I’m a researcher when it comes to the web. I love tracking trends on various keywords that I’m interested in – everything from social media to horses, writing, cultural issues, feminism, interior design, and career related topics such as community management. I find that it is quite rare that I find a Community Management article that is useful to me. Is it because I “know it all”? Of course not. It’s just very interesting to me that any blogs and websites that talk about Community Management do so in very abstract and high level ways. I mean high level enough that what they say could be considered ‘common sense’ and basic know how.
Why is this? I think it’s because a lot of what Community Managers deal with on a day by day basis is:
- Personal to the community the CM is representing
- Sensitive to reactions by the community
- Confidential to the company
- So varied from company to company
A ton of community management is learning as you go. It’s learning a lot of interpersonal skills and the ability to make good judgement calls. It’s about assuming the role of your users and acting as their voice to the development team (but the harder part is making sure the passed along feedback is aligned with company goals). It’s not really things you can learn by blogging. But throughout the past two years that I’ve been the sole CM at Metaplace, I’ve learned a ton. Things like:
- What are the best subject lines to increase open rate?
- Which newsletter/mail programs work the best for the size of my company?
- How often development roadmaps are necessary.
- How to deal with a changing product
- How to write community guidelines and enforce them.
Looking back, I should have been blogging about these learnings as I have been going along. Why? Well, other than selfish SEO reasons, because when I was looking for this information I couldn’t find it. Articles on the web about CM are generally things like “How to build a successful online community”, “What are the traits of a good CM” and “Why it’s important to have a community manager for your brand”. These are not topics that are great for my day to day job. They’re great for spreading the word about community management, sure, but I’m not the target audience for that.
So here I am railing against other bloggers for not being concrete with useful CM data, and I don’t even do it myself. Well here are the reasons why:
- Personal vs. business - I’ve always tried to keep this blog more about my personal feelings and thoughts on the industry itself. I try not to mix Metaplace business in here, because then I’ll end up with my online community I represent coming here to read what I say. Eventually, regardless of disclaimers this blog would become another community outreach point and my users would come here.
- My Identity – On this blog, I’m not Cuppycake the Metaplace CM. I’m Cuppycake, the MMORPG enthusiast. I like it that way.
- Sensitivity of conversations – There are many many learnings in community management that aren’t shared with the public. It’s really quite unfortunate, because posts like this one are amazing resources for CMs. If you are going to post detailed learnings like this, you need your company’s buy-in as it’s definitely a cultural shift. I think we all aim for transparency like that, but it’s really difficult in practice. Frankly, sometimes managing your community requires you to be opaque for the good of the long term message.
So that’s why I personally don’t blog about community management. I think other CMs have similar reasons, but they might have their own as well. There are some absolutely spectacular CMs in gaming, virtual worlds, and web products and some of them would be such a fantastic resource. It’s unfortunate that detailed community management learnings are kept so tight lipped.
P.S. for the record, most of this could be said about community panels at game dev conferences as well.
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.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I totally agree with you dear. ^_^ I come here to read what Cuppy has to say on things, not “Cuppy the Community Manager of Metaplace.” Plus getting into that whole company info vs. personal info is just dangerous. There is stuff about the company is for the company. If that information needs to get out, then there are channels for that on the main website and in other areas. This is the Cuppy’s blog, which is none of those channels.
Although, I agree again, I do wish there was more of a centralized place for information about community management. I’ve tried to look things up and I’ve found some really interesting stuff, but most of what’s said is really just the common sense you gain when dealing with communities at large. All communities seem to display the traits that people publicly say, and you can find that out by simply spending time with any community on any level.
It’s trying to cut through the noise of the community that is one of the main problems of CMing anything. Everyone has their own opinions and motiviations for what their posting, but you need to surf through the posts to find that common thread that seems to be driving people to speak loudly. Asking questions is a great way to do that, but the questions you pose need to be said in a way that isn’t leading. Too often do I see CMs sending out surveys that I know will not produce good, reliable data about their communities simply because the answers are severely polarizing. Aion is a nice example, as their latest survey included the question, “Do you like private shops?” with the responses being, “I love them!” or “I hate them!” or “What’s a public shop?” That data isn’t going to tell you anything.
And I think I just went on an insane rant. I’ll stop now, but suffice it to say, keep on truckin’ with what you do here.
I enjoy it thoroughly! (And you and I have to go questing in Aion. ‘Nuff said.)
This is a really interesting perspective – thanks for sharing. I work with many community managers and am finding similar things which is that a lot of the issues – and therefore the experience – handled by community managers are of a pretty confidential nature either to the community member or the the company. Even if someone were to try and blog about the issues, they are too nuanced for most people to articulate well in text. Great post!
Interesting views – not sure I completely agree with them though. I agree that there are a lot of CM blogs that are too ‘common sense’, but I’ve managed to find some (such as Rachel Happe’s, or her ‘Community Management Roundtable’) that cause me to think and expand my thinking as a CM.
There are lessons to be learned even in posts that have to be stripped of specific details of the client/community. Also, I’d be interested to see how a community itself could be challenged to blog about itself – what would the members of a community feel was safe to share publicly about their struggles, triumphs, etc? Thanks for making me think in your post!
Not hard to set up a second blog, where you can community-manager-blog the right way ….
I have a TON of blogs already
The last thing I need is another one!!
So, Tami, you don’t need a whole blog post, but what did you discover to be the Best Newsletter/email service? THX
PS I enjoyed your style. Robyn Tippins sent this post via Facebook.