Our events & media manager Teri, with our Dreamcast Collection shirts from E3 2010

It feels sooooo good to be back! We’ve really missed blogging about all the cool stuff happening here at SEGA, and we’ve really missed reading all your comments, too. There’s lots of content to catch up on, and we’ll be doing just that over the next few weeks. We’ve also got exciting new stuff coming up. But for now, we wanted to catch you up on some of the changes we made while we were away,  so you don’t stub your toe on our new furniture, so to speak.

Blog Merge

Kellie (me!) enjoying a post-event drink at Sonic Boom 2011.

As you may know, we’ve maintained a few different blogs under the SEGA umbrella for a while now — the SEGA America blog, the SEGA Europe blog, and the Sonic blog included. What we’ve found is that we’re often posting the same content in multiple places — and this is more work for us and not as much new content for you. So we’ve condensed all of those blogs into one single blog (which  you are now reading). Community managers from both sides of the pond will be updating this new blog, and we hope this makes for a more consistent and unifying experience for everyone. We also promise to be as globally inclusive as we can by remembering to specify when promotions, release dates, etc are only for one country or another. But please be patient with us if we mess up occasionally, as this is a new blogging experience for all of us.

Because of this merge, we have a new URL — http://blogs.sega.com — and you may need to update your RSS feeds (if you read us via RSS) because of this. We have put redirects in place for our old URLs, so hopefully we don’t lose too many of you along the way.

I see some of you Sonic fans out there with pouty faces, because you enjoyed reading a blog that was only about Sonic and not our other titles. Well, first of all, I would suggest that you give reading our entire blog a chance, because  you might find something that you really like. But if you really just want only Sonic, we can help you out! The old Sonic Blognik URL redirects to a space on our blog that aggregates all of the Sonic posts on the blog in one spot. If you want all Sonic and only Sonic, this is the place to go.

New Look

Mark (Associate Producer) and Judy (Sr. Brand Manager working on Sonic) play bouncer at E3 2011.

The original structure of our blog is still the same — a 3 column layout with categories on the left and other fun stuff on the right. But we’ve made a few updates and hope you’ll take advantage of them!

First, you might have noticed our new banner, featuring Sonic. A lot of the characters in our old banner were a bit dated, so we’ve changed to a fresh look. Along with the new banner, you may notice that the splotchy background (or blue circles, if you are used to the Sonic blog) is gone and has been replaced with a clean, white background. We also placed links to our social media sites in the banner for easy access. (For ESRB reasons, the Flickr and YouTube point to the SegaAmerica accounts, but the Sega Europe Flickr and YouTube accounts are still active!)

The category list is still on the left, and still takes you directly to any specific game or event you want to see all of our blog entries on. We moved it up the page to make it more prominent and accessible, to help you find what you’re looking for more quickly. We also kept the calendar on the upper right side of the blog, in case you prefer to search for an entry by date instead of subject.

We put some new stuff on the right side, too. We added a Twitter widget, which shows the most recent tweets from the SEGA account. We also added a Facebook friend box for the SEGA page, so you can “like” us right from the blog.

Our final big change, and one that we are all VERY excited about, is the addition of social media sharing buttons on every blog entry. Now you can “like” and share our content on Facebook, give us a +1 on Google+, submit our article to StumbleUpon, or tweet a link to our article on your Twitter. We hope this helps you share our content with your friends and help us spread the SEGA love all around the interwebs!

Welcome Back!

Matt (Associate Producer) and Julian (Clumsyorchid, Community Manager) at San Diego Comic Con 2011

We also made some more minor updates while we were away, like upgrading to a new version of WordPress. We think we’ve got all the bugs ironed out, but if you see something you think shouldn’t be happening (or don’t see something you think should be happening) please let us know in the comments.

What hasn’t changed is our commitment to bringing you all the best SEGA-related news and awesome stuff from around the web. And as you’ve seen in this entry, we like to highlight the people who work here at SEGA. We want you to know that there are real people on this end that are just as passionate about our games and our company as you are. We also love to highlight our fans, because you guys make awesome fan art, come to conventions in amazing costumes, and are just all-around the best fans ever.

We’re thrilled to welcome you back to the new and hopefully improved SEGA blog! Let us know what  you think in the comments. And don’t forget to like/+1/submit/tweet about us on your way down to the comment box.