See, people, this is how you prove you have a sense of humor when one of your employees goes bonkers on one of your (admittedly deserving) customer/troll hybrids:
From JetBlue:
Perhaps you heard a little story about one of our flight attendants? While we can’t discuss the details of what is an ongoing investigation, plenty of others have already formed opinions on the matter. Like, the entire Internet. (The reason we’re not commenting is that we respect the privacy of the individual. People can speak on their own behalf; we won’t do it for them.)
That bit about privacy matters to customers and employees.
No kidding, guys, actual headline about a big league community manager: “…the White House press secretary’s candor may be a sign he should switch to less visible role.”
It is a standard of conventional wisdom that people are idiots, can’t handle the truth, and facts must be dressed up and spun in order to be palatable. And it’s a fact that people who do tell the truth are usually “in trouble” at best and run out of town on a rail at worst.
Now here’s my problem with the conventional wisdom, besides it being cynical: It’s not actually true.
An audience is always composed of two groups – one, actual customers (or voters or whatever). Two, people with their own agenda. You might as well blow off the second group entirely, because they are never going to listen. It does not matter how much time you spend on spin and packaging and whatever. They are going to find a way to twist your words, take quotes out of context, and if all else fails, lie. Why waste time catering to their nonsense? I’ll tell you what, if your community is bigger than a thousand people, you don’t have time. Your only hope is to break people off from the herd at live events and get through to them when they don’t have an audience.
The actual customers are different. You still want to put your best foot forward. You still want to choose the perfect words, the words that will communicate your feelings and your intent as well as the facts. You still want to convey a sense of inclusion, of partnership, of value. You need to be in sync with your team in terms of your message and your timing. And you should never be rude to an individual (rude to hypothetical groups/strawmen – we CM types call that a “technique”) and you don’t need to say every little thing that pops into your head at the instant it does the popping.
But you really, really don’t have to avoid candor with actual customers. When you think you do, then… and only then… is it time to switch to a less visible role.
No, it’s not a Q&A, it’s my “managing questions” post at Modsquad.
It’s kind of funny – I let this blog go dark/dim because I felt like I’d said everything I could possibly say on the topic of community. Also, the MMO Underbelly series at MMORPG.com was completely sucking me dry.
But the Obvious Truth well apparently never runs dry. And I’m getting pings (but no jobs for remote employees, grumble crank moan) on how these little posts at Modsquad are really helpful to people doing strategic planning.
Well, yes. That’s why you hire a community director before you get into beta, after all.
Rant on: After ten years, the idea still persists that we’re forum mods – widgets you hire when you have customers and not before. You CAN hire community people that way, but you should call them “moderators.” Or you can hire someone whose job it is to babysit Facebook and Twitter, and that’s a useful job too, but that’s not a community director either. That’s a social media moderator.
Community directors DO strategic planning, tool development, customer research, and contribute to the design process both in terms of product development and marketing. We’re the glue holding the team together.
Today’s post over at ModSquad: Physical World Bonds
This is another dead horse I keep flogging, even though most companies do events in the physical world. My complaint is that the reasons for those events are usually aimed at marketing, aka sales and promotion.
I want to see more events aimed at community, aka retention. The motivation matters.
I did sound kind of formal and nervous in the first one, didn’t I. So I reverted to my actual tone in this one. The seven of you give awesome feedback 
It was hard to not go off on a tangent about leaderboards, and how the original Camelot leaderboards were pretty much entirely Scott Jennings going rogue and me going, “Ooh! Ooh! What about this?” and Scott saying please stop touching stuff on my desk.
Also, we crashed the game servers because we were complete effing n00bs.
But we had fun.
That last point about designing/building a back door into the system from the start… there aren’t many things in my career that I’d like to do over, believe it or not, but that point I’d take back in time and scream DO THIS! at myself at three different jobs.
I have mentioned before that one of the obvious truths of community management is respecting your players.
The fact that it has to be said is a little disgusting.
Don’t get me wrong, at industry events I was just as likely as the next CM to sit around participating in the Crazy Player Olympics. (The judges once gave me all 10s for the guy who flew out to Virginia from Illinois to demand his lost hammer back.) But the nuts are the outliers. If you do not genuinely care for your players, and think of them with respect, you are going to burn out like a White House press secretary.
Having respect for players means caring about the things that are important to them, both in the game itself and with the influences that shape their response to your product. So, in a traditional sword and board game, you should both care about the game, and at least respect the RPG mentality that leads people to your game.
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I started to write this somewhat wonky piece for this blog, and realized that I had a column due at MMORPG. That happens to me a lot, lately. I got the kernel of the piece – that bit of research – from my friend and former minion Jeremy, who also wrote a blog post about it.
The article ended up being a little different from my intended writeup, because the audience there is more general than the seven of you, who read, presumably, because you care about community stuff.
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Any time you change a post, a FAQ, an announcement, or a story for ANY REASON besides a very minor typo, you must put “EDITED mm/dd/yy HH:MM.”
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I love automatic trackbacks. I’m always interested in seeing what people are saying… or not saying. One example of the latter, my little reference-laden post about certain parties and their piss poor timing? That little post is one of the most heavily hit features on this entire blog. And yet? Almost no one is discussing it. They’re just passing the link to their friends, in emails or IMs or other means not trackable, saying “READ THIS.” And yet I’ve got almost no email on it, or any crankiness in the comments. I don’t preapprove my comments, and have deleted three comments in the history of this blog, so it’s not like I’m editing out the hate or anything. I have theories about the reasons for this strange aberration, but no evidence.
But as usual, I digress. I followed one of the trackbacks (in the Quid Pro Quo thread) to a blog called Geek Critique, where a fellow named Rob disagreed with some of my text. I nodded a bit while I was reading, seeing where he was coming from. One of his points, though, made me realize that I hadn’t fully explained my reasoning, and so I started to post a reply. The longer I typed, the more I realized that my response was covering a topic that is actually rather central to the way I conceive of true community work.
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