Blue eyed bankers and Berlusconi's latest colour quip

It's slightly off topic but here at About Time Towers we take an interest in world events, since it's the bread and butter of our game (which we are currently updating for our upcoming travel game). While Gordon Brown was over in Brazil, he was thoroughly upstaged by President Lula Da Silva who laid into "white blue eyed bankers" for wrecking the world economy. He clarified this by saying that he personally had never met a black banker. I'm not sure how I feel about these comments - they are blunt populism if nothing else, and there is no doubt that Lula is a hell of a lot more popular at home than his guest, Brown. Poor old Gordon could probably learn a thing or two about communication from his host. Gordon is forever in the clouds dealing with the global economy, but he has never learnt the art of the pithy down-to-earth headline grabber. There is nothing very headline grabbing in anything he says, it invariably gives you a sinking feeling, regardless of your political sympathies. Lighten up, is how I might comment on his marketing skills. I myself am a proud owner of two blue-grey eyes, but I'll leave the protest to the world's yet to be spotted black bankers.

Meanwhile the world's most gaffe-prone prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has continued his Bernard Manning style quipping against his counterpart in Washington. Previously at their first meeting  he commented on Obama's "suntan", causing a few raised eyebrows, although apparently Obama let it slip. This time Berlusconi said critics of the previous remarks did not get his sense of humour. That is correct Bernard. And just to show how funny he thinks he is, he added that his economic policy was not like Obama's, saying: "I'm paler, since it's so long since I went sunbathing." With Obama lifting all those troops out of Iraq, he could do worse than drop a few off in Rome and then ask Berlusconi to make a few more of his wisecracks.

Selling boxes online - it's hard

Between manufacturing at one end of the process to marketing at the other end, we do a great deal in between including design, content writing, sales, fulfilment etc. Now we are trying to make our online shop work for us. So far it has underperformed and that is probably not surprising as we have invested little and probably done somethings along the way that, in hindsight could have been done a lot better. Apart from not getting our SEO right, we have started work on viral campaigns and not carried them through to see if they work. We do at least have a little data on our shop and website. So this year we want to get it right and shift plenty of copies of About Time through our shop by developing our online marketing. Thing is, like a lot of traditional games and toys companies, we are not really tuned in to the online space and how to use it. We make boxes and sell them in stores. But as Scrabulous proved, a good online game can be really good for sales of its sister offline game (even if the owners of the offline game don't approve of the online version, as happened with Scrabble's US owners.) There are no doubt lots of other interesting ways to get consumers talking about the game, interacting with us online and then, buying the thing. It's a seasonal market so getting all year sales is gold dust. We really need to break the mould on this one and make About Time a game that is natural to buy online. In fact quite a few of our retailers did very well online for us, so it can be done. Onwards and upwards....

Which social network for the About Time app?

We met our marketing company last week and discussed our year's plans for marketing. We did a range of marketing in our first year, including instore promotions, a radio competition tie-in in the South, PR, a little bit of targeted direct mail and a very small smattering of advertising. Budget constraints meant we had to be focused on what we knew would shift product. We wanted to do a viral campaign using 'mini' versions of the board game, but it never quite came off.

 This year we are determined to take viral marketing, and online display seriously as we focus on some core markets for About Time - relaunch our website as a better shopping-friendly space, and drive traffic to the site to bump up sales. We are looking at a display campaign on some core/niche sites, and a social networking campaign. But assuming we build a game playing application for a network, which one do we go for? Facebook or Twitter, or go straight for the iPhone, or even Amazon's Kindle, which is not even in the UK yet but is getting people excited (and annoyed)?

It's something we have to decide - our campaign will include some simple competitions based on our time trivia concepts. But there is the phenomenon of multiplayer asynchronous games like Scrabulous (now Lexulous)which drove sales of Scrabble even when the makers had  never approved the online game.

Any thoughts on this would be most welcome