We Need Community Managers

Our friend Ron Meiners of Multiverse contributes a brief essay responding to Raph Koster's "Age of Dinosaurs" talk at AGC. The argument: Market success in synthetic worlds requires community-building.

Specifically, Ron writes:

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A Proposed Footnote to Raph's AGC presentation: you need CM's to lead the little fuzzy guys to the next Age...

Raph Koster's talk at AGC “The Age of Dinosaurs”, as reported in Gamasutra, talked about changes in progress in the game industry, driven by the limitation of our current business practices and the ongoing evolution of web media and the creation of independent content. (I actually missed the talk itself, due to my involvement with the Multiverse presentation that ran concurrently).

One part of Raph's talk struck me as worth comment, as a Community Manager, as a practioner of the fine art of building relationships with our customers... Raph said (as quoted in Gamasutra)

   

"Content isn't worth a damn," Koster   continued. "What is of value is the relationship between the consumer   and the producer. Being good is no longer an exclusive. In a hit-driven   business, the epitome of success is to be the Beatles or Elton John, which   means having a consistent record of making blockbusters, or almost never   screwing up, of always earning out reliably and of doing this over the course   of decades. Those people are so rare they are the dodo, and their share of   the audience as a percentage of the population is shrinking."     "The goal instead should be to be the Grateful Dead. You don't want to   be the number one hit, you want a relationship so that you can ding them over   and over and over again. The band's t-shirts may make more than their   recordings."

 

Now while one might question the desire to be the Grateful Dead, the point is well-taken, and I would even like to offer some expansion. Community Managers are usually seen as slightly advanced fan boyz, with little impact beyond keeping the forums under control (and due props to the members of Patricia Pizer's “Community by Design” AGC panel, which advocated much closer working relationships between CM's and Designers). But in addition to the value of community considerations in the design process, in looking to build long-term loyalty with our customers, the front line is the CM. And we've been seeing this as our role for some time.

Early on in my career it was apparent how powerful customer loyalty could be- the example that comes to mind is Mplayer users hacking the client so as to be able to stay logged on until the servers were literally shut down. That kind of loyalty offers the option of building (happy) long-term customer relationships, rather than having to re-attract the same customers all over again with each new release. The footnote to Raph's suggested new consumer interaction model has to do with the value, or neccessity, of the CM in this process. We're the ones engaged in building on the interactions around our games, resolving complaints, and working with the tools we have to design and implement activities and social dynamics that supplement the game experience, often to fill in gaps in the original design. We're the ones who are nurturing that loyalty, working with the cultures of our worlds, and trying to build positive social dynamics, and to build long-term relationships. Thus, to make the transition from dinosaur to mammal, the CM has a vital role.

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Comments

[Nato Welch]

All this is obsesively focused on commercial success. Is that the only thing that counts? Is it possible to foster community in a virtual world without a commercial entity presiding over it?

[Michael Chui]

All this is obsesively focused on commercial success. Is that the only thing that counts? Is it possible to foster community in a virtual world without a commercial entity presiding over it?

I have a problem. My problem is that I don't actually care about money. I am an idealist, a dreamer, and I'd like to live in a world where no one buys anything because no one needs to. Unfortunately, this is a fantasy.

Commercial success represents survival, not dominance. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth, the electricity, the maintenance. You need money to do this. The money has to come from somewhere.

There are ways to foster community in a virtual world without a commercial entity presiding over it, of course. But these ways are difficult. You basically need a sponsor to pay the bills without getting in your way (too much). There are probably a few other ways. But the self-sufficient way (if your sponsor suddenly withdraws or folds... you're dead) means that the service you provide generates the income that pays the bills to continue the service. That's how civic systems generally work: it's called a tax.

[Andy Havens]

Since when did "commercial" become a dirty word? As long as we're not talking about unfair or inasanely one-sided competition, the commercial marketplace does all kinds of good things in all kinds of areas, especially in entertainment related systems and platforms.

You often don't have a choice in stuff like health-care, transportation, environmental living conditions, utilities, etc. etc. But entertainment? Crap... Ain't nobody holding a gun to anybody's head and saying, "Hey! HEY!!! When we said 'Everybody Loves Raymond,' we meant YOU TOO, BUSTER!" Nobody's forcing anybody to play WoW vs. SL (which, last time I checked, you could play for free... hmmm...).

Is it possible to foster community in a virtual world without a commercial entity presiding over it? Sure. Ask yourself the same question, but substitute some other industry:

"Is it possible to foster community in a literary world without... etc." Yup. Get a whole bunch of people to do so, and we call it a library. You could do the same thing with a VW. If you got enough people together and said, "We will donate the time and money necessary to buy/rent the server space, hire the programmers, write the content, do the upkeep, etc. etc." you could have a free, public VW for whatever "public" you define. Either those who donated, or everyone. Your call.

Problem is, the marketplace is just much more damn efficient at doing that kind of thing than groups of well-meaning activists. I'm a liberal to the point of almost being a socialist, and I still favor the market in almost every field of human endeavor. The government should be in charge of some things, because competing for blood money (wars), reaping (health care), and lowest common denominator futures (education) seems to me to be a bad idea. But what kind of games do you think we'd get if the gubberment were in charge? Yoiks!

There are a number of Open Source VW projects going on right now. None are as slick as the commercial ones because... well... slick costs. Heck, if you don't mind using text and hyperlinks as your world-nodes, you can build your own world for free [PIMP ON] on my site, www.playbywiki.com [/PIMP OFF].

Now... I'm going to go back and take umbrage at Koster's remark, "Content isn't worth a damn." What a load. You can have the best community building team in the world. If you're humping a crap product, the people won't come to commune with you. Or, if we're talking Long Tail and micro-niches, sure... you can have a VW with 3 bright-eyed CMs and 17 players who are all gloriously happy. That's fine. Really. I think it's great that tech can now enable everybody to go and do their own thing. I know that some of the "communities" I participate in online are pretty damned small. But they also have some pretty damned good content, and that's why I'm there. Not because some CM is blowing smoke up my avatar.

[Matt Mihaly]

Michael Chui wrote:

There are ways to foster community in a virtual world without a commercial entity presiding over it, of course. But these ways are difficult. You basically need a sponsor to pay the bills without getting in your way (too much).

Actually, no, you don't. There are hundreds of virtual worlds with strong communities (text MUDs primarily) run completely for free and paid for out of the pockets of the owners, purely as a hobby.

--matt

[Thomas Malaby]

Matt's right. I think it would help this conversation to think of the economy in virtual worlds as involving much more than market exchange. Reciprocity and learning are constantly operating alongside, and interacting with, market exchange, and there is no shortage of examples in VWs and offline of societies where these other dimensions of the economy are robust enough to balance out the power of the market (although I think most VWs tend to be overridden by the market). It's not an either/or proposition of market or state; there are other forms of governance and distribution that VWs are well-poised to explore.

[Cyanbane]

I completely agree, A great example of this is the relationship of the CM with 3rd party sites. I run a fair size MMO fansite. I do it as a hobby, and if you factor in the value of my time invested into it, the site probably loses money in the long run. It doesn't really matter to me, because I enjoy doing it, but one of the reasons I enjoy doing it is because of the relationship of our site with the CM as an intermediary between us (myself and other fansite staff) and the game. Yeah, i know that sounds quite odd thinking of him a liaison for between us and the game (specifically in relation to the fact that his mortgage is paid by said game), but that is what makes a him a great CM. Someone who filters, summarizes, and clarifies problems with an MMO for the developers, yet they also have to explain to the community steps taken within the game in relation to the problems reported. They have to be the perfect ambassador. It is a very tight rope to walk, and it takes a very special person to do that in my opinion, but I also think this specific game is starting to see that the CM is by far one of the most important position for the game, if not the most important position after launch. Unfortunately the game I have a fan site for is losing the best CM in the industry in my opinion, form what I understand not because of another company/game, but because of external factors. It, as a 3rd part operator, is a huge impact on me, specifically related to the intermediary for the game and my site. I am sure it will all be for better in the end, but it really does show me personally what power the CM wields with the online community, and if I were the head of a dev studio, I could easily see where it IS the most important position post launch, specifically for games that entail a lot of communication for updates. The specific game I am talking about I hope understands this, and will choose the next CM carefully. In short in relation to this post and as a great analogy, I do view this specific CM (or past CM as of today) as the Jerry Garcia of the game (band). The games brand and reputation was very much dependent upon him, when he leaves he will leave a gaping hole, it is certain the band will continue touring, as for ticket sales they have us deadheads locked, but for new listeners it might be some tough venues from here on out.

