KM in games
I will tell you about who is such a community manager (KM), what he does and what are the differences, for example, from the SMM-specialist (social media manager). You will also learn about the basics of community management and a few tricks that KMs use in their work. The material will also be useful for the development teams of both small and large projects in which it is planned to work with the community. Especially for project managers there is a section on important mistakes that many producers at one time made as part of game project management. In general, I recommend reading to anyone who is somehow connected with the gaming industry or is simply interested in it.
My name is Olga Makushenko, and I work in the Allods Team on the Skyforge project. The article is based on my nearly two-year experience as a community manager and on various systematic English-language material, links to which are located at the end and in the text.
I hope, I will be forgiven by the haters of anglicisms, but I will often use the word “community” than “community” - this is what happened in the gaming industry.
Who is such a community manager?
')
It is unlikely that readers have difficulty translating two whole words, but even the term “community manager” does not reflect the essence. First you need to correctly understand what a community is.
The community is NOT “Vkontakte”, “Twitter” and “Facebook”.
A virtual community is a group of people who gather at certain sites to discuss common interests, in our case of games. In fact, we are with you, while discussing a certain news on Habré or any other site. Thus, these are people who discuss exactly your game. The community can develop without the help of a community manager, but only with the help of a good KM will the development vector be the most correct, which will allow you to avoid tons of negative, “trolling” and discord among your players.
A community manager is a kind of man-orchestra. One good CM can combine the responsibilities of a copywriter, content manager, marketer, SMM specialist, event manager, technical support specialist, psychologist, and top player. And it seems to me, I even forgot to mention something.
A community manager is an intermediary between the development / localization team and users. He is a friend and helper, as well as a developer’s face in the player’s eyes.
One “joint” on the part of KM becomes public property in just a few hours.
In his article, Philip Driver highlighted several important features of a professional community manager, but I added a little more from myself:
A useful experience for a community manager was well described in her article by Julien Vera:
In a Forbes article, Jennifer Ghreib identified 4 pillars on which community management is based:
It is very important to always remember these points and try to embody them in your work.
The difference between SMM and community management
The responsibilities of a community manager are often combined with the duties of an SMM specialist, and SMM specialists are called community managers. Indeed, one person can do both, as often happens. But the work of the community manager in the game project is very different:
Why is community management so important?
The core of any gaming business is a good game. Let's say there are some good games in the market that belong to one niche, and yours is one of them. To sell the game you attract the marketing department with all its capabilities. However, your competitors are not lagging behind - they also have excellent marketers.
It is at this stage that the community management department contributes. Happy and contented players are in themselves an advertisement for the game. If you develop a community, your players become super fans, who tell the game to their friends. They bring you new users already loyal to your project. It turns out that a good community manager leads new players who most often stay in the game for a long time with their friends. It’s hard to find a more effective marketing channel that brings so many loyal new players.
The quality of the work of a community manager is very difficult to assess just as the result of the work of marketing or PR departments. I have not met a metric similar to ROI (Return of Investment) for community managers. Tracking performance is becoming a very difficult task, and this is one of the reasons that, at least in Russian-speaking countries, community management is not perceived as a rather serious and important profession.
However, it is always worth remembering that your gaming community is the people for whom you made the game. They understand and love her, perhaps even more than you. If you can properly direct the enthusiasm of the fans, they will help you make the game even better, leaving feedback on these or other innovations and highlighting the main problems. And enthusiastic players, like no one else, will be able to inspire your team to even greater achievements.
A developed gaming community can:
It would be strange with such an impressive list of the merits of a developed community not to pay enough attention to its community, let alone underestimate the importance of the work of the community department.
Therefore:
Game project managers often hire community managers with no work experience, believing that communication with players does not require specific skills. All this often led to big problems. As I wrote above, one “cant” of an inexperienced KM led to a deterioration in the reputation of the entire company or project.
People who today say that the community management is not important in the project, not far from people who said 100 years ago that PR is absolutely useless. Ivy Lee came and proved the opposite, describing the basics of modern PR in his works.
In Russia, there is a widespread opinion that has already been practically abandoned in the West: a community manager is a student employed only to publish news and remove extra negative on the forum. Something in between a copywriter and a moderator.
