HubSpot ARG Pirate

I wrote on Friday about HubSpot‘s latest venture into the world of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and how brilliant it was. Despite my assertions, there were quite a few people who were miffed by the whole thing. Clearly, upsetting customers (or students, in the case of inboundmarketing.com) is bad for business. HubSpot went to great lengths to apologize to those people who had been offended and to prematurely reopen the site despite the game being live. In ARG terms, this is called “breaking the fourth wall,” and it’s a big no-no. In essence, by admitting to the fact that this is a game, HubSpot forced gamers to un-suspend their disbelief, which ruins the game to some extent.

So by launching the game, HubSpot irritated its customers. By apologizing, they irritated whatever part of the ARG community was paying attention. It’s a bit of a raw deal. So what could HubSpot have done differently to avoid this?

1. Link to IMU Educator Pages. If HubSpot wanted to shut down IMU, then they should have given people a way to access the video lessons more readily. They did this on www.CaptainInbound.com by linking to HubSpot Educator pages (disclaimer: they linked to this site), but they never did it on InboundMarketing.com. Why not? This would have been in keeping with the C&D order, which only referenced content within the IMU; it would have promoted the new class of IMU Educators; it would have kept access to the materials and the IMU exam open; and it would have been tremendously easy to do. I don’t really see a downside to doing it this way.
2. Pick Something Less Valuable as Collateral. The Inbound Marketing University is a tremendously important resource to many marketers. Not only is it a wealth of important information, but it’s also a means by which independent marketing consultants can set themselves apart from their competition. So to prevent messing with their livelihood, HubSpot could have chosen something else to shut down — like their Facebook page, for example.
3. Don’t Shut Anything Down. The Cease and Desist order was really enough to pique my interest. What if HubSpot had come out and said, “Kronus Media wants us to shut down IMU, but we don’t think their claim has any validity. We therefore refuse to comply with the C&D order. This could get us into some serious legal trouble, so we need your help to get to the bottom of things.” Maybe not as dramatic, but A) it’s believable, and B) it doesn’t piss anyone off.
4. Launch it Better. How did I find out about the game? Well, I’m a Certified Inbound Marketing Professional, so I get the IMU newsletter. And in the newsletter was a little substitution cipher contest. The next day I received an invite to join CaptainInbound.com, shortly after the IMU was shut down. But I wonder how many people went through the effort of deciphering the clue (which involved using an image editor) and submitting the answer, especially considering that the call to action was buried below the fold on the newsletter. Not many, I’d wager. (Me? I’m a puzzle geek with too much free time.)

HubSpot clearly took a risk with this ARG, and I’m not sure that it’s paying dividends quite yet. But that’s the nature of taking risks. The important part is that even if the game wasn’t launched as well as it could have been, HubSpot was remarkably quick to address the concerns of its audience, to break the fourth wall to appease them, and to apologize for any inconvenience they might have caused. And if you can minimize damage as effeciently as HubSpot did, then you can take all the risks you want.

What do you think? How could HubSpot have done things differently to maximize the impact of the ARG without upsetting its user base? Share your ideas!