[WorldMaker]

There have been many text worlds I've been on, or read about, or generally just admired from a distance where the CMs were the bastions, the focal points, of story telling. They were the wizened kings and caring queens (or whatever genre analogy you prefer) guiding the very feel of the world from seats very close to the pilot (to break to a different metaphor).

The CM as glorified forum monkey is a strange beast. Partly, I think, it says something about these games that so much time is spent on out of game experience here. What do forums successfully convey that might not be done in game? I'm not being rhetorical, I think its an interesting question that more game designers should be asking themselves... I'm curious how often "oh, a 'forum' thing on the main website" is a decision made by marketers...

Not that I think there aren't things that a forum brings to the table, but certainly an "official" forum needs more to its existence than to be a place for CMs to spend all of their time responding to complaints about the game.

For instance, I think the way that the "official forums" for Uru have always been full of cryptic story puzzles, very directly tying together the forum and game experience, is a very unique step in that direction. How well that sort of thing works with other MMO styles is a seperate matter altogether, I realize, but certainly food for thought...

[tom gordon]

In 2001 I set up a company specifically to provide professional community management services to online games, game services and MMOs, based on my previous experience helping to set up and run what was at the time one of the largest online game communities in the world.

Not a single MMO developer I spoke to in the following three years was even remotely interested in community management or customer support (both of which are, in my mind, linked), to the point where it became pointless from a commercial perspective to even consider speaking to any MMO or online game developer about community management. The one company we did deal with in terms of community management took every community and customer support suggestion we made and ignored them - even basic ones like providing information about the game *before* registration, not after (yes, really, you had to register for this pay to play online game before you could find out anything about the game).

Forgive my pessimism, but when it comes to Community Management, most of the large MMOs I've played, tested or looked at are all lacking any decent or integrated form of CM and CS. One company I spoke to - off the record - even admitted that their (hugely popular) MMO didn't have any CS tools built into the game at all, as CS and CM were extremely low priority.

Even Raph's comment: "What is of value is the relationship between the consumer and the producer" rankles me, as the primary reason for my giving up SWG was the appalling customer support and community management within the game, and the absolute lack of interest show by the company in the players within the game. I even used SWG as an example of how *not* to provide community management and customer support once, as the CM's and CSRs appeared to do everything they could to break the relationship between the consumer and the producer, even going so far as to abrogate responibility for large portions of support.

As a company we don't do Community Management anymore - it's too enervating. When I play a massively multiplayer game, I no longer have any expectation of receiving community or customer support, and if something goes wrong, I don't even bother trying to get help - I just move on, and if it gets too bad, switch game.

No current MMO, in my view, has anything close to a serious commitment to community management from the company providing the MMO, something distinct from games which actually have community seperate from the provider, which is a great shame.

[Cael]

I disagree.

Somebody always has to, right?

Well, others have already written about how CS makes absolutely no difference in terms of customer retention and how CS can never be good enough. Since it'll never be good enough, one has to wonder why anyone would bother to spend money on it all.

Secondly... Community Managers? Please, please give me a break. The only players CMs have any relationship with are the "catass" type who troll forums during the time they're meant to be working or when the game server is down. The enthusiasts. The ones who, if there was no official forum would go make their own forum to whine and be stupid on (and very often do even if an official forum exists).

I don't see (for example) the Rolling Stones as having any relationship with their fans at all. They certainly don't consult with fans about songwriting decisions.

I think the "interactive medium" bit has gone to some peoples' heads. The consumption may be interactive. The creation is not. Let consumers consume - don't get anywhere near letting them influence the creation process lest all we end up with is McWoW and EQKing.

[Raph]

In context, the statement means "the fair market value of content is asymptotically approaching zero, as far as consumers are concerned, simply because content is increasingly everywhere and increasingly cheaper."

Even Raph's comment: "What is of value is the relationship between the consumer and the producer" rankles me, as the primary reason for my giving up SWG was the appalling customer support and community management within the game, and the absolute lack of interest show by the company in the players within the game.

I think that for a while, SWG actually had the best community management in the industry. Particularly in the run-up to launch and for a period after launch.

[Thomas Malaby]

(trying to fix the ital bomb, but we may need Ted to do it from the author interface...)

[Thomas Malaby]

Fixed, apparently. :-)

[Prokofy Neva]

Jerry Lives!

Great insight, Raph.

These companies need to spend more on community managers, appreciate the role more, and upgrade its status within the company with the programmers, who sneer at them, and with the fans, who abuse them. They shouldn't be wisened kings and queens but, well...community managers.

[Samantha LeCraft]

As anyone who attended the AGC panel with Patricia Pizer, Betsy Book, and myself will know, there are those of us in development who believe strongly in the importance of community. For those of you who didn't catch the panel, let me re-iterate some of the things I said there (my apologies to everyone who heard this the first time around).

I believe that MMOG communities are black holes. At a panel on how to best use third party fan/news/community sites to your game's advantage, at AGC the day after my panel, someone from the audience stood up and said that the reason that players are so demanding of developers is that players don't understand the development process. "If we could teach the players more about the process," said this person (whose name I didn't catch -- I had to run out in the middle of the panel, but no, not because I was offended, for those who were wondering! ;) ), "they would understand and they would stop demanding so much."

I couldn't disagree with this statement more. Getting back to my black hole comment, I truly believe that it doesn't matter how much attention, or access, or information we give to the community as a whole, or to individual players, they will always want more. It's an insatiable beast, and the more we feed it the more entitled the players feel. They pay good money for this game! They pay our salaries!! We must explain to them why we made that change! We must get their approval on all changes before we make them!!

IMO, that path leads to nothing but pain. We end up kowtowing to the most devoted, most neurotic 5% of the playerbase, ignoring the vast majority of players who will never post to the official message boards. I think that we should restructure our relationship to the community, especially in terms of post-launch. I definitely believe in the importance of the community, in the importance of respecting the community, and getting feedback from them. However, I do not think that the community is best served by official message boards run by the company. We are spending too much time with the neurotic 5%, and not nearly enough time with the third-party community sites, the experienced guilds, and the social mavens.

We need the developers to be able to communicate upcoming changes, with help from both Marketing and Community Relations, in such a way that attention isn't drawn away from the developer's comments by replies from the 5% (perhaps through a Developer Blog with the comments disabled?). We need to solicit input from all players in a way that encourages constructive feedback, but doesn't allow them to use our resources to air grievances publicly. We need to search out guilds who have a strong understanding of the gameplay mechanics, and lurk on their forums to gather reactions to recent or upcoming changes to the game. And above all, we need to fight the sense of entitlement that nearly every MMOG to date has fostered, while encouraging the growth of the community and cultivating a reputation of valuing and genuinely liking the players (imagine that!).

I also strongly believe that all this argues for stronger, more professional Community Relations representatives, rather than any form of downgrading of the community team. I've seen situations where the development team sees the Community Relations team as the enemy; where communication between these two groups is none existent; and where the Community Relations representatives are unable to do anything but apologize for the actions of the development team. All of these situations are harmful to the business as a whole, and management needs to be as aware of these issues as they are of all other communication and pipeline issues within the company.

As a Designer and an advocate for MMOG community issues, I take a lot of my cues from Disney: do not have official message boards, listen to the larger community rather than the vocal community (ie, Winnie the Pooh vs. Mr. Toad), and always make sure your representatives to the public are in a good mood.

[Michael Chui]

Having no Internet at home means I'm slow on the response...

Actually, no, you don't. There are hundreds of virtual worlds with strong communities (text MUDs primarily) run completely for free and paid for out of the pockets of the owners, purely as a hobby.

