Monday, February 4, 2008

A CM's fears

Uh oh, it's blog #1...I'm willing to bet that the first blog is generally the hardest. Yes, yes, I'm starting to see that now. I want to start things off with a big BANG, but I'm willing to bet that it just doesn't work that way. These things come with time...

It's quite telling, knowing that this is actually my first blog. I know, for SHAME. How could this have happened? I think I know the answer, but I'll need to explain myself first. There's one thing I've noticed about us OCR (online community relation) folks - once we get some experience under our belt and take off that Cloak of Newbness we tend to become less afraid. And when that happens, we tend to show a bit more of ourselves, i.e., throw a little personality in the mix. So what can make CMs (community managers) even the most outgoing CMs, afraid in the first place?

What CMs worry about when they first get the job

1)Eating our own words. We hate to say one thing, then BOOM, it ends up haunting us forever. Sadly, this is a fact of life, and sometimes you do just have to go out on a limb. And the more the community loves ya, the more likely they will let you forget too ;) This is not necessarily a bad thing, IMO.

2)Not being 100% certain. We hate, hate, hate that. We know players always want concrete answers, and we love giving those answers when we can. We like being that "great know it all behind the curtain". But I've discovered this - it's okay to state something may or may not happen. Heck, I sometimes try to give the odds or a general idea of the likelihood whenever possible. Even if something may not be written in stone every community enjoys being a part of the process.

3)Sounding too casual. I can't write those "we apologize for the inconvenience please let us know if you have any questions or concerns" generic business statements any longer. I used to do that, but now I've really given up trying to NOT sound casual. I've realized I can remain professional AND sound casual all at the same time. I think I'm just one of those CMs who is always going to a)make grammar/spelling mistakes and b)type the way I speak. Yes, many GMs have to write that way, but I don't. I just don't feel like I'm getting through to anyone if I just end up coming across like a robot, typing the same expressions over and over again. I'm just going to leave the marketing words up to the marketing guys....coming from me, it just sounds like a bunch of hogwash.

4)Getting blamed for the ruining the whole game, aka, Don't Kill the Messenger. Ha, it's true. But we understand...we're the focal point for a lot of frustration because we're the ones out there working in the line of fire. We sometimes have to write and say things that we know aren't going to be well received by everyone. It doesn't necessarily mean we have full control over the situation, but we're going to be the ones who are asked to explain the reasoning behind it.

I've seen CMs handle this in different ways. To me, I see it like this: I'm the Community Manager, I get PAID to deal with this. I'm here to represent the product as a whole. It's not my responsibility to assign blame to anyone or deflect blame on to someone else. If it falls on me as a default rule (perhaps a players assumption) then it falls on me. I use "we" a lot because we're a team here at NCsoft, and I'm going to stand behind any decision made, even if it was not my own. I'm going to be very vocal about what I think before a decision is made, but once a decision is made I'm going to stand behind it. Now sometimes it makes sense to clear up a misunderstanding, but that's a different matter. It may be true - we may just be the messenger sometimes, but we should NEVER point fingers or convey information in a "this is someone else's fault" type of manner.

5)Revealing to the world we're not always game experts. We may know a lot about any particular game we work on, but there isn't a single person who knows it ALL. It's okay to say you may not know something. As CMs, we're only held up to standards of perfection in cases where we TRY to be like that. We don't have to be infallible to be good at our job.

Going back to what I said earlier...how could this possibly be my first blog? Well, technically it's my first blog, but I think I've been "blogging" via the message boards for the last few months now. It's not something I did on COH. This is something I've grown into, using the lessons I've explained above. Sometimes I can write paragraph after paragraph on the forums *Exteel cough cough* all the while staying in first person mode.

So, I figured I might as well start a real blog :)

2 comments:

Ripper McGee said...

Welcome to the blogosphere (something I've dabbled in, but have yet to keep at)! I look forward to more exposed thoughts!

~Ripper

Unknown said...

Wow, i only just found your blog. Pretty interesting to hear more about 'the life and times' of a CM, sounds pretty tough being the only one for 4 different games.
Its like you have 8 different groups of people, the devs and the players, trying to communicate through you all at once.


I'm very intrigued as to some of the nuances of the job, like which devs you talk to, which questions you get to ask etc.

One of my mates is studying sociology, but shes also a heavy gamer so I wonder if she'll end up in a similar line of work.

-Kitro, exteel