Here’s a shout-out to our friends at Capcom, an entertainment company that functions at the cross-roads where “Fans” and “Trust” meet. This weekend, Capcom did a stealth relaunch of Capcom Unity’s community destination. Talking exclusively to FanTrust, Capcom Corporate Officer/ Vice-President - Strategic Planning & Business Development Christian Svensson said, “The feedback is largely positive. No other video game publisher has gone this far synching up fan activity.” Designed to let fans take their Capcom ID on the road, play across multiple devices and communicate across multiple user accounts, the new community hub has been in the ...

Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable to say to entertainment professionals that audiences were turning the entertainment business model on its head. Sure there was a lot of talk about technology, piracy and convergence; but surprisingly little about consumers. Television, film and even games had a tradition of keeping people at a distance– at the far end of a screen. Nielsen ratings, retail units sold and other metrics treated audiences like blobs. Blogs hadn’t been invented. There was no YouTube. And in the entertainment business, there was no grand tradition of “the customer is always right.” Today, the line ...

Mathew Ingram, who writes the Internet media blog Ingram 2.0 for The Globe and Mail, recently posted a great article about the first-ever ROLF-Con (ROLF is the Internet/ mobile chat acronym for "rolling on the floor laughing), an event held on the MIT campus that brought together Internet celebrities and their fans. I, for one, would have given my right hand to meet Christian Ladner, Toronto-ex pat living in L.A., Internet copywriter, and creator/ blogger for Stuff White People Like (#2 - Religions that ...

Is there money to be made in Facebook? According to Adonomics, the answer is yes, particularly for developers that tap into the fan bases of entertainment properties. Adonomics is an online source of Facebook analytics, enabling visitors to track the growth, activity, and valuation of companies that develop applications for Facebook - as well as valuation of individual applications. In its latest blog entry, Building the Social Suite of Category Killer Apps for Facebook, Adonomics identified the top ten trends in Facebook application ...

I’m fascinated by the way some people become fiercely loyal to certain entertainment properties. Their dedication is cult-like. The marketing guru Douglas Atkin, in his book The Culting of Brands, has a similar fascination with brand loyalists. He thought, why not study real cults? It turns out that people become addicted to cult brands for more or less the same reasons that people become committed to cults like the Moonies. And that companies cultivate unshakable allegiance through the same basic techniques as those used by, say, Hare Krishna. Asks The ...