I probably should've mentioned that you can sponsor yourself. That IS what I meant. To me, a sponsor means someone who puts money into an operation without expecting a monetary return; it doesn't have to mean another person.

[ron meiners]

"All this is obsesively focused on commercial success. Is that the only thing that counts? Is it possible to foster community in a virtual world without a commercial entity presiding over it?"

Actually, the only community folks I know who aren't essentially in it because they'd be doing it anyway and are just lucky enough to get paid are the ones who see it as a career path to marketing (go figure). To stay in community work, you pretty much just have to love creating positive social connections. The money's just for bills and things.

My point is really that most no-one else (in the game development business) is paying attention- and that there are some very powerful and potentially valuable reasons that people might. I'd even argue that a really good community manager can shape the culture of the community well enough to avoid Samantha's "black hole" syndrome- though the proactive approach to community that she advocates is something I'm very much in agreement with. Or to say it again: folks do this work because they value and are good at creating positive social dynamics, and, if supported, can help create a positive experience around games and virtual worlds (especially) that greatly enhance the user experience.

I suppose I'd want to go even further, and say that one of the primary reasons people dedicate themselves to this wacky profession- or vocation- is the belief that positive social interactions, connections, bonds, meaningful exchanges between individuals, generally have a genuinely positive effect on those involved. Or to put it another way, I think there are very real reasons people become as passionately attached to their communities as they do, from being "On Tour" with the Dead (oooh, that took me back!) to hacking Mplayer to the insane dedication it takes to run a good fan site- or to run privately hosted Uru Live servers after the game has been shut down, long enough to demonstrate to a new publisher that the product has a very passionate consumer base (GameTap has resurrected Uru Live, as it were, the Myst based MMO that Ubisoft took through Beta but didn't launch).

I can't help but really see this stuff in somewhat revolutionary terms: the dawning realization that good business can very much rest on solid, interactive, long-term relationships with your customers... Communities of passion have had very positive stuff going on for some time, and I can't help but think that if business decisions are made with meaningful input from the customer base, some "better" decisions might get made.

[Peter S.]

I think that most of the comments here are based on the conclusion that by saying 'Content isn't worth a damn,' Mr. Koster meant that content isn't worth a damn, period. Note the punctuation.

That's one interpretation, but I think that when he says this and continues to say that what matters is the relationship between the consumer and the producer he's saying that Current content isn't worth a damn. What matters is the producer's ability to react to their target consumer and tweak content appropriately.

I disagree with that because you have to start somewhere. In the words of Steve Jobs, 'You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.' You need somewhere to start and you need somewhere to aim, and then you make a 1.0 version based on your interpretation of that. Current content matters, but it isn't important in the long run.

I do agree that what's important is picking a consumer to listen to and then tweaking the experience to fit them. Community Managers, as stated before in these comments, act as ambassadors to your target audience and interpreters for your company.

[Mike Sellers]

There is a dynamic balance between content and relationship, and between listening to users and treating them as designers.

In the first case, you won't bring users into your game if you don't have some content. How much content is needed? No one really knows. Thus far most games have aimed very high -- the largest worlds, the latest graphics engines, the most armor combinations, etc. A few, such as Puzzle Pirates, have made a virtual of starting off with less content but keeping a (mostly) positive relationship with the players, building on both over time. Personally I find the latter strategy more appealing: it's less risky and moves the focus off of whiz-bang content that's going to seem really cool to the users for a few hours at most. I suspect next-gen MMOGs (not the multi-gigabyte content-heavy ones that are about to come out) are going to start minimizing initial content for strategic, risk, and relationship reasons.

On the other side of the content balance, online games depend on the continuing relationship with the users more, I think, than any other entertainment medium. Thus far mostly that relationship has been based on the content itself ("give us much more of the same, please" has been how users' requests have been interpreted), which has enabled us to deflect our attention from the service-oriented aspect of the busisness back to the more tangible, tractable part (and one well understood by those executives who are used to making single-player, fire-and-forget, all-content games).

The other balance that's been mentioned here is how you listen to your users. On the one hand you need to listen to what people say about your game; you're not going to find all the issues yourself, or be able to see the game with fresh eyes (something many developers and execs underestimate, thinking they can 'unknow' what they already know and be an effective stand-in for a new player). On the other hand, if you listen only to the most vocal users -- especially those you've given a free bully pulpit on your own message boards -- you're going to end up catering to a niche of a niche; a small and likely unsatisfiable minority.

Moreover, users aren't designers (in any field, but especially in games). It's been said that users "can't imagine what they can't imagine." They'll ask for -- sometimes demand -- exactly the same thing they already have because it's what they know, not because it's what works. So the danger in listening to them is not only that you'll not deliver something they'll like, but that they'll first feel listened to ("hey they're using my idea!") and then will see their hopes dashed when what's delivered really doesn't change things at all. If as a developer you sink into sullen silence at that point, that's when the users begin to feel spurned and the relationship really goes downhill -- again, at least for that highly vocal minority.

Effective community management to me means, in part, navigating the waters of what people are saying (and not just on the boards), how they view the product, how new people find it and others stay with it (or not) -- being an internal advocate for the players overall, but without becoming a buddy of the uber-guilds or an adversary to the developers.

I don't believe any of the major games in our industry do an even passable job of this today. It's an incredible challenge, and the aspect of game development and operation most outside of our typical comfort zone as developers. There are excellent analogous examples from other parts of the entertainment industry -- Disney first and foremost, as Samantha mentioned. To see the dynamic balance of content and relationship in play in that part of the industry, spend a day at Disneyland and a day at another theme park and see which one you're more likely to return to. If you answered one of the others because of the roller coasters or something like that, you aren't representative of the average consumer by a long shot -- as Raph implied, it's not the content that makes for repeated sales.

At the same time, we're once again in that situation where the old rules don't quite work here. We aren't making theme parks, exactly, nor single-player games. Just as the development for online games changes dramatically from the paths used in other games, so too the marketing, positioning, branding, and management (including but not limited to community management) of these games also has to change.

No one does this well yet. Someone will. And then, as with World of Warcraft's fast dominance of the subscription space, we'll all slap our foreheads and say "of course! It's obvious -- now that we've seen it."

[ron meiners]

Great comments Mike, and your Disney mention is a great clarification: establishing a relationship with your customers doesn't really mean handing over design to them. Disney certainly doesn't let consumers design, if anything they're an example (which I've used here, oddly enough) of a community based around content which is created from the top down. However, they are very active in managing that community, and in guiding the culture to create positive experiences for the participants. In doing all of the support, communication, and relationship building associated with community management, I think the same thing is happening, often below the radar, in the online sphere as well. Whether they define it as such or not, most community managers are actively working with the various participants to create positive long-term relationships. I think recognition of the importance of the community is the basic value, both to the community and to the developer team.

[Peter S.]

Effective community management to me means, in part, navigating the waters of what people are saying (and not just on the boards), how they view the product, how new people find it and others stay with it (or not) -- being an internal advocate for the players overall, but without becoming a buddy of the uber-guilds or an adversary to the developers.

An interesting view, considering that the uber guilds are the ones with the members most likely to stay on as subscribers if you keep catering to them.

Average Players (people not in uber guilds)obviously have a higher churn rate, in part because they include the people who get bored with any game and eventually move on. Because all MMORPGs, the most successful MMOs today, are already based on rewarding players for time investment (and because players don't seem to mind), it seems to me like the MMO predilection to put people into Uber Guilds is a perfectly reasonable one. The consumers have proven by playing time-rewarding games based around social interaction that they want more time rewarding social interaction, and the easiest way to give them more of that is through guild catering.

The issue of Solo Players vs. Uber Guilds in MMOs is an excellent one (I should hope so, as it's been argued ad infinitum), but from a developer perspective is largely resolved. Uber Guilds promote long term players just like rewarding time spent in-game does, and so from the company's perspective catering to Uber Guilds is community management.

It seems to me like the only two goals of the company behind any MMO focused on community management should be to a) Make it as easy as possible to create an uber guild and b) Give the guilds more of the same.

