The Story of MaTTcom: “Mediocre Freelance Artist” to General Manager of CLG
Matthew “MaTTcom” Marikian is currently the General Manager of Counter Logic Gaming, an eSports organisation based on one of the most popular current games, League of Legends. I will be using MaTTcom’s successful journey through the eSports scene as an example of the right steps to take in which to develop an authentic online professional profile.
Branding and Visibility
MaTTcom started out a freelance artist, an “overwhelmingly mediocre” one as he stated out in his blog. He realised that what he could not produce with pure talent alone, he could compensate with being highly flexible and adaptive in his work. MaTTcom expanded his talent in the game League of Legends by producing related art work . His work soon gained a lot of attention by the gaming community through mediums such as reddit and his personal deviantart profile. While MaTTcom may not be the most talented in his field, he made up for it by marketing himself really well which is considerably more important (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2013). A quick search on League of Legends sub reddit of “MaTTcom” yields these results (the thousand numbers are upvotes, the reddit equivalent of Facebook likes):
Standing Out
MaTTcom stayed relevant in the eSports scene by affiliating a portion of his work to a League of Legends team, which is the same team he is managing now, Counter Logic Gaming or CLG. MaTTcom was not only one of the popular artists amongst the League of Legends community but was probably the only one that was worth CLG’s attention. This may not have been as simple as the ‘Employ Adam‘ case but MaTTcom stood out just as well and that is what mattered back when League of Legends was at the beginnings of its popularity.
While it can be said MaTTcom was lucky that he got into the League of Legends scene relatively early and that he dove into a huge gap in the market, he made him self known, stood out and stayed relevant to develop his professional profile.
References:
MaTTcom photo from MaTTcom blog: An artist’s journey in LoL and eSports- http://blog.ibuypower.com/blog/2014/05/04/mattcom-blog-artists-journey-lol-esports/
Counter Logic Gaming – http://lol.esportspedia.com/wiki/Counter_Logic_Gaming
MaTTcom’s deviantart profile – http://mattcomgo.deviantart.com/
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (2013). The Future of You. https://hbr.org/2013/01/the-future-of-you/
Simple Sells – http://simplesells.tumblr.com/day/2013/01/03/