Gary Con Communication Issues

This is absolutely spot-on.

Several of you have also pointed out issues with setting hard dates well in advance. Also a completely valid point and we totally agree. The complication with this year, however, is that operationally this is a first-year convention. We had many internal deadlines that we didn't want to communicate because we were simply not sure how all our new systems would come together. We are already well past when we originally wanted to communicate or execute some of this stuff. But we figured it out. Things mostly work now, and we can plan for the future with certainty. None of this, however, is meant to excuse our failure to communicate.

We're updating the website now and pushing out some more communications to address your concerns. We're also reminding our staff that these forums require our presence.

A lot of you here have some very valid angst, and more than anything I appreciate that you choose to speak up instead of walk away silently.

 

I'll chime in, too, just to say that I despise social media channels like Facebook and Twitter for this type of communication. They're unbelievably disorganized platforms and there's nothing users can do to make finding things on those sites less excruciating. Forums are nice and orderly and searchable.

 

Social media platforms are tough. The reach and engagement they uniquely provide do have visible results for us, especially for attracting new fans, but it is definitely a poor platform for organized communication. It is absolutely our intent to provide all the basic information people need, and answers to most questions that arise within our website as primary source, and the forums and official fb site as our most closely monitored forms of interaction (besides, of course, emailing us). Other channels should be used to direct folks to these official platforms. Something got lost in the last few months in terms of keeping focus on our official communication platforms vs. posting on facebook because it's easy.