As has been pointed out, people on the general forums are generally the exhibitionist and unpleasable minority (they are, after all, ranting out their concerns to millions of perfect strangers along with thousands of other people just like them) and a better indication of popular sentiment can be derived from the message boards of the Uber Guilds.

Also, I'm of the opinion that engineers should be users. If they aren't making something they'd use, they shouldn't be the ones making it. And if they are making something they would use and it's a Virtual World, it stands to reason that they'd use it. And if they use it often and the game is designed to facilitate the creation of Uber guilds, they'll probably be in one.

That unnecessarily long chain of reasoning leads to the totally inconclusive conclusion that if you accept all of my original premises (takes a breath), your developers will be in a position to understand why you're doing everything you do (if you choose to explain it to them) and will not be in an adversarial relationship with you.

It seems to me like the most effective community management would be making all your subscribers get into Uber Guilds and catering to them. And indeed, that is the trend.

In part? What else does effective community management mean to you?

[Peter S.]

This Article corrected me: One of WoW's main appeals is toward the more casual gamer.

Which begs the question: do PvPers (read:Twitch Gamers) need community management? Are the soloers manageable? Or should they be left with the dregs of the Uber Guilds in an MMO environment. WoW's success seems to say no, but then again they are often accused of catering to uber guilds these days.

[anydincsy]

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[Troy]

MMO's are a service, not a product. In service, your 'face' to the customer is essential. For MMO's, that's made up of many things, but what many players have the most direct interaction with is the CMs and the GMs. That 5% that post on on the official boards is vocal, annoying, often hard to please, but THEY CARE. Now, perhaps they care to see you go down in flames or care to gain an unfair advantage, but they are motivated to do something beyond what the more passively consuming remainder of the market does. That's power, for good or for ill.

One thing I learned in marketing that applies here was the 5 stages of customer satisfaction. Apostles, satisfied, neutral, unsatisfied, and terrorists. Anybody who bothers to post on official boards tends to fall into or near the apostle or terrorist groups. Apostles are wonderful. They spread your advertising message farther and better than you ever could and they do it for free. They care. They communicate. They create buzz, and they are very hard to make but also very valuable. It takes a lot to lose an apostle. Making them is the goal of relationship marketing.

As you run down the stages, you get less active customers and more passive consumers. It's much much easier to lose a satisfied customer than it is an apostle, but the difference between the satisfied customer and the neutral one isn't nearly as large. All 3 of the middle stages are prime targets for the competition, as they are all fairly passive consumers that aren't that hard to lure away.

Finally, you get to terrorists. They people are often ones that once cared, that used to be near or in the apostle category. Now they hate you. And they are far more damaging than apostles are good. People love you some of the time, but they hate you all of them time. They spread bile and acid at every chance, and due to the same human nature that makes terrorists tend to work harder than apostles those attacks tend to get more attention than the apostles' support. Slinging mud gathers attention faster than singing praises. Ignore the 5% that yell and scream? Bad idea, that noise gets through to those that don't play the game and if it is overwhelmingly negative it makes you lose customers before you ever have a chance to gain them.

Everybody who posts more than a few times on a MMO's official boards has a greater than average chance of either starting or being pushed into those two active camps. A lot of companies have to spend millions finding out who cares about their product and who merely uses it. MMOs can get it almost for free. Ignoring the fraction of your customer base that goes out of its way to say something isn't wise. Yes, many are morons, attention seekers, chronic whiners, or trolls. They are still your customers, and if you expect to see a forum full of worthless fools that's probably what you'll get regardless of what the reality is.

Furthermore, don't forget that in that active fraction there is a LOT of brainpower. A dev might be thinking about how the guts of the game works 60 hours a week or more, so the company might well put in 1200 man-hours a week. Hell, let's assume WoW has a big team. 500 people, 30,000 man-hours a week. A just an hour each, the player base puts in 6 million man-hours a week. Even if just .1% of that experience is harnessable to the benefit of the company that's still 6,000 man-hours a week. 20% of your dev time that could be useful. I know people, yes plural, that put in 40 hours a week. Don't be so quick to sneer and assume they are all useless idiots. Not only does the player base have a massive time spent advantage, but they have it all with how the game actually works. I've seen lots of Devs, from basic mucks on up, insist that things are different from how the actually are because they deal with the theory of how parts of the game are supposed to be working rather than dealing with how the game actually works as a whole. I'll point to the WoW 'miss' rate way back as an easy example. Harnessing your customers' spare brainpower is an interesting topic in modern business, just check IBM's innovation sessions or the Sep 25 issue of Business Week.

While you have to keep in mind that not everybody posts on the forums, and not everybody even reads them, trying to justify ignoring what they say because 'it's not the larger majority' or 'that's not the REAL community' is asking for it. Any teacher can tell you that if one person is willing to voice a question or a comment, chances are good 5 more were thinking along the same lines. Any forum base is a distorted reflection of the 'total community', but keep in mind that the 'distorted' part is as important as the 'reflection' part. You don't think the uberguilds and the social mavens post on the official forums? Some do. Some don't. How do you tell which is which? This problem is compounded by the primitive forums that most MMOs use. And considering that the forums seem to be about the only tool companies use to communicate with their customer base, the neglect those forums get is very puzzling.

I do think that the CM team needs to get more attention. All the interaction with the company that many players ever see comes straight from the CMs and GMs, and when those CMs come off looking like they are stalling, out of the loop, or outright hostile it looks really, really bad. Talk to any upscale service business about what happens when your front line representatives to the customers get angry, uninformative, or provide wrong answers. No MMO I have seen yet has managed a very good customer relationship management program. The CMs always come off as angry, clueless, powerless, or out of the loop in fairly short order. Anybody who aims to beat WoW is going to have to address community management better than Blizzard did, as that is one of their biggest weak points.

I do think that official forums are a good idea. Lacking them means that you are limited to communicating with your customers by much more limited means. Other forums, while useful, are run by other people, with other mods, with other rules, and for other goals. Your use of those forums will be constrained by those factors, possibly to your detriment. Furthermore, if those 3rd party forums say things you don't agree with, will you instead just dismiss them as more of that 'unpleasable 5%'? In addition, I see a number of assumptions about the 'average player' or the 'average consumer' that aren't substantiated by much of anything, even in my own post. There seems to be a general lack of knowledge about player bases that represents a treasure trove of useful information. Are you sure that the comments of your forum base don’t reflect your larger player base? 5%, are you sure about that number? How many raiders do you really have?

And of course the players want more. It is called progress. Business are driven by it. We want more, we want better, we want new! It is also called opportunity. When people say that, you have an opportunity to give them more, better, new and make more money and get more satisfied customers. It's not a black hole. There's a steady stream of money flowing out of it and into your pocket.

[magicback (Frank)]

Another perspective to think about Community Managers is to view them as supernodes and to view content as data that can be accessed. Of the two, the node is more important than the content.

The supernodes facilitate, navigate, and provide other useful services. It asks as a catalyst, an amplifier, a regulator, a multiplier. etc.

Also, Jessica Mulligan already pointed out the importance of customer service function and the under-investment.

Lastly, another concept to ponder is Rhizome and the application of multiple, non-hierarchical flow of content (genes, cultures, food, etc.). Essentially how flat non-hierarchial social network works.

I'm new to the concept, so I don't have much information. But I do know that it's something to explore further from an applied perspective.

Frank

[ron meiners]

"It seems to me like the most effective community management would be making all your subscribers get into Uber Guilds and catering to them. And indeed, that is the trend.

In part? What else does effective community management mean to you?"

Posted by: Peter S. | Sep 24, 2006 12:46:53 PM

And-

"This Article corrected me: One of WoW's main appeals is toward the more casual gamer.

Which begs the question: do PvPers (read:Twitch Gamers) need community management? Are the soloers manageable? Or should they be left with the dregs of the Uber Guilds in an MMO environment. WoW's success seems to say no, but then again they are often accused of catering to uber guilds these days."

