If there is just one point that you take from this blog post, make it the fact that community managers are just as important (if not more important) in social games than any other type of online game or community.
Facebook gives game developers a rather unique deck of cards to play with, in that there is a built in system for players to provide feedback about your product. Applications have walls in which players can post comments, they have a discussion forum (which is a removable option) where players can create threads in this rather primitive message board software. Users can rate your product with 1-5 stars and provide a bit of feedback along with their rating. And for almost every action by which they interact with your product, they are advertising your product to their friends. This is a win/win situation by all means.
Why is Community Management important in social games? Same reasons it is crucial in all online communities such as managing expectations, putting a tangible face on the company, showing you listen and relate with fans, extracting valuable feedback from players, etc. But here’s a quick peek at how community management in social games is unique.
Vying for attention
This is probably singlehandedly the number one reason for having a Community Manager handle status updates and communications with the playerbase. The typical Facebook game player doesn’t just play one game daily. They become fans of dozens of these games and each one can blend into the next if they’re not pulled into the game again in some way or another. Facebook as a platform is noisy, but in a good way. When a game or brand posts a status message that has hundreds of “likes” and comments, it always bubbles up into the “Top News” tab on everyone’s Facebook dashboard. This means more people see your message. This also means they are seeing the messages of LOTS of different products and services they have “fanned” on Facebook. Creating status messages that encourage fans to click, engage, read, and interact with your wall posts does involve some creativity with you’re not the only one out there doing it. This is where good market research, knowing the userbase, and knowing out to reach out into your audience is important. Community managers are great at this.
Lots of retention opportunities
The biggest thing a Facebook game developer can do to increase their DAU/MAU is not only encourage their members to become fans of their product so they can receive updates, but also ensure these updates are interesting, timed-well, and are frequent enough without being too spammy. The best time of day may vary for your game, but it’s fairly easy to test and see what time of day provides the biggest win. Facebook game developers have a benefit of having a direct link to what is essentially everyone’s life-feed. It’s like being able to send a newsletter to your customers every single day. This is not cost or time-effective in an MMO or online service, but on Facebook it can be done with a couple sentences and a teaser image. Multiple times per day you have the power in your hands to pull users into your game, and a community manager can singlehandedly help increase your retention numbers.
Muddy user feedback
There are plenty of benefits to a widening demographic, and there are some unfortunate negatives as well. One of theses is that suggestions about the game’s development are often misguided and hard to extract into actionable tasks. Bug reports are jumbled, hard to understand, and come at a striking rate. These players are not familiar with concepts such as “beta” and are demanding, can be stubborn and hard to please, and don’t understand concepts that many traditional gamers have long been familiar with. This means that it takes a community manager with some skill to evaluate all of the feedback at a micro-level and turn it into actionable tasks and macro-trends. It can be very easy at times to knee-jerk react to a few ranting users on the boards, but a good community manager uses tactics to appease the masses and make sure the right tasks are passed on to development. Trust me when I say that the people implementing the code do need a barrier from these players at times.
Opportunity to provide better-than-normal CS
The nature of social gaming and the free-to-play business model is that there is a high level goal of acquiring users and fast. One side effect of this is that the number of users exponentially grows much larger than the support team size, especially in the case of social gaming startup companies. Many Facebook games are currently opting to provide little to no customer service, and this has set an expectation among Facebook game players that “developers never help us.” On Island Life, we’ve made it a point to respond to important threads, consistently give feedback and updates about our game, and answer support tickets in a relatively timely matter. Our players are appreciative, it’s quite awesome. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “this game is amazing and I keep coming back because the devs CARE unlike other games.” They’re thankful for responses (even scripted ones). There is an opportunity here for a community manager to come in and give your game the positivity that it needs to make it stand out from the crowd. Building a community means listening and responding.
Getting players excited
If there is one thing that almost every Facebook game is doing, it’s releasing content at a steady rate. New items, new decorations, new pets, new animals, new avatar clothing, new maps, you name it. Part of the win of every release is getting the community excited about it. Releasing promo images ahead of time, getting players pumped up for new items, soliciting feedback for what kind of items the players would like to see, wrangling imagery to really make the release stand out. Many games now are doing things like running contests, promotions, and limited time events. Someone needs to be responsible for keeping a friendly tone, encouraging positivity in the community, planning events and holidays, determining what will be successful for the players, and making each release shine. This is where a Community Manager plays a HUGE role.
What do you think? Have you had experiences as a community manager in social games, or have you dealt with one as a player? Comment away!
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }