hile Blizzard has many thousands of dollars to spend on advertising and pr, players of the game engage in pr-like activites every day without spending any money (usually). Today, I will cover how players practice advertising and pr in game, and tips on how not to suck at it.

Unlike the real world, the channels of communication are very restricted. The majority of communication on a mass scale is performed by means of a city-only channel called “trade chat” or “/2”.

As you can tell, it is cluttered at the best of times.  This activity is most likely related to advertising; however there are no pictures and a high rate of non-response.  Most often the people who are looking for a guild will not even read trade chat and you can expect one response for every 100 times you spam your message.

A more succesful means of advertising your guild for recruitment is a third party site such as wowprogress.com.  For players wanting to experience end-game raiding, they can easily see which guilds on their server have progressed and exactly how far they have progressed.  For example, my server of Akama shows the top 20 guilds on the first page.  You want to be in the top 20 guilds because most people never click more than they have to.  Once you click on my guild, we have provided more information on what we are about, how to contact us and how to apply to our guild.

Speaking of ways to contact us, a good guild web site is just as important as a good company web site.  If a web site looks terrible, you look terrible. This is the first impression anyone will have of you or your guild/ company. Do not make them squint and desperately search for the back button.




Blizzard recently announced Blizzcon, their large yearly event.  While it would be nice to be able to stage a large event like Blizzard, most of the players are happily insconced inside the game.  The solution by a few guilds is to hold events in-game.  PETA (yes, THAT PETA) even held an event in game to garner publicity in real life (though it didn't go as planned). Personally, my guild planned a night where we gave out raiding flasks (an item that increases your effectiveness in raids for those who do not play). If a player could recall a time they had an enjoyable interaction with one of our members.  However, if you are trying to establish a presence in the raiding community, plan your events before they are already inside the instances and therefore, unreachable.