My thoughts are that the Uber guilds are passionate- and possibly in part because we understand their play style (in part because they've told us about it) and as a result, we've built better tools and technologies for them to have positive interactive experiences. We must appreciate passionate players, and we really do want to do what we can to create more- in that play style or others.

For example, why isn't there a stadium in WoW? Where more casual players to come hang out, watch a battlegrounds fight, and chat? Or some sort of craft guild? The social options that are there are best at supporting the play of hard core players.

So I think there should be options to facilitate the social experience of most users, from hard core to casual. Similarly, the CMs should be paying attention to this spectrum- building relationships through a variety of communication paths- ideally supported by the rest of the development team. This may mean new technologies or design features, but will hopefully create a much richer, and much more consistent, player experience. So, the answer to both of your questions is yes... see what I mean about community managers and positive social dynamics?

;-)

[Raph]

I have to admit that I am floored by the use of Disney as an appropriate model. Disney engages in purely broadcast practices. Its control over things like its theme park environments are not examples of community relations (something for which Disney has a long-standing negative reputation); they are examples of literally management, designed purely to extract dollars.

Most particularly, it is a method premised on minimizing user input and contribution, pretty much from top to bottom. Is that the model we want for virtual worlds?

[Peter S.]

Actually, there is a stadium in WoW. Nobody goes there.

I envisioned a battleground where everyone had stock armor/weapons (army issue) and it was up to your team to be better than theirs. But the Uber Guildies say 'We spent time getting this armor, we want to use it to CRUSH these guildless, godless curs!'

I don't see a reason for the devs to cater to the casual crowd, as even if you do get a ton of casual people the ROI sucks. Make a good skill-based PvP system that you have to continually tweak for balance, or make a new dungeon you fire and forget and yet lasts forever.

The way I see it, leveling up in WoW is for casual players. Post-60 is for Guilds. Seems like it works.

[Mike Sellers]

Disney is not purely broadcast by any means. Most of their customer/community management is done person-to-person, as with any MMOG. As for "extracting dollars" you could say the same thing about any MMO: every feature there is designed to extract dollars by getting people to play and to come back.

In Disney's terms, they have armies of people connected to their attractions (including theme parks) who make every aspect of your approach, reservation, arrival, duration of stay, issues, billing, special requests, departure, post-departure, and eventual return as positive as possible. There sare some direct analogues to MMO customer service and community management, and they run circles around the best in our industry (or most others). This level of management -- both at the individual and community level (e.g. with their Disney Vacation Club) is why they are able to charge premium prices and yet have phenomenal growth and retention of repeat customers.

There are of course many differences between Disney's community relations and that needed for an MMOG. But we should look to them for ways to do what is necessary for MMOs and apply them as we can -- IMO there's no solid example of how to do this well within our own industry.

User input is a dicey thing, as I noted above: users are emphatically not designers. I'm not saying we should not listen to our users by any means, but right now most MMO developers' methods are primitive, hit-and-miss affairs where small numbers of often shrill, idiosyncratic users are given disproportionate weight. I am not a fan of democratic design by any means. Unless you're going to throw open your world construction to your users as Second Life has done, I don't believe they're the best arbiters of what makes for a coherent, cohesive, engaging design.

FWIW, Disney is far from being a perfect company, or even in many instances a fun place to work. But in terms of managing expectations and assuring a positive experience for millions of customers, day in and day out, there is a great deal we can learn from them to apply to our own particular market needs in MMOs.

[Raph]

All of your examples are of customer service; are we really at the point where we equate customer service and community relations? I agree that the industry has a lot to learn from other sources regarding customer service.

But in terms of relating to, interacting with, and responding in some fashion to, a community, be it of customers or fans or both, I actually think that the games biz as a whole, and the MMO world in particular, are trendsetters, not laggards. Again, most communication with most mainstream media companies -- Disney included -- is unidirectional.

Let's not fall into the trap that thinking that community relations is about "managing expectations and assuring a positive experience," please... you can do that without talking to the community at all.

[Brenlo]

Community Management is not Customer Service. Two different groups with different goals. Customer Service is individual interaction with a goal of resolving a specific, usually short term issue. Community Management is all Macro-Commuication, with the end goal of encouraging players to play our games longer.

It is also not marketing, although effective community management should work closely with marketing.

The current community management role, in my opinion is broken. The forum moderator, voice of the player is antiquated and served mostly to placate the masses. I feel that we are at a fork in the road and the industry can continue to lump Community Management in as marketing or CS, looking to keep the players quiet so that the developers do not have to waste time chatting with them, or we can move forward.
What is that direction? In my opinion it revolves around 4 things;
Informing the players. Community Management should be your news team. They should keep the players updated on everything.
Educating your players. The Community Team is your front line of education (other than player education). They should not only teach how to play the games, but how processes work, why things are the way they are, and this CAN be done without giving the players an expectation of control over design processes.
Entertain the player. A good CM team should be working on adding additional entertainment value for the players. This can be in the form of contests, promotions, events, anything that adds some fun outside of the game and leads into number 4 on my list.
Promoting Socialization. At SOE (yes the evil empire) we have a motto for our CM group, Bringing Gamers Together. To me this is the crux of what we should be doing. Providing ways for players to meet each other, promoting grouping, introducing players to each other and strengthening those community bonds which they build regardless of what support we give them. This applies to our internal gamers (developers) as well. We should be highlighting those folks, getting them out there, interacting with the players. There is plenty of Rock Star love to go around, it should not all be reserved for we community folk.

Just my opinion. =) Please beg to differ.

[Mike Sellers]

FWIW, my examples really aren't only of customer service; there is real community relations there too. I prefer not to spell out the connection more specifically at this time though.

It's true that MMOs are blazing new trails in the degrees and ways in which we interact with our customers -- I just believe we're doing so badly (in general), not taking advantage of the lessons learned by others who have blazed similar trails before us.

Let's not fall into the trap that thinking that community relations is about "managing expectations and assuring a positive experience," please... you can do that without talking to the community at all.

Yes, you can. But the mirror trap is that of believing that community management necessarily features intimate conversation with the community at large -- once you get above a few thousand customers, such contact with "the community" is an illusion.

Brenlo wrote: Community Management is all Macro-Commuication, with the end goal of encouraging players to play our games longer.

What you wrote -- quoted above and your four focus areas -- is part of the reason why I keep bringing up Disney -- for most of their products and services, no one does remotely as good a job at this macro-level, multi-directional, one-to-one and many-to-many communication as they do. (If you see it as broadcast and unidirectional, you're missing a big part of the picture.)

[Raph]

Hmm. I honestly cannot think of one single instance of anything like what I'd call community relations from Disney, and I have two kids squarely in their target demo. Seriously. I'd love some examples.

I fully concede they are fantastic at marketing to us. But I have never seen Disney do anything because a community wanted it that way except via massive outcry (as in, for example, when they put Japanese language tracks on the releases of Ghibli movies).

In fact, I cannot think of even a case of Disney saying something to us even on a macro-broadcast level, outside of standard branding and PR exercises.

I'm going to come out to some degree on the opposite side and say that in the end community relations is about making each individual user feel like they are a member of a community. It's not about keeping them paying month after month -- it's about keeping them in the orbit, so that even if they leave they might later return. In the end, it's not about relationships to masses of people, because you can't have a relationship with a mass of people. It's about building the personal relationship, a user at a time.

Saying that this doesn't scale is belied by examples ranging from Apple to Southwest Airlines.

[ronmeiners]

Just to clarify, I think adroit community management is valuable in both content creation paradigms, top-down and user created. I think some of the most powerful and transformative online experiences can come from collaborative creativity, though that may not be the kind of experience most users look for. Similarly, last time I was at Disneyland, one of my chief pleasures was thinking about some of the community design I was seeing there. In particular, I love the notion that much of the social interaction at Disneyland is bouyed by an ongoing presence of the laughter and delight of children, sort of as a common background thread that affected the mood, and thus the interactions, of all attendees. I'm not sure whether or not this was design or circumstance, though I have been told that Walt was very much a believer in designing social experiences. Whether or not that's happening now, dunno.

The effect seems quite real, however. Anyway thanks all for such insightful elaborations on this topic.