Not so long ago, I watched a recording of a master class of community managers at GDC, where Linda Carlson, a community director from Sony Online Entertainment, was among the participants. She talked about really unusual things for us. Yes, yes, there is a community director position in Western companies. Open any Russian hr-portal and enter something similar in the search bar. Is there anything? There are very few results. In addition, she gave an example about the joint work of the community and the marketing department. According to her, if the PR-manager is preparing a publication for external sites, he will definitely consult with the community department about the possible reaction of the fans. In my opinion, this is a very correct approach, as a result of which the company works as a single mechanism.
Community management
As I have already said, the community can grow without a community manager, but at the same time you will not be able to direct the vector of its development and influence its atmosphere.
I must say at once that you can never fully control your community, but it is in your power to set the right course of development.
The primary task of the community manager at the stage of launching the project is to prepare platforms for your future users to communicate - forums, blogs and groups in social networks. This is not very difficult to do, but do not forget that it is better to prepare the rules of behavior in advance. So you can avoid trouble in the future. Immediately try to think about all possible conflict and unacceptable situations. After all, if you change the rules too often, people stop believing them.
Develop your community by educating leaders who will set the example for others. A small community can easily exist on self-regulation if it has strong authorities demonstrating the right behavior.
Fan groups - this is quite an important part, which is often forgotten. These can be communities on social networks, blogs, or sites about your game. The authors of such groups already love your game and will be happy to help bring the necessary information or hold certain events. Moreover, fan sites are also an indicator of the success of your game. By supporting the fan community, you help yourself.
The hardest thing is to earn the trust of the players. However, if you fail to do this, further difficulties may arise with the control of the community.
Community development
Like any living organism on our planet, a community lives and develops only when it is fed the right food.
There are two main types of food: information and entertainment.
The most correct and logical to issue information in time and metered. Please do not make other people's mistakes. For example, you should not spoil interesting content, discouraging interest from your players, instead of preparing interesting material at the right moment.
Entertainment is contests and events. All people want recognition of merit and, taking part in contests and winning, they feel themselves to be part of something bigger. Players get new food for discussion and gossip, and you get loyal users who like your contests and game.
However, there is a slippery moment. Often during discussions of something or someone, players are crossing a fine line, starting to violate the rules of your site. Moderators like to solve a problem in the simplest way, closing or deleting a topic. This is not very correct, because you thereby negate the efforts to entertain the players. Try to accurately translate the conversation in a more adequate direction, point-breaking violations.
Some rules of the community manager
Good KM:
1. Knows your community.
The gaming community is somewhat similar to a country with a unique language and culture. CM must understand these people 100% and be part of them. Only if you are a player, you will understand why the next innovation was met negatively, although, according to the developers, it brings a lot of benefits.
2. Communicates.
All communications to build correctly in the language that is clear to the player. Often, KMs use too official or technical language to communicate, but speaking in this way, you are very far from your users. However, do not cross the line. If the users are with you, most likely they will sit on your head.
Players always lack communication and information. No matter how much you communicate, they will always say that this is not enough. It is better not to clog these heads, but work out your own way and frequency of communication.
3. Honest.
I advise you never to lie to the players and try not to say that in the future can be perceived as a lie. For example, you decided to make a certain change and told about it, and then changed your mind and decided to do it differently. If the players liked the original version, you can never prove that you did not cheat and mock them. The situation seems completely fictional, but I came across it more than once.
4. Values ​​his community.
The strength and influence of the community is great. Without considering the opinion of the community, you can make a big mistake. You do not need hordes of disgruntled users in various forums. This spoils the reputation and impairs the players' trust in your company.
Errors of managers in relation to community management
The Internet boom is a relatively recent phenomenon. In Russia, only 10 years ago, he appeared already in many homes. At the same time, the first virtual communities were born. Nevertheless, it is difficult to find well-established rules for working as a community manager. Often, mistakes are made by the leaders of game projects, and the burden of responsibility falls on the shoulders of KMa.
