IMGDC 2007: Community Management as having to do with community

This should be a rant, honestly... The extent to which people ignore the importance of understanding, designing for, and managing the communities associated with virtual worlds and MMOGs is just... just ... something that really makes me want to rant.  There's a whole world, as it were, of dynamics in understanding and working with groups.  And that's the business we're in.  You'd think it would make sense to try to start with that...

Kelly Heckman’s talk on Community Management at IMGDC was the fruit of a lot of experience in the trenches, driven by what’s worked and what hasn’t, and what a good community manager needs… and I think shows how much room there is for understanding what community management can be.  And what it is now… that it probably shouldn’t be.  Kelly talked about the need for data mining, a good tutorial, clear, reliable, and user-friendly billing practices (as opposed to the quasi-usurious practices some MMOs use – creating short-term gains at the expense of their integrity, and at the expense of the long-term relationship with their customer. What is it that makes companies think that treating their customers poorly will be forgotten the next time they want to sell a game?  But I digress.  Suffice it to say: folks, the customers you’re talking to now are quite likely your best bets as customers next year… play nice, seriously).  The problem is that as important usability is, as much customer service as community managers are called on to do… it’s not really community management.  It’s usability, and customer service.  Which is wonderful, and very important… but there’s this part about the interaction between users, the development of community expectations, values and leaders, and the ability to design and influence what really are individual sub-cultures that isn't getting discussed. I did leave Kelly’s talk early (apologies!) - but what I heard points out the reality of the profession in many incarnations:  community managers do lots of customer service.  They are not seen, and respected, as the company interface that’s influencing a (hopefully) thriving social organism created in and around the world.  They’re not seen as the leaders (in theory if not in practice) of a community that can comprise thousands of individuals… or more.  The original designation of these groups as community is in fact accurate… if done well, with interesting social spaces and the expression of appropriate social values, expectations, and ways to interact, it is a community.  It’s people who form long-lasting social ties, create friendships, create social organization (from guilds to fashion designers) and basically create new forms of the social activity we live in throughout our lives.  That’s the goal of this discussion forum, really – to recognize and understand the social aspects of these worlds, to get excited about the emergent behavior that’s happening now, and to try to understand how we can create positive interactions, design community aspects of our worlds… and then manage them.

Comments

[Travis Ross]

Ron, recently I have been looking at some organizational studies literature and I believe there is a lot there that could be applied to community management. One specific thing I have seen is idea about knowledge management within communities. When new players come into a game there are tremendous amounts of information that must be disseminated and I have seen recently with a lot of games a focus on transferring knowledge explicitly through forums, websites, manuals, and even video. The thing that makes this approach difficult for new players is that much of the knowledge within the game about social norms and practices takes the form of tacit knowledge meaning it can not be recorded on the tools currently used for knowledge management. For example, I want to tell someone how to complete the rank V mission in Final Fantasy XI I can explicitly write down the steps to do it, but what I can’t do is write down how I dynamically adapt my strategies to adapt to the current environment. Social learning and learning tacit knowledge, as Brown & Duguid, and Steinkuehler have shown us, takes place in the form of apprenticeship, coaching, and storytelling. These sort of activities are emergent the game designers and community managers can’t force people to do this activity, but what they can do is cultivate it and provide the tools, atmosphere and direction to help it grow. This is direct benefit to developers because while it takes extra work to create the environment that promotes the tacit learning activities, new players who “grow up” in this sort of environment as going to build more social capital and learn the tacit knowledge of the game with less resistance than those who don’t. And this I would imagine will have a direct impact on the churn rate of new players or W00t more long term customers.

[ronmeiners]

Thanks Travis, this is a great clarification, and exactly what I'm trying to draw attention to... though I would go further, and say that the communication of culture happens throughout most or all communications, really. For example, the various messages in the site here have sent a very clear message about our intention, appropriate communication styles, vocabulary, expected knowledge base, etc. And hopefully, in addition, we've also communicated our desire to foster dialogue as well: that this will be a friendly place as opposed to an austere one, etc. I think the communication of culture and/or behavioral expectations is really much wider: in the default world we're constantly engaged in processing cultural cues, and formulating strategies for thriving in those circumstances. The delightful part about the online experience is that they remove some of the steady beat of cultural expectations in our local environments - which local environment should we pay attention to? The one of the virtual world... we approach these experiences with an aspiration, I think, for an ideal cultural experience, and are very keyed to interpret all information - as design or as part of a community interaction - as cues as to what's appropriate. As such, the designer plays a key role in providing appropriate messages and interaction opportunities in the worlds (and educational materials) and the community manager plays a key role in acting as a governor, as it were, on the dynamic patterns that evolve: guiding them as much as possible, as any good social leader does (and as a de facto hopefully-benevolent dictator, the CM can wield huge cultural authority if they're skillful). So yes, I agree, and would even take it farther across the spectrum.

I should probably turn this into a separate post, just to explain better where I'm coming from on this. I think there's a lot of learning to be done here - a real collusion of (surprize) understanding and application of cultural theory.

[Taelos]

Ron is totally right with his statements about community managers being second class employees of a given MMO service. As the role of community managers in MMOs withers, the communities themselfs are forced to take up the slack. Done effectively it is to the long term benefit of the communities and the mid-term detriment of any specific MMO. Here is why I think so.