PS as to the discussion about Disney as community management, for what it's worth, I think they're clearly doing some things that positively influence social interactions between participants, and clearly not doing some of the more interactive one-on-one relationship-building MMO CM's do. Is this a question of how we define these terms?

[Raph]

I think it is. Because to my mind, the social design of the spaces in Disney is fantastic and groundbreaking and we have much to learn from it, but is a separate discipline entirely from community relations.

[Brenlo]

Thanks for the comments Raph, but I disagree at least partially. Neither Southwest or Apple is a valid comparison to what Community Managers in an MMO are faced with.

Southwest does a great job of creating influencers, of that there is no doubt. However, they have thousands of customer touchpoints throughout the US. One passenger may deal with as many as 20 different Southwest employees on one trip, all showing their great customer friendly attitude. We have one community person, dealing with hundreds of thousands of passengers =) I feel it is an apple to oranges comparison. Are there lessons to be learned? You bet! One of the more important lessons is that even the person driving the plane should take time to be courteous and friendly to the passengers. That no one is above treating the customers with respect.

Apple is a totally different beast entirely and while I know they have a fanatical following, I am not aware of there community efforts to drive their fanaticism. Please send me some links where I can read up on them.

As for a Disney Community building effort, Disney Pin Trading at the parks. Huge following, supported by the park, they even have cast members wear pins just to trade. They have special pin trading newsletters and events. They are as fanatical and loyal as any Mac user and they love Disney and the Disney experience, while being a part of the pin trading community. There are other Disney initiatives as well but this was the most prominent off the top of my head.

[Samantha LeCraft]

Ron, I have to disagree that Disney doesn't do the "interactive one-on-one relationship-building" thing. I have a collection of tiny moments that I've had with Disneyland and Disney World "Cast Members" (the park employees who are seen by the public), starting with my first visit when I was four years old and continuing on through today. To list a couple of examples: the Cast Members telling me "Welcome home" when I return to Disneyland or one of the Disney World hotels. Snow White coming up behind my husband and I when we were watching the newborn ducklings in one of the ponds outside of Tomorrowland, and completely in character counting seven ducklings, then giggling and saying "Oh, too many for me!" before continuing on her way to her autograph signing shift. A Disney Vacation Club Cast Member spending about a half an hour with my husband and I just a few weeks ago, telling us all kinds of trivia about the park. During a family trip several years ago, a Cast Member in full Goofy costume escorting one of my siblings to the restroom and then back to our table at dinner...

I could list experiences like this for hours. A lot of the Disney experience is about the design of the park, and I will admit that I love how friendly and cheerful their Customer Service phone representatives are. But things like Snow White pausing at the door to go backstage, as her shift was ending, just to lean down and give my three year old brother the kiss he had followed her for? What is that if not interactive, one-on-one relationship building? The above-and-beyond personal experiences Disney gave me as a child made a life-long customer out of me -- it's no mistake that I got engaged at Disney World, returned there for my honeymoon, and now am the proud owner of an annual pass to Disneyland.

In my experience, there is a section of the Disney experience that isn't design, or customer service, or marketing. There's no real way to quantify the effects of tiny things like the hot, tired Cast Member at the front gate of Disneyland smiling at me and greeting me by name as she swipes my annual pass. And yet it does make a difference. That is what I mean when I talk about Disney's community management.

[Mike Sellers]

Okay, one last Disney-flogging post and then I'm going to take off the Mickey ears for awhile.

It's interesting to me that many people don't see or understand the many overlapping communities that exist within the Disney customer base. I feel a bit like I do when talking to "online community" people more familiar with text-based discussion groups who don't quite believe that these online games actually have communities in them too -- often more vibrant than the ones in the discussion groups.

There are a number of points of Walt Disney's design philosophy that bear directly on community design and management. For example, he said "shared experiences are compelling experiences." There is underestimated value in having exciting, moving, frightening experiences in a shared environment: they become more memorable and more fun. This has important consequences for game design and community management.

Similarly, Disney said, "you can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make the dream a reality." This applies to everyone involved, from production and management to (especially) community managers, however they're defined. And while that's a broad statement, it's one that too many game developers fail to understand and put into practice.

Finally, it's interesting to me that one of the Disney hallmarks -- in physical and social designs and in their interactions with their customer communities -- is the principle of "infinite detail." No item is too small to be tweaked, no gesture too insignificant between a cast member and guest. One case study quoted Disney imagineer John Hench as saying that the secret to their success was "attention to infinite detail, the little things, the minor, picky points that others just don't want to take the time, money or effort to do." This is something missing in most MMOs, and yet should sound an awful lot like the "culture of polish" at Blizzard described at AGC by Rob Pardo.

I know that from a traditional MMO development and deployment POV, this all seems fairly abstract and far removed from community management, but it's not: it's all of one piece, or it's worthless. This culture and these principles have to be set firmly in place by management and production, and carried through design and development, marketing, support, and community relations. Otherwise you're left trying to "manage" a community that's been inadequately considered during development, and which hasn't been the focal point all along. As they used to say about usability, slathering this on at the end is like putting lipstick on a cow.

[ron meiners]

Thanks Samantha... point taken. Though I will say also that those experiences don't sound like they were building one-to-one relationships, as much as they were one-to-one interactions, however magical. I'll agree that they're not in those other categories, though there's a piece of community management that's not being covered there. I can exchange meaningful information about the game or virtual world experience with members of a community I'm working with, on a meta level, as it were, which I've not seen at Disney (though that doesn't mean it doesn't exist). In the process we're also building one-to-one relationships, and encouraging that in others.

And I thought I had a good time... (and isn't it interesting how appreciative of Disney we all are, regardless of our differences about how to talk about it?)

[ron meiners]

And to Mike, thanks, I'm raving here about the points you make and how they're stated. Regardless of where one draws the line of where community management actually begins or ends, Disney does an outstanding job of creating a culture, of valuing that at every step, and in believing that will make a difference in the end user's experience (surprize). I'd argue that that's a core dynamic that's happening in our online communities- the creation of culture- but usually it's driven in a much more "random" fashion, as it were, often by the loudest. Culture forms dynamically as a point and as a product of our interactions, and consistently being aware of that can make a huge difference on the cultural values a community comes to exhibit, especially as a product of community leadership. And certainly, there's a world of potential value, to community and host, in recognizing these dynamics and supporting a positive implementation or response to them.

[Brenlo]

As I read this growing and very interesting thread, it occurs to me that we are actually discussing two different issues. Community Relations and Creating Evangelists/Influencers. Creating influencers is an important function of Community Relations, however it is not the sum of their responsibility. Every strong Community person (insert non-standardized titles here =)should be targeting key people to convert into influencers. But Let's face it folks, with the size of our audiences, it is nearly impossible to give every customer that personal touch, to convert each and every one without the staff of Disyney, Southwest or Apple. These companies have a corporate culture of creating influencers that extends from the top to the bottom of the organization. They have thousands of employees all ready and willing to make sure your experience with their company is the best it can be. That is where the Southwest's of the world and the Disney's have excelled, in creating influencers. We can argue whether they actually practice community relations all day, but it is clear that they know how to create passionate fans and in large part that is due to vast number of employees that affect your experience.

We, on the other hand have a handful of resources, which is continually growing smaller as companies move away from existing Customer Support models (Hell, if you followed Gordon Walton's panel, the future may very well lead to no more CS) Which leaves an even smaller number of smiling, happy folks to ensure that the customer experience is "Dyn O Mite". So how do you propose that a team of 3( as is the case of the SWG Community team as an example) grant that personal touch to a few hundred thousand customers?

I do not believe we can. I do however believe that thru good community management, we can get the players to do that for us. Targeting specific users to create evangelists and enabling them to spread the gospel is a good direction. Providing them with resources to host their own mini events, much as Adult Swim does with their College program can work wonders. Inviting influencers out and catering to them on the weekends is something we have found has a lot of positive traction. Make sure you spend time and resources determining who your real influencers are first, otherwise it is a wasted effort.