Julien Vera has already singled out the main mistakes for me, but I tried to add examples from my own experience:
1. Sending a community manager to the mouth of a lion. For example, you need to convey information that is very likely to be perceived very negatively. Managers often send KM at the mercy of the players, not trying to resolve this issue in advance and "settle" or alleviate the situation. If management prepared a rationale for the necessary solutions or an alternative for disgruntled players, problems with the community could be avoided altogether.
2. Insufficient support from your community managers. This follows from the preceding paragraph. If you need to convey information, and the CM knows in advance what will be negative, and informs the manager about it, you can often hear something like this: “You’re a community manager, go and deal with the players. I do not like? This is your job! ” What kind of desire to work can remain with the community manager, when, in addition to pressure from the players, he also gets a negative from the authorities? There have been cases of nervous breakdowns with community managers. We were losing our temper and writing such a nightmare on official sites, which only remained to dismiss them. It is hardly necessary for your project.
Did you hug the community manager today?
3. There are such managers (project producers) who transfer responsibility for the decisions made to the players on KM. Suppose a producer makes a certain decision on a project, the CM voices him, and hell begins at the sites - the community is dissatisfied. The producer understands this, comes to the forum and voices the new decision, which cancels the previous one. According to the players, the CM has deceived them, he is a universal evil, while the producer is their best friend and helper. Such a strategy only undermines the trust of players in the project in general and in community manager in particular. Unfortunately, I heard about this more than once.
4. Underestimating the team of community managers. The profession is new, and often, underestimating it, companies pay a very small salary to KM. However, always keep in mind that the community manager is responsible for the image of your company in the eyes of users. Thanks to a good community manager, new loyal players come to you. Are you sure that you need a student who agrees to work for a meager salary, and his greatest talent is the ability to moderate the forum?
5. Insufficiently close interaction between the marketing, the community department, the PR department and the development team. The first three departments are the most common ways to communicate with the players. If your PR-manager publishes one information, and the CM informs another, it looks at least strange. Even worse, when the CM is poorly following the development process and does not even try to convey the ideas of the players and their potential feedback to the developers. However, often the developers do not want to listen to the players.
Some are of the opinion that developers do not need to distract from their main activity - development - and engage in interaction with players. I think differently: sometimes only the developer can correctly explain to the player why this is so and not otherwise. Better yet, if you can involve your community in the development process, giving them the opportunity to choose how this or that function will be implemented in your project. Thus, you will get not just fans of the game, but super fans who will know that they influence the future of their favorite project.
As an example, you can conduct a project ommand & onquer, which fans have been waiting for a very long time. However, after the alpha tests, the developers have published information that they are curtailing the production of the project , since the game is not at all what the players want.
Conclusion
This material is systematized information from various sources and the quintessence of my experience as a community manager in various gaming companies. I really hope that I was able to explain in an easy way why a good community manager is so important for your game project.
As a result, I repeat that the community manager, developing your gaming community, brings new players. You need to be very careful when choosing an employee for such a responsible position. If you have a good KM, the authority in the eyes of the players remains at the same level, but if the KM begins to make mistakes, this will very quickly be recognized outside of your project.
If you have any questions, I will be happy to answer them in the comments.
Promised links to materials used in the work on the article:
http://gamesmarketer.com/2013/07/19/the-beginners-guide-to-community-management/
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132004/online_community_management_.php
My name is Olga Makushenko, and I work in the Allods Team on the Skyforge project. The article is based on my nearly two-year experience as a community manager and on various systematic English-language material, links to which are located at the end and in the text.
I hope, I will be forgiven by the haters of anglicisms, but I will often use the word “community” than “community” - this is what happened in the gaming industry.
Who is such a community manager?
')
It is unlikely that readers have difficulty translating two whole words, but even the term “community manager” does not reflect the essence. First you need to correctly understand what a community is.
The community is NOT “Vkontakte”, “Twitter” and “Facebook”.
A virtual community is a group of people who gather at certain sites to discuss common interests, in our case of games. In fact, we are with you, while discussing a certain news on Habré or any other site. Thus, these are people who discuss exactly your game. The community can develop without the help of a community manager, but only with the help of a good KM will the development vector be the most correct, which will allow you to avoid tons of negative, “trolling” and discord among your players.
