Comics Marketing, Yet Again

Still decompressing from the New York con.  For those of you who may be wondering I did not, as I told Ragnell I would a few months ago, stand up in the DC Nation panel and ask Dan Didio if he knew how the Internet worked.

He still doesn’t, by the way.  The DC_Nation Twitter didn’t do a damn thing for the entirety of the con - which, well, would have been a great way to announce all of those new Batman titles or the Giffen/?? Doom Patrol book, don’t you think?  Lots of retweets, lots of potential links.  Lots of buzz.  Because I didn’t hit a lot of panels, I heard all of my con news second hand and, even in real life, it would have been much more convenient for the big announcements to be aggregated somewhere.  If we can have EA’s giant photo wall or the Twitter wall at AdTech, this is something we can surely do.  In fact, the next con broadsides that Alert Nerd puts out will probably do something like this.  Not that that’s DC’s fault.  That’s on Reed and all of the big publishers, actually.

I have some hope for DC, though.  They’ve apparently brought social media microceleb Chris Brogan in to consult the Distinguished Competition on how to retool its online presence.  Chris is a good guy and also a comic geek, so I think that this meeting of the minds can bear some powerful fruit.  I don’t expect DC to just start aping Marvel (okay, I kind of do - there’s a track record there), but they’re experiencing a lot of bad weather online right now, and it’s totally within their power to right it. They just need to be willing to.  It’s not going to win their lost market share back immediately, but raising their profile should be at the top of their marketing gameplan right now.  As comics start to really go digital, it’s going to become more and more of a necessity.