When Raph was still with us, here in the great collective, we were working on some very cool social network tools. These tools showed some surprising trends, for example on any one server in one of our MMO's there were only 5 to 10 real hubs of communication. Amazing when you consider the number of players on a given server, those are the folks we need to be giving the personal attention to, and that is the kind of support we need to get the job done.

[monkeysan]

Raph said: "I think that for a while, SWG actually had the best community management in the industry. Particularly in the run-up to launch and for a period after launch."

My wife and i spent huge amounts of time on both sides of SWG's prelaunch period and postlaunch 'honeymoon' in research for Smartbomb (we profiled them).

From what we observed, I'd not hesitate one second to concur with Raph on this.

It was actually kind of phenomenal to watch.

[Michael Chui]

on any one server in one of our MMO's there were only 5 to 10 real hubs of communication

By "hubs of communication", do you mean players or locations? It looks like players, from the context, but it's hard to believe. What was the average population and average concurrent, if you can recall?

[Jim Self]

With respect to all and the good comments made, this discussion has gone WAY off topic.

If I could attempt to sum up the summary I read at Gamasutra, Raph's point is that MMOs are making content, not experiences. To me, MMOs don't seem to be truly services or products but the "content as product" example is good. "Here's a sword. You're level 1. Get to level 60." Once you've done that... what? You can't experience the past 59 levels in the same way again because you've already consumed them.

This brings me to my own point. Communities do exist within the MMOs, but more as an afterthought or concession. The "point of the game" isn't to find your place in an ongoing community, it's to get to level 60 (and perhaps bling out your avatar).

How can you expect someone to be attached to that? Don't cite uberguilds, because those usually exist across MMOs. They are their own communities. Where is the face and voice of the publisher? Anything to give the world that personal touch, because ultimately it's the personal things that create a community. The problem of scale is the true problem I believe, but that just makes it a question of how to break down the players into managable groups. And who says broadcast can't help create communities? Have developer podcasts with discussions about why changes are being made, for example.

The Iron Realms worlds are, to me, a terrific bridge between the close-knit groups of small MUDS and the huge masses of other MMOs. Players who contribute to the community become leaders among players and eventually gods, still playing in the world while also serving an important CM role.

[J.G.]

There are many things missing in the current offering for community management and customer service. Obviously a lot has already been presented here.

The problems in both areas revolve around the industry's unfortunate desire to think of both as an afterthought.

The keys to any good community management or customer service offering are:

1. Excellent Internal Communication
2. Early phase CS / CM Integrated Development strategies
3. Use your CMs as direct liaisons between developers, customers, and external communities. They are more than just internal forum moderators with administrative powers.
4. Your CM is your "one to many" face, and your CS is your "one to one" face. Give them the tools and communication to do those jobs effectively. Then you will see the real value.

Being one of the earlier players in the graphic MMO industry, I have seen huge problems with the industry's view on CS / CM and seen them just stay huge. The biggest problem is actually the lack of any real view. Companies need to stop thinking about the process as just making a game and realize they are making a service. One day companies will realize the strength in CS / CM comes in their ability to reduce churn and build retention. If done well, increase word of mouth marketing.

Another giant problem is the unfortunate "US vs THEM" attitude with both the Developer vs the Player / Customer and even more damaging the Developers vs CS / CM. Communication between Dev / QA / CS / CM has to be integrated in the project planning and development phases in order to assure proper communication, and in turn execution, in all areas. When the right hand is perfectly fine telling the left hand what it is doing, and the right hand is perfectly ok realizing the left hand may actually have valuable input, we will finally see good results.

Developers and operators often talk the talk, but rarely walk the walk. They like to start the day by saying "customer first", but not one of them has integrated anything in their system or project management that would indicate such a desire. By "customer first" I do not mean the customer is always right. I mean they should be thought of in processes and not just gameplay.

I currently direct a company that works with developers doing just this. Unlike some of those presented here, I have not and will not give up on community. The community is your customer. If you think of the community as only that 10% vocal of the 10% on your forums, you are already off to a bad start.

~ Working on improving CS / CM one developer...err.. conference...umm.. discussion... crap.. I'm working on it, OK?!

[magicback (Frank)]

Another perspective is to look at your local township and see how the elected leaders manage the community in that they:
1. Plan for the growth of the township (city design)
2. Provide essential services for you to do what you need to do (roads, waste disposal, etc.)
3. Deal with problematic elements of the township (police, firefighters, emergency staff, etc.)
4. Process to change community leadership (elections)
5. Promote and celebrate the special events within communities (holidays, fairs, etc.)

Since we are using Disney as an example, we can view Disneyland and the surrounding area as Disneytown with a focus towards providing a great experience for visitors (a tourist town focus). In this light, they are doing a good job for their objective. It's a top-down approach.

If we look at Apple, they have created products that buyers can really build a community out off. Most of the work is done by the community, so this is a distributed, Rhizomic, approach.

Southwest airline appears to be in the middle of the two. There is some top-down directed approach to managing the community, the customer base. They also produce a service that the consumer can build a community out off.

In an MMO environment, goals and strategic may be different, but any community management should have at least the four basic objectives I stated above.

Marketing is to bring people into the community.
Customer Service is to provide service for the community. Community Management is to manage the community. There are many ways to do it, but I do believe the strategic and tactical decisions should be made at the highest level: the mayorial, town council, the lead producer or manager.

Talking about one-to-one and one-to-many strategies is great, but I think we should step back and look from afar. The library, main street, the park, and the event held there are content. However, it's the mayor, the town council that manages the community (with participation from the citizenry).

So, any one has good examples we can learn from?

Frank

[JG]

I can't totally agree with that, but then again I don't have to. :)

The mayor would hire the correct people to do the job required (not just elected officials). The correct people would definitely report to the mayor, however the mayor would trust them to do they job they are hired to do. A mayor, in no way, knows every level of every thing working in a town. They are there to provide big picture strategy, and not there to micromanage.

Strategic goals should always come from the top, however tactics are developed by the people doing the job. The president says "Destroy that power plant", the generals say "Yes Mr. President, this is how we will do it."

I agree with the basic elements, but I can't agree that putting a producer on the task just because he is titled as producer is the right way around it. You need a professional to do the job and provide guidance, and not a title.

A mayor (lead producer) can't do anything with his town (project) if he doesn't trust his teams and facilitate proper communication and teamwork between the teams.

A good example of poor communication and bad teamwork due to lack of trust and communication would be Katrina. Due to mistrust and US (State) vs THEM (Federal) politics, it was even more of a disaster than it would have been. If FEMA management would have facilitated a plan of proper communication between all levels of government, with no room for politics or star syndrome, it would have been less devastating than it ended up being.

"One to One" and "One to Many" are just one element set of the stated strategy. Tools, processes and procedure are also involved. Communication and integration are more than important.

Hope I wasn't all over the place too much.

[ron meiners]

It's all about communication...

The models for internal processes are another topic, though I think we agree that input from the community, or awareness of the community, should be at the table.

Two quick thoughts on the topic of online community and government: that for the most part one really different aspect of these social contexts is that they are largely constructed... while "default world" social constructions can be affected by similar influences (messages into the community, how interactions take place, social organizations are all examples of how interactions can be influenced), the tools for these things must be constructed in a virtual world, and so the artificial nature of them is much clearer.

Second, another point of interest, the only virtual world I know of where there's an explicit social group chosen as representatives of the population to the host company is There. Although it's as yet nascent, they're trying to work on the myriad problems of what an official community representative group looks like, what's expected of it, what it's empowered to do, how it's chosen, etc. Is it a government? In what senses?

Theoretically this will further a social group's involvement with a site... and lead to the evolution of systems where a community itself has a signifgant organizational role in the further development of its virtual world.

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm really startled and appalled at Samantha LeCraft's comments -- she and the Lindens must have gone to the same gaming conferences and weekend seminars. Currently the Linden Lab communication strategy is following just exactly this playbook -- shutting down the forums (a dramatic and very contested and disliked move which got hardly any game media press, much less RL media covarge); moving to an official Linden Blog (already dubbed the Blob by the customers for its vague, white, puffy feeling); shutting off comments on some forums; railroading, filtering, summarily deleting, steering off to third-party sites out of site, out of mind, etc. etc.

