I touched on this topic in my last column for MMORPG (the which came across as comedy, I hope, but I meant every word), but this morning I’ve read two stories where fairly large companies were just Not Getting It. So I thought I’d growl a little more.

At MMORPG, I said: “Some are very casual, and take a “we’re all just players together” approach. Others are very formal, with a top down approach. That’s not the same as bad communication, mind you. It’s really an issue of tone. I tell clients and employers that they can choose whatever tone they want, and that there are pros and cons to both. The only bad choice is to try and blend the two.”

The reason it’s a bad choice is because you can’t have it both ways. You’re screwing with people’s expectations when you do that, and that goes to the heart of what good community management is all about.

The top-down communication style is just that, a style. You can have very good communication with that style, with regular (predictable) updates and lots of accurate and timely information. You don’t build a lot of relationships that way, and some players (especially those trained by other companies to feel entitled to more direct involvement) will hate you. Not to put TOO fine a point on that, but… so? Most players have relationships with their families, their friends, and their cats. They don’t want one with you,  and they think the people who do are weird. As long as you communicate clearly, often, and with basic respect for their intelligence, most players will just accept it as how you do business.

And when you say “here is the decision we’ve made, the end,” people will for the most part accept it. Unless it’s really stupid, in which case they’ll leave – but without the same levels of argument and internet drama as a more involved community.

So, yeah, I see the advantages to the top down approach. I see why managers, particularly the autocratic types, adore it. I just don’t like it. It goes contrary to my entire philosophy of community building, which is focused on relationship building.

Most players aren’t looking for a relationship, and as I’ve said before, my duty to them is to keep from screwing up my game to cater to the vocal minority. The players who DO want to feel like they’re part of things are influencers and evangelizers. This is why my style tends to take me to startups. Without a pile of hundred dollar bills filling my spare Olympic swimming pool to fund my outreach campaign, the company needs the connections to these key customers.

I also believe that a virtual world is not a product in the sense that a single player game is a product. It’s an experience, one shaped largely by the community. The relationships I build aren’t just between the company and the players, but between the players themselves. Without a sense of investment, people play an MMO and drift away. Relationships equal retention.

But the downside is the sense of personal investment leads people to want more decision making authority than they have. At the end of the day, a small handful of people make the decisions. At a company that values their community relationships, I’m usually consulted… but I’ve never been the one to make the final call. I tell employers they need to make decisions based on community, CS, and metrics (“what people are actually doing, as opposed to what they say they are doing”).

Anyway, a community that feels invested is much more prone to uproar than a community that is used to being told what they’re going to get. If you want the good things about relationship-based community management, you accept the inevitable uproar and you find ways to make that work in your favor (hint – lots of energy to be harnessed, there).

If you emphasize the community building, or give the impression that the community is central to your strategy, you have no right to expect that community to roll over and accept your pronouncements – and you write your announcements with a lot of thought put into the tone.

You know what my job is? Oh, sure, there’s a lot of stuff about “building relationships” and “communication” and “facilitation” and “sanity checking,” but really, my job usually involves apologizing.

I’ve apologized for things I did, things I was about to do, things I didn’t do, and even things I tried desperately to avert by methods including begging, pleading, and screaming. I’ve apologized for wrongdoing, attempted rightdoing that went horribly awry, and things I would do again without a second thought. I’ve apologized for how I came across, how the listener thought I came across, for how I didn’t come across but the listener thought I secretly meant to come across, and for being across the hall from someone who did not wash his hands after he peed.

None of this has injured me in the slightest. It hasn’t cost me anything, either.  It is part of the job, like correcting release copy and putting on pants when I go to meetings.

It’s not just the Ocean Marketing hilarity that’s got me thinking. I’ve been seeing more and more protests at stores that happen because of the following:

1. Some ignorant employee violates their own company policy and orders a customer to stop doing something the employee doesn’t like. Breastfeeding, being black, whatever.

2. Customer turns out to be educated, aware of policy and/or the law. Complains to management. Gets runaround.

3. Complains to HQ. Gets runaround.

4. Rallies internet friends and stages protest… to demand support for something the company already supports.

5. Company gains reputation for being against something they support.

The accompanying article (here’s the one I read today) usually makes two things clear – one, the originally offended person never heard “I’m sorry” from anyone, and two, the flack in charge of providing quotes didn’t say “I’m sorry,” either.

Maybe these people just don’t understand the central component of the public spokesperson’s job. I hereby will do my holiday service and provide a helpful how-to guide for public facing employees:

HOW TO APOLOGIZE TO AN ANGRY CUSTOMER

Step one: Listen to angry customer until customer has run out of words.

Pro-tip: You need to actually listen, because you will need to remember what he said for step two.

