Social Network Presence
Now that we've announced the name of our combined community, we need to start working on our web presence and a big part of that is our social networking profiles. The recent downtime of our websites underscores the importance of having an external means to communicate with our membership.
Among the Officers, there does seem to be a bit of disconnect about how our social networking profiles should continue. Currently, we only have them for Stonewall Fleet (Facebook, Twitter, Google+), but we'd like to include all of our other guilds on these sites as well.
The big question is whether or not we should create new profiles (a separate Facebook fanpage, Twitter account, and Google+ page) for each guild or create unified profiles for our entire community (a Facebook fanpage, Twitter account and Google+ page) for the Stonewall Gaming Community.
There are many advantages to having a unified presence. First of all, it'd be less maintenance for us. Instead of having to create three new pages for each guild, we could just direct all of our members to the same pages. As well, when we have community wide messages, we wouldn't have to post them to 9+ different accounts. In the future, if there's ever another social networking site that we'd like to have a presence on, it would only compound this problem further.
The big disadvantage is that we'd be cluttering your activity stream with information for a game that you may not be involved in. Announcements for all of our games would be posted to these accounts. Whenever we were to post announcements for Stonewall Fleet, for example, those members that don't play Star Trek Online, would still receive them.
We'd really prefer a targeted solution, but the increased complexity of the alternative is a real issue. The last perk would be that it'd build up our unified community.
So what do all of you think?
Among the Officers, there does seem to be a bit of disconnect about how our social networking profiles should continue. Currently, we only have them for Stonewall Fleet (Facebook, Twitter, Google+), but we'd like to include all of our other guilds on these sites as well.
The big question is whether or not we should create new profiles (a separate Facebook fanpage, Twitter account, and Google+ page) for each guild or create unified profiles for our entire community (a Facebook fanpage, Twitter account and Google+ page) for the Stonewall Gaming Community.
There are many advantages to having a unified presence. First of all, it'd be less maintenance for us. Instead of having to create three new pages for each guild, we could just direct all of our members to the same pages. As well, when we have community wide messages, we wouldn't have to post them to 9+ different accounts. In the future, if there's ever another social networking site that we'd like to have a presence on, it would only compound this problem further.
The big disadvantage is that we'd be cluttering your activity stream with information for a game that you may not be involved in. Announcements for all of our games would be posted to these accounts. Whenever we were to post announcements for Stonewall Fleet, for example, those members that don't play Star Trek Online, would still receive them.
We'd really prefer a targeted solution, but the increased complexity of the alternative is a real issue. The last perk would be that it'd build up our unified community.
So what do all of you think?