A community manager is a kind of man-orchestra. One good CM can combine the responsibilities of a copywriter, content manager, marketer, SMM specialist, event manager, technical support specialist, psychologist, and top player. And it seems to me, I even forgot to mention something.
A community manager is an intermediary between the development / localization team and users. He is a friend and helper, as well as a developer’s face in the player’s eyes.
One “joint” on the part of KM becomes public property in just a few hours.
In his article, Philip Driver highlighted several important features of a professional community manager, but I added a little more from myself:
- Player oriented.
- The game expert feels the game inside and out.
- Leader able to manage a community with a lot of players.
- Has good communication skills. Yes, we all write in the summary of their communication skills. But please do not confuse sociability with the ability to convey information to users and your team.
- A person who is willing to teach other people new things.
- Balanced and confident person. The community manager should be prepared for the fact that users can react aggressively to his messages. The main thing is to learn not to take the negative on your account. This is very difficult, especially because many players do not see the difference between KM and the project as a whole, directing aggression against a particular person.
- It has a huge margin of patience. As you know, nerve cells do not regenerate, and it can be very difficult for super-emotional individuals.
- A talented speaker. Perhaps CM will represent your game at various events and exhibitions. In this case, the ability to adequately answer interview questions will not be redundant.
- Writing talent. Basically, communication KM takes place on forums and various sites. A community manager who is not able to prepare the news or correctly answer the players is unlikely to earn the respect of users. There are KMs who communicate like this: “Hi everyone! This game is awesome, it has monsters and battles, and even cars !!! Lol. What image of the game community managers want to bring with the help of such posts remains a mystery.
A useful experience for a community manager was well described in her article by Julien Vera:
- Experience administering fan sites, moderation forums. Any experience with different communities is a huge plus.
- Media and marketing. It will be easier for you if a person already knows how a PR game is built and distinguishes a good press release from a bad one. And if he also confidently holds in front of the camera lens, you are lucky.
- Technical education or IT experience gives the community manager an understanding of the development process.
In a Forbes article, Jennifer Ghreib identified 4 pillars on which community management is based:
- The growth of the community, which is based on continuous analysis and development of the community.
- Interaction with your users and the development of opinion leaders (opinion leader).
- The ability to listen and speak with users in their language.
- Improvement - using your knowledge to make changes and improvements.
It is very important to always remember these points and try to embody them in your work.
The difference between SMM and community management
The responsibilities of a community manager are often combined with the duties of an SMM specialist, and SMM specialists are called community managers. Indeed, one person can do both, as often happens. But the work of the community manager in the game project is very different:
- Playground. For KMa, the main sites on which it operates are forums and blogs, both official and unofficial. For the SMM specialist - social networks.
- Objective. The SMM specialist is focused on attracting new users, while the CM is working with existing ones.
- Community management. In SMM, managing a community is a difficult task, because keeping track of the comments and building a competent dialogue there is not easy. On forums and blogs, there are more opportunities for building structured communication, which is more likely to convey your point of view to users.
Why is community management so important?
The core of any gaming business is a good game. Let's say there are some good games in the market that belong to one niche, and yours is one of them. To sell the game you attract the marketing department with all its capabilities. However, your competitors are not lagging behind - they also have excellent marketers.
It is at this stage that the community management department contributes. Happy and contented players are in themselves an advertisement for the game. If you develop a community, your players become super fans, who tell the game to their friends. They bring you new users already loyal to your project. It turns out that a good community manager leads new players who most often stay in the game for a long time with their friends. It’s hard to find a more effective marketing channel that brings so many loyal new players.
The quality of the work of a community manager is very difficult to assess just as the result of the work of marketing or PR departments. I have not met a metric similar to ROI (Return of Investment) for community managers. Tracking performance is becoming a very difficult task, and this is one of the reasons that, at least in Russian-speaking countries, community management is not perceived as a rather serious and important profession.
However, it is always worth remembering that your gaming community is the people for whom you made the game. They understand and love her, perhaps even more than you. If you can properly direct the enthusiasm of the fans, they will help you make the game even better, leaving feedback on these or other innovations and highlighting the main problems. And enthusiastic players, like no one else, will be able to inspire your team to even greater achievements.
