SC2SEA.com - Starcraft 2 SEA eSports Community Site

Cross-post from my proper blog duckvillelol.com...

I sit here on the train, rolling along on this cold Winters day in Melbourne, looking forward to a weekend of fun, Starcraft 2, and yes – the promise of hope for the local scene.

“Why so glum?” you say, reading through these idle words, well – it’s a matter of precedence. For a long time the SEA and in particular the Australian region has been waxing and waning in terms of the “size” of it’s online presence and “input” into the community – and now is the time to show what we’ve got.

We have some of the tip top players flying over to Sydney, NSW to compete in the Blizzard WCS Australian nationals; a championship with $10,000 up for grabs, we’ve got the mighty Tastosis casting, along with comrades HD and Painuser, and with the 300+ people who will be attending the event I think it’s time we made a mark.


In my previous “call to arms” comments in my vlog (if you saw it, if not look here) I mentioned how one of the big reasons the Australian scene has been so small and unnoticed is the lack of brand recognition. We have almost no one with the amount of name recognition as Incontrol, nor the stage presence, or the outburst of Idra – and while you don’t necessarily need figures like them to prove your market (Australian SC2) is worthy – it’s certainly something that helps. As per my blog I still think that for us a lot of the brand recognition we require will come from social media based marketing – putting your name out there on twitter, pushing your twitch stream, your team, your team sponsors and so forth. It won’t be easy for Australians to get on cool shows or even produce cool shows that others can watch, mainly because of the distance and timezone factors we deal with every day.

So what should you do? Tweet. Tweet hard and tweet a lot. Tweet the scores from games you’re watching at WCS. Post them on your Facebook. I don’t even care if you don’t have any friends who aren’t SC2 players or even gamers in general (why do you have those friends then?) – just get the names out there, post pictures and show people that the Australian SC2 scene is alive and kicking, and we kick hard. Another thing to do is show your support to the sponsors. I’m a serious advocate of supporting a brand or name if they give back to you – I recently gave a small donation to drop.sc who do a wonderful job hosting replays! Do the same. When you see the sponsors of the event, mention it in a tweet. “Thanks @jimsbikeshop for supporting australian starcraft!” something as simple as that gets the attention of a marketing team and says to them “hmm, it seems we’re getting good return on our investment in this Starcraft thing. We should do it more often.”. This is EXACTLY what we want.

Make sure you use social media channels as much as you can, because it is fast becoming one of the best ways to get attention not only for yourself and an event you’re at, but also for brands and sponsors to look at it and be interested to. And as everyone should realise; more interested sponsors; more money in the scene; more prizes, more events, more more more!

So please be sure to spread the word and get buzzing this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, hopefully we can make the rest of the globe see that we aren’t some sort of wasteland in the backwater station of the internet. As always; if you're a player/coach/manager or whatever and you have any questions about using social media please feel free to speak to me, I work in social media quite a lot in my job (which is why I prattle on about it all the time...) and I'm happy to help anyone with questions about engagement, using Twitter programs, FB based stuff and other things.

Cheers!