PS3 Attitude increases charity revenue through Twitter

PS3 Attitude is a PlayStation 3 daily news site with a difference.

A 100% philanthropic venture, every ounce of revenue the site generates is given to worthy causes. Throughout 2009, PS3 Attitude are supporting GamesAid, the video game industry charity.

Having grown organically through word-of-mouth, article syndication and social networking, PS3 Attitude is now finding a new way to drive traffic that rewards readers and increases game developer/publisher interest in the site.

PS3 Attitude started with humble origins. Originally founded on the Blogger platform nearly two years ago by one person with a mission, the site went through a re-design and re-launch and is now sitting on a WordPress system.

These days, the site is run by a whole team of volunteers around the world who submit stories, perform interviews, write game reviews and report the important PlayStation 3 news of the day. Having reached over 1,000,000 PS3 owners in two years, and currently growing at a rate of 240% per annum, the games industry are starting to take note of PS3 Attitude.

Being privately funded, everything PS3 Attitude do to promote the site has to be done on a shoestring, so the site makes use of a combination of free promotion-oriented plugins such as MaxBannerAds, Thank Me Later, All-in-One SEO and ‘What Would Seth Godin Do?’.

As PS3 Attitude continues to grow, the site gains more kudos within the industry daily. For example, they are now an Official Media Partner for the Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2009, and the site is one of only a handful of EU-based gaming websites that are actually reporting live from E3 in Los Angeles, the biggest video game event on the 2009 calendar.

But it is PS3 Attitude’s use of Twitter recently that has started to move the site further forward, and at a quicker than average rate.

PS3 Attitude has developed a number of key relationships with games developers, publishers and industry contacts over the last two years. When those organisations provide the site with free games and giveaways, PS3 Attitude uses Twitter to distribute them to their followers.

Every Tuesday, PS3 Attitude becomes PSFree Attitude. The site is re-branded with a new logo and a sidebar advert that leads you to an article explaining how the system works. The Twitter feed is also disabled so that people have to follow @PS3Attitude on Twitter to be able to win the prizes.

Here’s how it works:

• A message is sent out on Twitter explaining what prize is available.
• A ‘code’ is sent out to the followers, but some of the characters are replaced with question marks.
• A tweet (or two) explains where to start at the site and how to follow the trail until the user finds the missing piece of code.

They punch the completed code in to a special redemption area on their PS3 console, PC or PSP to claim the prize. First person to do it wins the giveaway; everyone after it is claimed only sees an ‘invalid code’ message

The clues and missing codes are hidden within the reviews and interviews that are aligned with the giveaway, so the developer/publisher sees more people attracted to their game every Tuesday. PS3 Attitude often send people on a trail across the Internet too by sending them to clues on their Facebook Group, Digg pages, PlayFire Group and other areas where the site is active, which helps grow subscribers and followers within a range of social networking and bookmarking sites.

Whilst in it’s infancy, PSFree Attitude is proving to be a very popular weekly feature and a mechanism for rewarding readers, gaining new followers, generating interest in particular game titles and driving additional traffic.

And in the case of PS3 Attitude, more traffic means more charity revenue.

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