It's a communications strategy worthy of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin -- shutting off dissent, muting or silencing criticism, spinning, whitewashing, closing down, deleting summarily, retreating, etc. People often talk about the Bushies' spin cycle and Karl Rove and such; that doesn't begin to capture the feel for a blanket, society-wide media strategy a la the Kremlin that seeks to totally control the relationship between government and governing.

There's nothing wrong with having a sense of entitlement about a game or a world. You're a customer, and you do indeed pay a salary. These are facts. Dismissing them and saying it's a black hole can't eradicate the *real* black hole problem: the utter lack of concept of balance and sharing of power on the part of the game company.

It's the game company that is setting up the zero-sum game. It conceives itself as an entity, with game gods, that must stay in power, use sychopants, resmods, fanboyz to do so, and never share power, let alone undergo a division of itself into separate powers.

We are now at a very painful stage in human evolution, if you will, or development, where discrete entities that seemed like they were "out there" like governments, or religions or game companies are now "in here" because of the Internet and virtual reality.

Accordingly, they need to realize that they can't really insist that they leave off somewhere and the customer starts up somewhere -- they are integrated and interwined. They're in it together. It's paradoxically realizing this symbiotic relationship that should catalyze the more enlightened game company into realizing that it must share power. That means giving IP to the customers and letting cash out the game currency, but so much more.

Game company officials wouldn't like to think of themselves having to subject to democracy and elections when they and their venture capitalists invested money in their game/world. Fair enough. But there's nothing wrong with lifting some pages from the manual of representative government, independent judiciaries, accountable police, etc.

People spend A LOT of time in worlds and games. They need to get better. It's fine to demand more of them. Disney isn't at all an example of the new phenomenon of an integrated "out there/in here" experience I mean. It's an old media dinosaur of the last century, push media, with a studio that figures out what sells, pushes it, pumps it, sells it, merchandises it, puts it on cereal boxes and sneakers, sells, sells, sells.

New media can't do that or it breaks and the customers shuts it off and moves to the next space/social software/thingie that doesn't get in his face that way.

Community managers need to manage. Part of their job is to retrain angry, sulking game-gods who are also in entitlement mode, thinking they need to be coddled and privileged like rare race horses just because they are coders. Pretty soon, it will become clear that coding isn't THAT different than making vacuum cleaners or toast. It will become less special and the game companies will have to deflate their egos and become more normal and responsive to customers.

Community managers have a really important role to play in evolving the game gods off Olympus and also prepping the fanboyz to yield their FIC 2 percent status to the commoners. What I do agree with Samantha about is the need to look beyond the fetishistic IRC channel 2 percent (or 5 percent if you will) to social mavens and such. Yet there'd be no need to deify them, either, and put them on a pedestal. They're just social mavens; one leaves; another will come. If they are less critical and demanding and happier with whatever is pushed to them, that's no need to over-celebrate them, because only listening to them will make for a bland and dull game, too, that they'll be the first to leave, biting the hand that fed them.

Balance is key. Nothing in excess, as the ancients said. Community managers have to become more respected, the complexity of the job valued, and the hiring has to reflect its upgraded status. Companies often hire young women or home workers because they think it's women's work to socialize -- they don't higher qualified older women or men with higher degrees and management experience that goes beyond saying "woot" and "wowzer" about each new fabulous game patch.

I'm not going to have to keep ranting about this too much longer, however, because there is going to be just an explosion of games and worlds coming around the corner, and Xbox stuff and Internet-based rooms and 3-d stuff, and it will get very, very competitive. And that means the companies that can turn around on a dime and really be sweet to their customers and treat them like real people in the real world instead of orcs and dwarfs will be the market-share winners.

[Samantha LeCraft]

Prokofy Neva, I have to say that your response is very strange. First off, I don't believe you've had any commercial experience creating or running MMOGs -- there are some things you advocate for or against that simply will not fly when we're talking about ventures that cost $15 million to $50 million to create, and more on top of that to run. Secondly, you agree with me on several key points, but at the same time completely twist some of things I've said. So let me clarify a few things.

I am not advocating for an "out of sight, out of mind" approach to community management. Rather, I believe that we need to spend less time with the neurotic 5% (or 2% as you said, which may be closer to the actual value), and more time listening to the wider community, even when they aren't speaking directly to us. We need to follow what players are saying when they don't think we're watching. We need to use statistics in our community management to see what people do rather than what they say. And we need to stop assuming that the neurotic 5% represent the needs and desires of the entire community.

I am not in support of the idea of "developers as gods". I abhor the "rock star" mentality, and on that point you and I seem to agree. That is actually one of the specific reasons that I think we need to move away from things like official message boards. If you spend enough time listening to the 5%, you start to believe two things: 1. that you are a god among men, and fanbois everywhere kiss the very ground that you walk on, and 2. that the players are the enemy -- how can they not love what you create, don't they know that you are a god? It looks paradoxical on it's face, but I've seen more than few developers fall into that mindset.

That said, developers are special in that we are the ones creating the entertainment that the players are paying for. It isn't like creating vacuums. It's like creating a TV show or a movie. I'm not saying that game developers are movie stars (or that they should be treated as such), but I do believe that the skills to create good game code, design, and art will remain as rarified as good writing, directing, and editing is in show business. We deserve to be well paid and valued for the contributions we make to a successful entertainment vehicle. That's the way all other entertainment sectors work -- if you use your unique creative vision to create something that people will buy, you get paid for it, end of story.

And on that note, MMOGs are not countries, and the developers are not governments. We aren't running democracies (or socialist communes, for that matter) here, we're providing entertainment. These are commercial ventures, and players can vote by taking their dollars elsewhere. Developers already "share the power" with their publisher, their investors, their stock holders, etc. Players like to throw around the "I pay your salary" line quite a bit, but the reality is that the monthly fee from a given player pays for about half an hour of a single developer's time, if that. The players were not the ones who put the money up for development, and so they are not the ones that the developers have to "share power" with. The players are paying for access to entertainment, just as they do when they buy a movie ticket or sign up for cable TV.

I do not believe that MMOG developers and their players have any more of a symbiotic relationship than the creators of a TV show have with their audience. Finding out what the audience likes and responding to that is important in any sort of on-going entertainment media, but just because you've rallied with other fans online to get a character brought back to the show does not make you entitled to power over the show. The show is still a privately-held Intellectual Property, and the creators can do what they wish with it. If you don't like it, there are plenty of other places for you to spend your entertainment dollar. As a developer, it behooves me to pay heed to what the majority of the playerbase wants, but that does not make the players co-creators.

I do agree with you that we need professionals in the community management roles. (Though I must say that I don't know of a single commercial MMOG that thinks of community management as "women's work".) Hiring professionals with backgrounds in sociology, social psychology, and statistics might be helpful as well. I think we need to move away from the game-god/fanboi relationship, and towards a more professional entertainment industry demeanor, and I agree that one of the first steps towards that is recognizing the importance of having professionals in community management roles, rather than using community management as a stepping stone for those trying to break into development.

And for the record, since this seems to be a confusing point: when I've talked about following Disney's example, I'm talking specifically about the Disney parks, Disneyland and Walt Disney World. I'm not talking about the marketing Disney does for it's movies and merchandise, the cable channels and radio stations Disney runs, Disney's ownership of ABC, or any of the other multitude of topics that fall under the Mouse Ears. I will agree that much of the rest of Disney is about marketing, but I stand by my statements that there is a lot to learn about how Disneyland and Disney World, the physical parks themselves, are run.

As to your last point, the MMOG business is already a very, very competitive place, and is only going to get more so as the years go by. Anyone who doesn't see that probably isn't cut out for commercial MMOG development.

[Matt Mihaly]

Samantha LeCraft wrote:

As a developer, it behooves me to pay heed to what the majority of the playerbase wants, but that does not make the players co-creators.

Prokofy's game of choice is Second Life though, and it's somewhat hard to argue that players are not co-creators there.

--matt