A developed gaming community can:
- Work as technical support, helping other players.
- Write guides and train newbies.
- Advertise the game.
- Reward other players with collective recognition.
- Regulate internal order.
- Generate ideas to improve the game, events, etc.
- Organize offline events.
It would be strange with such an impressive list of the merits of a developed community not to pay enough attention to its community, let alone underestimate the importance of the work of the community department.
Therefore:
Game project managers often hire community managers with no work experience, believing that communication with players does not require specific skills. All this often led to big problems. As I wrote above, one “cant” of an inexperienced KM led to a deterioration in the reputation of the entire company or project.
People who today say that the community management is not important in the project, not far from people who said 100 years ago that PR is absolutely useless. Ivy Lee came and proved the opposite, describing the basics of modern PR in his works.
In Russia, there is a widespread opinion that has already been practically abandoned in the West: a community manager is a student employed only to publish news and remove extra negative on the forum. Something in between a copywriter and a moderator.
Not so long ago, I watched a recording of a master class of community managers at GDC, where Linda Carlson, a community director from Sony Online Entertainment, was among the participants. She talked about really unusual things for us. Yes, yes, there is a community director position in Western companies. Open any Russian hr-portal and enter something similar in the search bar. Is there anything? There are very few results. In addition, she gave an example about the joint work of the community and the marketing department. According to her, if the PR-manager is preparing a publication for external sites, he will definitely consult with the community department about the possible reaction of the fans. In my opinion, this is a very correct approach, as a result of which the company works as a single mechanism.
Community management
As I have already said, the community can grow without a community manager, but at the same time you will not be able to direct the vector of its development and influence its atmosphere.
I must say at once that you can never fully control your community, but it is in your power to set the right course of development.
The primary task of the community manager at the stage of launching the project is to prepare platforms for your future users to communicate - forums, blogs and groups in social networks. This is not very difficult to do, but do not forget that it is better to prepare the rules of behavior in advance. So you can avoid trouble in the future. Immediately try to think about all possible conflict and unacceptable situations. After all, if you change the rules too often, people stop believing them.
Develop your community by educating leaders who will set the example for others. A small community can easily exist on self-regulation if it has strong authorities demonstrating the right behavior.
Fan groups - this is quite an important part, which is often forgotten. These can be communities on social networks, blogs, or sites about your game. The authors of such groups already love your game and will be happy to help bring the necessary information or hold certain events. Moreover, fan sites are also an indicator of the success of your game. By supporting the fan community, you help yourself.
The hardest thing is to earn the trust of the players. However, if you fail to do this, further difficulties may arise with the control of the community.
Community development
Like any living organism on our planet, a community lives and develops only when it is fed the right food.
There are two main types of food: information and entertainment.
The most correct and logical to issue information in time and metered. Please do not make other people's mistakes. For example, you should not spoil interesting content, discouraging interest from your players, instead of preparing interesting material at the right moment.
Entertainment is contests and events. All people want recognition of merit and, taking part in contests and winning, they feel themselves to be part of something bigger. Players get new food for discussion and gossip, and you get loyal users who like your contests and game.
However, there is a slippery moment. Often during discussions of something or someone, players are crossing a fine line, starting to violate the rules of your site. Moderators like to solve a problem in the simplest way, closing or deleting a topic. This is not very correct, because you thereby negate the efforts to entertain the players. Try to accurately translate the conversation in a more adequate direction, point-breaking violations.
Some rules of the community manager
Good KM:
1. Knows your community.
The gaming community is somewhat similar to a country with a unique language and culture. CM must understand these people 100% and be part of them. Only if you are a player, you will understand why the next innovation was met negatively, although, according to the developers, it brings a lot of benefits.
2. Communicates.
All communications to build correctly in the language that is clear to the player. Often, KMs use too official or technical language to communicate, but speaking in this way, you are very far from your users. However, do not cross the line. If the users are with you, most likely they will sit on your head.
Players always lack communication and information. No matter how much you communicate, they will always say that this is not enough. It is better not to clog these heads, but work out your own way and frequency of communication.