Hi, my name is Taelos and I currently maintain my avatar persona in four different MMOWs. I am replying to this thread in avatar form because in the context of our online worlds, the community is comprised of avatars. And it is we avatars who are impacted by the depth of community support within a given service. And it is we avatars who must have a hand-in-hand relationship with our community manager(s).

Not all the worlds I inhabit have a visible employee of the service who is tasked with "Community Management". This fact has always amazed me since one of the "M"s in MMO stands for multi-player so by definition communities "just happen" in MMOWs. To not expect and/or plan for this in advance by the game designers is exposing ignorance of the customer and their needs.

I agree completely with Ron when he says that community managers are treated as second rate citizens by their employeers. The best example is with Makena's THERE.COM service, where they have burned through three community managers in under three years. After the last one quit they operated with out any community or support manager for almost another year. As an active community advocate within THERE, I have first hand experience working with these community managers. And I watched with shock and disgust at how frustrated they became as each of them in turn realized that they did not have the support of the company when engaging the community. There was no effective way for these community "managers" to make commitments on behalf of the service or even to be an advocate of community needs to unhearing company management. Community management is not all about organizing "tupperware parties" to amuse the service membership. Although it is apparent that the management of some MMOW believe this to be so.

Community managers not withstanding, there is an even greater need for intrinsic tools with a MMOW to foster the creation of communities and enable them to sustain the ups and downs communities will encounter over time. All four of the MMOWs this avatar enhabits have different level of community tool support, all of them lacking, some woefully so. What is important to note is where the service is lacking, avatars involved in communities will seek to augment their worlds with external tools to support their communities. Some obvious things are easily demonstrated, such as the use of external BBS and blogs to facilitate community communications. Similarly the use of external voice chat and text chat software to fill the void where no such features exist, or augment that which already exists in a given service. But the need for tools does not end there and frankly is a discussion topic all on its own. Nontheless, lack of community tools within a service creates a background level of frustration which eventually contributes to member churn. Take that to the bank.

And the needs of communities go beyond tools and managers! Does the service even CARE about communities at all? Are communities even on the radar screen of the service providers? If not why not? Perhaps within existing business models these service providers have not adequately instrumented communities in a way that can be "monitized" and thus have value? One thing is certain; the depth of community support within each MMO I live in varies widely.

Once again, this gap is filled by the communities themselfs. As a community leader in THERE I have been involved in a member organized, funded and operated organization who's goal is to foster the creation, support and sustanance of communities in THERE. The fact that we have made progress at all and have survived for three years is remarkable given my observations of THERE actions toward communities mentioned above. The good news is that our organization has influenced THERE to create new tools to help communities, which is a great start but there is much more work to do. The upside for THERE is these same tools have enabled them to make more revenue and retain more members. Why this is not seen as a win-win is beyond my comprehension.

All of this brings me to my thesis "Wither the Community Manager". Given the dismal state of community management within a game, pan-MMO communities are forming. These are communities which by definition exist simultaneously on multiple MMOs. They have formed because communities realize that the individual MMOW service providers will not help them. Physician heal thyself! In other words, we invent our own "Community Manager", build our own tools. Survive on our own with dimished loyalty to the MMOW. It is the people stupid, thats what is important, not the MMO.

For example my community spans four different MMOs. We have learned a hard lesson that the service providers really do not care what happens to us. When we grow frustrated with one service we know we have other choices and we excercise those choices. If weather is bad (service poor, laggy, server down, etc.) we up an move to another MMO. It is not uncommon to "MMO hop" several times on a single evening. As such we have long since abanoned the thought that any MMO would "keep us together". Instead we use external tools to maintain our own group coheasion.

Ron made a great point when he said "the customers you’re talking to now are quite likely your best bets as customers next year". We are an example of those future customers able to influence mass migrations between games old and new. I think MMOs can go a long way to buy our loyality back. All they need is to try.

Taelos Katran

[Celia Pearce]

Taelos, thank you for your thoughtful and extensive post. It's great to hear about this issue from an insider's point of view. I was very much hoping that people would engate in our discussion here from the players' point of view.

I think your adage: "It's the people, stupid," should be taken up as a mantra to urge companies to view community support in a more expansive sense. As I've mentioned in other posts, MMOGs only belong to the designer until they open. Once an MMOG is in full swing, it belong to the players; and it behooves the "Gods" of the world (i.e., its owners and creators) to take heed.

I don't remember what game it was, but in one game mentioned earlier here, the power of a God was based on the number of citizens that were loyal to them. This is an excellent metaphor for what we are talking about here.

It's interesting to note that in the smaller worlds, they at least have someone called a "community manager." With all their shortcomings, this at least indicates some consciousness that this is something that is needed. Conversely, larger worlds tend to deal in terms of "customer service," which I think we can all agree is highly inadequate for the types of environments we are talking about.

[ronmeiners]

I've been amazed at the power of communities since our users hacked the Mplayer client to stay on the service up until the bitter end of its being closed down. Well, before then, really, but it's a great example.

Raph Koster did a talk at AGC in 2006 that sums up the importance of community support in virtual world creation and management... the Gamasutra writeup is here:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10803

It's a great read on some really sharp thinking on the forces pushing the industry... and the looming necessity of a strong relationship with your community.