The actual post is up at my employer’s site. (It’s hard to see hotlinks on that site – the article I was riffing off of is here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2262544/) But comments there are borked, and I figured, if y’all wanted to talk about the post, I ought to give you a place to do it before I pimped it all over creation.

If you’re looking for a diatribe about Sarah Palin, you aren’t going to get it.  If you’re looking for me to admire her community management, you sure as hell aren’t going to get it.

But brand management is a different animal. I respect the hell out of whoever she’s got doing brand management, and I stand in awe of what they’ve accomplished on behalf of their client. The client is doing her own part, though. If someone came up with a natty armband and some good slogans for her, she’d be unstoppable.

The two are not related. The job is a QA job on an upcoming game, and while you will not grow rich doing this job, you will make some useful connections and make a little money without having to relocate or even put on pants. And guys, you know I love you, but “I did this open beta” is not actually job experience. However, something like a team lead position is, if you can shore that up by having at least sort of related professional experience. The posting is here: http://sacramento.craigslist.org/sof/1736581596.html

As for the ancient fish: I did my Metaverse Mod Squad post yesterday and I was maybe a little punchy. The seven of you who have been reading my stuff for… a decade… know that I sometimes torture analogies until they scream and break loose their chains to flee into the night. (See what I did there?) At any rate, I compared developers who post on message boards to coelacanths.

I started to write an anecdote in my post for ModSquad today (a brief run down on multiple feedback channels) to explain exactly how I knew some of these things and decided… nah.

But I couldn’t not snicker about it. The four of you who have been reading my ramblings for ten years (HOLY CRAP, TEN YEARS) will join me in a hearty laugh at this one particular bit:

Forum posters aren’t just telling you what you need to know. They’re also performing for an audience and getting feedback of their own. You don’t have time to filter out the nugget of truth in both the rant and the feedback letter.

Oh, the irony. It burns.

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.

You guys will recognize the opening line from a post I made a month ago. But in the last month I’ve seen more than one example of how people aren’t born knowing this stuff, so I made it into a blog entry.

I’m enjoying the stories, posted and emailed, of those of you who’ve made use of this stuff outside gaming. We are the gaming generation, and by golly, we’re taking over.

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.

You can read me trying to sound erudite three times a week at Metaverse Mod Squad’s blog.

The seven of you will probably not see any really new material, but hey, getting paid to blog is always ten kinds of awesome, so I thought I’d mention it here.

The Friday feature, BTW, is going to be Pro Tips From CMs. The MMS team is composed of a lot of terrific people who will no doubt have great material, but if any of you have a tip you’d like to see included, gimme a holler. I’ll post anon or with name and game link, as you choose.

The bulk of a community manager’s job, once the community is set up and running, is expectation management. When you invite people to ask questions, you create an expectation that you’ll answer them all, not cherry pick the easy ones. When you post five times a day, you create the expectation that you will continue to do so. When you moderate gently and lightly, you create the expectation that it will be always thus. When you respond to a user’s feedback with an immediate change in the game, you create an expectation that you’ll do that forever.

This is all very simple stuff. I am not sure the explosion of community-style jobs has been a good thing for the industry, because these basics don’t seem to have been learned.

But enough of my cranky old person’s ranting. I actually came in to post something interesting that I’ve noticed over my last few gigs. And then I realized I didn’t have an Examiner post up for today, and decided to experiment with posting it there. It’s obvious truth, to some extent, but the seven of you are a little more informed than the average bear.

Just how much more informed you are is the subject of another post.

There was once a repairman called in to fix a big, expensive machine. He examined it for a few minutes, whacked it with a hammer, and the machine started right up. He presented his bill for $400. “But all you did was hit it with a hammer!” complained the customer.  The repairman said “Oh, I only billed you $5 for that. The other $395 was for my knowing where to hit it.”

I am still with Quick Hit, but I’m back on the terms where I was over the summer – part time, and non-exclusive. Ain’t nobody going away mad, now. Dunno if you all have noticed, but the economy is in free fall, and venture capitalists are telling their projects to spend every dollar like it’s their last. A community manager retains customers. A community manager acquires customers. Community managers can help you prioritize your to-do list, even. What a CM can’t do is build features out of raw code. For that, you need a programmer, and headcount budgets are what they are.

I don’t have to like it in order to understand it. I love the Quick Hit team, and I really love the Quick Hit community. I’m honored to still be associated with the project, but I am, once again, consulting, writing, and raising hell.