Step two: Say to the customer, “Please correct me if I have misunderstood you. You are angry because X, Y, and Z.”

Pro-tip: Repeat steps one and two if necessary.

Step three: Pause for one moment and think about how you would feel if you were the customer.

Step four: Apologize, using the active voice. “I am sorry [this] happened.”

Pro-tip: You have to actually mean it. You have to be sorry this human being in front of you is upset. Do you have to be sorry for what happened? Well, if you/your employer was at fault, yes. But the minimum you should be able to muster up is genuine regret that this person is angry, and a desire to make them happy again. (Edit to add: I use my regret over the customer’s distress as a shortcut to the right frame of mind if the cause of their upset doesn’t get me there. Thanks to Sidereal for helping me clarify my thinking.) If you cannot muster up that much, you are in the wrong damned job.

Step five: If someone from the media calls for comments, say “I apologized to the customer and we will work hard to avoid XYZ in the future.”

That’s…kind of all there is to it. I’ve been apologizing professionally for more than ten years now. I admit the part about being sincere is what keeps this from being “the easiest job in the history of mankind,” but even for the empathy-challenged, you can usually figure it out within a couple months. There are about a billion PR/Marketing niches that don’t require even that much, so it’s not like a failure to care is going to limit your career in any way.

But if you’re going to sit on the front line, you should probably figure out how to give a green-assed damn about your own customers. Probably. What do I know.

When I’m interviewed, I’m usually asked what my favorite part of community is. The answer is “the players,” which always makes me a feel a little weird, because the reason interacting with players is my favorite part is because I’m basically a player that someone is paying to hang out with players. Since I’m usually alone in the room, am I really just talking to myself? MMOs: The gateway drug to solipsism.

My second favorite part of community management is a little less mentally masturbatory. I call it the batting cage.

Picture the first night of a beta, or a stress test, or launch, or even a trade show. You’re in a small space and you cannot leave. Problems or people who absolutely must have your attention pop up every couple of seconds. The pace is relentless. There are no do-overs – a miss is a miss, but you can’t stop to cry over it or you’ll miss the next three. On the best of these occasions, I slide into a groove and everything thrown at my face gets a clean, solid hit. (Well, not the people. It does not help to punch people, no matter what you might have heard.) The adrenaline helps, but endurance matters more. At the end of the night, there’s this sense of accomplishment, of having been a vital part of the process of making a game.

It is seriously fun. It’s like PVP with software.

I just saw a very silly article in the paper on how parents can protect their children from bullying in the online world. All right, it wasn’t all silly – “don’t post naked pictures” is a lesson that needs to be learned early. (Hey, and parents, pro-tip, think about your future credibility vis a vis this discussion before you hit post on those adorable naked pictures of your toddler. Also, if you really cannot control yourself, DON’T TAG THE SHOT WITH HIS NAME. Seriously, do you hate him so much that you want him to have no friends in seventh grade?)

The thing that made me snicker uncontrollably was “Stress to your children that they should never physically meet anyone they’ve only become friends with online.”

Really? In 2011, we’re giving this advice with a straight face?

“Don’t meet your online friends in person, son.”

“How’d you and Mommy meet?”

“Match.com and then we hung out in World of Warcraft. Now shut up and eat your peas.”

I admit I’m a little vague on some of the details, because kids don’t come with a user manual. Oh, who am I kidding, that doesn’t matter. I’ve never read user manuals in my life except for when someone is paying me to spellcheck them.

Anyway, manual or not, I’m fairly sure that the point of parenting isn’t just to keep the little demons alive until they can pass on their own genetic material. Wait. Okay, that is the point, but there is a higher moral point to human parenting, which is to equip the little demons with the skills to keep themselves alive, because you can’t always be standing there.

When it comes to meeting online friends in the physical world*, a more reasonable (and ultimately more useful/protective) rule is “Kid, talk to me about meeting online friends and we’ll make a plan together.”

Parents can help their children to understand that people are not always what they say they are (and that sometimes people are what they say they are, but other things as well). Parents can and should teach their children basic safety rules like “Always meet in a public place, and always bring another person with you.” Meetings between elementary aged children should be negotiated between the respective parents. Junior high students should be supervised through the process. If you haven’t equipped a kid to function safely by high school, you don’t even want to know what they’re getting up to.

We must teach our children to safely negotiate a modern world where many people meet and interact online before meeting in person. Sticking your head in the sand and saying “just don’t do it” is a breathtaking abdication of responsibility. How’s that abstinence-only education working out for you?

* Did you see what I did there? Maybe if we taught our kids that the online world IS a real one, and the stuff you say matters, maybe there’d be less bullying.