Why Social Media is a Fail for Most Online Poker Sites

sme_bw2010_jay_baer_v1 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

I was watching this video and couldn’t help but think about all of the mistakes online poker companies make when approaching social media. Especially the part about just setting up a Facebook page and ticking that off on your list of things to do to become a social media aware company.

Few poker rooms have a single person devoted to social media. And those that do radically understaff it. It’s sad to see a company that has 20 or 30 people who are in charge of buying ad space in local media and they don’t even have a single person 100% dedicated to social media or they have one or two people in charge of handling world-wide social media efforts despite the fact that if done correctly they could touch nearly as many as the other 20 - 30 people doing traditional marketing.

It’s a bit of a paradigm shift for many companies. Like Stelzner says, if they’re a fan on Facebook they already like you. If they’re following you on Twitter they already know you and your brand. But if you look at a lot of the Twitter and Facebook communications form online poker sites, and even some affiliates, they’re still trying to sell you in every communication.

I don’t mean to single out these companies but they are the two biggest in the industry so they set the bar for the rest of the online poker business.

Look at PokerStars’ Twitter feed:

Granted, they make a small effort to interact but as you can see the feed is basically a firehose of PokerStars related information. They’re on broadcast mode. They really don’t care about what’s coming back to them in terms of conversation.

Full Tilt is probably a little worse in this regard:

While I agree with Stelzner that the people who sign up and Like you on Facebook and Follow you on Twitter are already fans just hitting people up with self-promotional crap is the same as people who post about what they ate for breakfast this morning. Nobody cares!

I just wanted to compare this to internet marketing guy Jeremy Schoemaker who has 112,202 followers on Twitter compared to Full Tilt’s 14,154 and PokerStars’ 35,358. Notice how he actually talks to the people following him and how he’s willing to talk about topics other than himself?

I’m not putting Schoemaker out there as the greatest guy to ever do online marketing but two of the biggest poker rooms in the world don’t even have half of the following (combined). I don’t even follow either of them because I know it’s just going to be an endless stream of self-promotional Tweets with no real desire to engage in a conversation or ever hear any feedback.

They offer no real value. They’re greedy little bastards who link out to nothing and expect everyone to link in to them. That’s a little tongue in cheek but the point is social means social. If you showed up at a party and just bragged about yourself all night how many friends do you think you would have?

Social media is not a broadcast medium. It’s an interactive medium. But that point gets lost on people who are used to being in the broadcast media business and people fixated on their past success (in a broadcast medium world). A bunch of execs sit around a table and decide, “Hey Bob, you’re online marketing, right? Why don’t you post 20 or 30 tweets a day on a Twitter account so we can fill up some of our guaranteed tournaments that are missing their guarantees?”

They’re not taking the medium seriously so they don’t get serious results which justifies them not taking the medium seriously … sort of an endless cycle.