Community Is King

So, as some of you may have noticed, I’m now working for CerebralFix as their Social Media & Community Manager. It’s the job I molded myself for by spending hours in front of my computer. I mean, think about it: I spend a good chunk of my days talking to people I’ve never met about video games while simultaneously attempting to guide behaviors. I swear, this job is just a loot table and a raid sign up away from being just like my days as a guild recruitment officer.

Well, maybe it’s not exactly like my guild officer days. It might be nice to have /gkick functionality again. And officer chat. Oh, God, I miss officer chat…

All joking aside, while the Vanilla WoW 40-man cat-wrangling sessions taught me the bulk of what I needed to become a social media & community manager, the time I spent as a search engine marketing specialist–and mainly the search engine optimization skills I learned–taught me almost as much. It’s funny, though. As a marketer who knows that she started out as a target demographic, I see a huge divide between what an audience needs and wants and what most social media marketers do. I don’t know why it is, but for some odd reason, many of my fellow social media people think that people love advertising, that Twitter and Facebook should be filled with what amounts to commercials, and, of course, that no one would dare unfollow an account for being an annoying bot, bent on helping you earn money while you sleep or pushing something or another on you. Ri-goddamned-diculous.

My promise to the gamers out there that follow CerebralFix’s accounts: While I might encourage you to try out a different game than you’ve mentioned playing already, I will never use our community to sell you anything.

I hear it now. There’s a horrified collective gasp from my bosses and other social marketers, but I’m pretty sure a good chunk of the community managers of the internet are with me on this idea. Maybe it’s all the time we spend in forums, but community managers get to know their audience way better than the average social media “guru” (my God, I hate that term). It’s this familiarity that helps us understand and connect with people, and, while our audience may be smaller, it also tends to be more in touch.

Rules for Earning Your Community’s Trust

I have a few rules I follow to create a small band of loyal misfits:

1. We are always we. To lead a community, you have to be a part of it. Never think of your audience as “them.” You should strive to be one of their friends, albeit the new one who’s a little weird and still getting to know everyone. The minute you act like a stranger walking into a club or like a member of the family, you’ve gone off the path you need. You have to be comfortable, but not so comfortable you’ve got your feet on the coffee table and you’re raiding the fridge.
2. No one wants to see commercials all the time. No one wants to be sold to. Whether we’re talking about used car salesmen or gold farmers who broadcast their cheap currency in Orgrimmar, we tend to ignore anyone who tells us what we want. Forum posts and tweets often turn into glorified infomercials in the hands of marketers, but community managers avoid this. Instead, we make suggestions, but leave the final decision open to individuals. At the same time, however, we also answer questions and encourage people to share their experiences. We put very few (if any) filters in place and treat negative comments as an opportunity for improvement and growth. And we never plant shills. That’s just bad karma.
3. We have a reason to care. Straight marketers often look at their social media channels as a way to push a product, sell it and be done with it. Community managers, however, recognize our channels as two-way streets. We field questions and garner repeat business by doing everything possible to create a positive experience for customers. In short, we make our audience feel valued. Positive comments are shared. Negative reviews receive public answers and queries on how to improve. Off-topic conversations are joined. For a community manager, the value of a community isn’t in the sales they generate, but in the community itself and its enthusiasm.
4. We live online and in a time when we can be very vocal about our opinions. We  let people have their say, and we respond as human beings. We don’t rattle off memorized nonsense, and we can’t cut a person short just because we disagree. We cannot hide behind corporate policy. We must allow both our audience and ourselves to be who we are. Otherwise, cripes, we may as well be automated programs. And who really likes talking to a ‘bot?

Listening is a far better use of time than selling ever was.