3. Honest.
I advise you never to lie to the players and try not to say that in the future can be perceived as a lie. For example, you decided to make a certain change and told about it, and then changed your mind and decided to do it differently. If the players liked the original version, you can never prove that you did not cheat and mock them. The situation seems completely fictional, but I came across it more than once.
4. Values ​​his community.
The strength and influence of the community is great. Without considering the opinion of the community, you can make a big mistake. You do not need hordes of disgruntled users in various forums. This spoils the reputation and impairs the players' trust in your company.
Errors of managers in relation to community management
The Internet boom is a relatively recent phenomenon. In Russia, only 10 years ago, he appeared already in many homes. At the same time, the first virtual communities were born. Nevertheless, it is difficult to find well-established rules for working as a community manager. Often, mistakes are made by the leaders of game projects, and the burden of responsibility falls on the shoulders of KMa.
Julien Vera has already singled out the main mistakes for me, but I tried to add examples from my own experience:
1. Sending a community manager to the mouth of a lion. For example, you need to convey information that is very likely to be perceived very negatively. Managers often send KM at the mercy of the players, not trying to resolve this issue in advance and "settle" or alleviate the situation. If management prepared a rationale for the necessary solutions or an alternative for disgruntled players, problems with the community could be avoided altogether.
2. Insufficient support from your community managers. This follows from the preceding paragraph. If you need to convey information, and the CM knows in advance what will be negative, and informs the manager about it, you can often hear something like this: “You’re a community manager, go and deal with the players. I do not like? This is your job! ” What kind of desire to work can remain with the community manager, when, in addition to pressure from the players, he also gets a negative from the authorities? There have been cases of nervous breakdowns with community managers. We were losing our temper and writing such a nightmare on official sites, which only remained to dismiss them. It is hardly necessary for your project.
Did you hug the community manager today?
3. There are such managers (project producers) who transfer responsibility for the decisions made to the players on KM. Suppose a producer makes a certain decision on a project, the CM voices him, and hell begins at the sites - the community is dissatisfied. The producer understands this, comes to the forum and voices the new decision, which cancels the previous one. According to the players, the CM has deceived them, he is a universal evil, while the producer is their best friend and helper. Such a strategy only undermines the trust of players in the project in general and in community manager in particular. Unfortunately, I heard about this more than once.
4. Underestimating the team of community managers. The profession is new, and often, underestimating it, companies pay a very small salary to KM. However, always keep in mind that the community manager is responsible for the image of your company in the eyes of users. Thanks to a good community manager, new loyal players come to you. Are you sure that you need a student who agrees to work for a meager salary, and his greatest talent is the ability to moderate the forum?
5. Insufficiently close interaction between the marketing, the community department, the PR department and the development team. The first three departments are the most common ways to communicate with the players. If your PR-manager publishes one information, and the CM informs another, it looks at least strange. Even worse, when the CM is poorly following the development process and does not even try to convey the ideas of the players and their potential feedback to the developers. However, often the developers do not want to listen to the players.
Some are of the opinion that developers do not need to distract from their main activity - development - and engage in interaction with players. I think differently: sometimes only the developer can correctly explain to the player why this is so and not otherwise. Better yet, if you can involve your community in the development process, giving them the opportunity to choose how this or that function will be implemented in your project. Thus, you will get not just fans of the game, but super fans who will know that they influence the future of their favorite project.
As an example, you can conduct a project ommand & onquer, which fans have been waiting for a very long time. However, after the alpha tests, the developers have published information that they are curtailing the production of the project , since the game is not at all what the players want.
Conclusion
This material is systematized information from various sources and the quintessence of my experience as a community manager in various gaming companies. I really hope that I was able to explain in an easy way why a good community manager is so important for your game project.
As a result, I repeat that the community manager, developing your gaming community, brings new players. You need to be very careful when choosing an employee for such a responsible position. If you have a good KM, the authority in the eyes of the players remains at the same level, but if the KM begins to make mistakes, this will very quickly be recognized outside of your project.
If you have any questions, I will be happy to answer them in the comments.
Promised links to materials used in the work on the article:
http://gamesmarketer.com/2013/07/19/the-beginners-guide-to-community-management/
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132004/online_community_management_.php
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/204896/
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