. I didn’t see a single comment indicating they were going to stop playing or cancel their subscription based on the interview, and given the coverage WoW has been getting, chances are anyone who is reading it is either already playing, or has conciously decided not to play.