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.
I will tell you, as a fan, it is strange sometimes being in a relationship-based community.
As you say, we feel like we should have more power than we have, but there is also that expectation of getting a reaction from you, specifically, that may work in a small community but it is actually the same problem as twitter. It is way too easy to eventually have so many followers that you can’t respond to everybody, causing you to lose the connections you originally developed, and every reply you do actually give just breeds more responses.
I see this a lot on the League of Legends forums, which has a terrible troll community, but the Riot employees seem to have a lot of freedom to discuss whatever they feel like on there and some really great discussion comes from that. But inevitably, every conversation devolves into each customer spamming the torch they personally carry for whatever cause is most important to them, no matter the purpose of the actual conversation.
You have been talking about the job of the CM, and I know you have talked about having an overall company policy about talking with customers on forums, but what do you think of communities like LoL where the vocal trolls swarm the forums, while hopefully the majority of readers are like me, just trying to find cool info to learn? Any ideas on how a company can get their message through the noise without looking like they are ignoring customer concerns?
Sorry if I rambled. Posting while listening to a podcast and working is probably not good for a coherent train of thought.
@Rathwirt
It can be very hard because one of the walls you face as the CM is simply the flood of discussions that you find in big communities. This is why taking a relationship building approach is rather difficult pre-launch because on launch, the community that existed before that launch are drowned out by new fish who just joined the community. The same applies on large-scale communities where you have an influx of new players all the time in a free-to-play game. Those relationships and even your communication can become very much like throwing a small pebble in a very large lake in terms of impact.
In all my years in community management, I still feel the best approach is by having a community representative filter those discussions and use one official channel to communicate a result. This is where the community portal shines the most in official communication from those filters where it has a much larger impact on the community as opposed to small victories in the forums that will surely be drowned out.
However, no matter what you do, you cannot listen or respond to everyone. There will always be something you missed or one customer you are not acknowledging in that one communication. I think this is where Sanya mentioned metrics in one article to define what is and is not a problem you should address. That’s why it’s critical you filter your community voice and compare it to the bigger picture before you act. Otherwise, you will drown yourself in that communication not hitting the key topics that represents the underlying problems versus problems that are really not going to be addressed any time soon (or addressing topics that are not relevant to the larger audience).
On topic, it’s always interesting to talk about when and where the community should have say in a particular process. Most companies are still trying to figure out where community management should fall in that process too. Should community have ownership over a certain area of product development or should they be used for consulting purposes only, etc.
For video game development, especially as most community management deals with the publishing end of companies, community is critical as consultants. It’s not our jobs to define what is right or wrong for the game in terms of game design for one example. Thus, community management works best as consultants or as influence on the best approach to what the player base needs. One link in the bigger chain, not having the final say or any greater power than the other links (customer support, quality assurance, marketing and etc).