Hey everyone! Happy 2 YEARS(!!!) of the Community Dev Newsletter. 🥰🥳
This project has been so fulfilling, and I'm grateful to everyone for clicking and reading. Whether you just subscribed yesterday, responded to every single email, casually lurked, or just skimmed this, thank you so much!!!! I was so nervous this wouldn't be helpful (especially since there are so many great newsletters out there already), but all of you came together and contributed to much to this. Thank you!! Here's to another year of communitying everywhere! (Hmm... that sounds... weird.)
But enough chitty chat because there is more chitty chatty to be had. We have an EXTRA LONG (it's worth it!!) newsletter featuring a guest post from one of the most recognizable names in the community scene...
This month's newsletter dives into:
- Balancing being "the face" of a game while properly crediting the entire team
- A new community activity: Rewrite a dev log paragraph
- 44 marketing/community related links, resources, and job posts
Guest Post 🎤
This year we're taking tiny steps in every newsletter to level up a community skill to keep us sharp and confident. 💪 Last week we practiced copywriting.
This week? Understanding what it means to be "the face" of the game without erasing who you are. And who better to talk about that then the wonderful, the magnificent, and boss community expert: Dylan Gafner (dmg04)! You might know him from his time as Bungie's Senior Community Manager or more recently as the Principal Global Community Strategist at Riot Games.
I asked him for his input on the question: "How do you balance being 'the face' of a community VS trying to raise up and give attention to the dev team VS giving yourself credit?"
His answer is so good, so I won't waste time writing here any longer. Let's dive into it!
Being ✨THE FACE✨ of a studio
Dylan Gafner: Thanks for having me. It’s been a while since I’ve written blog content, so this is exciting. No doubts this will be a bit long winded, but we’ll see how deep your readers go. Let's get to it.
First, let’s look at balancing your ridiculously beautiful face with giving appropriate attention to the dev team.
Elevating the TEAM: A challenging aspect of this comes from your internal presence at a game studio. It can be difficult to nail down comms or really deliver appropriate messages for players if your initiatives come off as projects to elevate your notoriety/face rather than helping the studio address a question, concern, or exciting opportunity for your community.
Some of the best Community Managers I’ve had the pleasure of working with don’t actively look to take the spotlight. They’re dedicated to the success of the team and the overall studio, meaning they’ll elevate appropriate spokespeople as necessary, find ways to push focus to teams/team members and their work, or step in to deliver information as necessary.
There are numerous questions layered into communication strategies as they begin to bubble up. Depending on whether you’re looking to solve a rising issue in the live game or planning out a season of content in advance, you may find yourself with the following Q’s:
- Who are we speaking to?
- Who in the community do we need to ensure finds this message?
- When do we need to deliver this message?
- Who among us has the facts? (Note from Victoria: Heh. Among us.)
- What is the projected reaction to our message?
- How much time do we have to allocate to drafting and delivering this message? (Another way to ask, what are we sacrificing to draft this message, AKA dev time).
Each of these questions is essential, and there can be MANY more on the table, but each is about maintaining focus on yourself as a part of the team, rather than being the main topic. If a given team member is willing/available to be credited with a message, that’s killer! If they decline and would rather not be the focus, you can attribute this to the team. Sure, you may be delivering the message, but the focus is still on the team itself. Sometimes things can get spicy, and you can deliver hard news without throwing a specific small team or team member under the bus by crediting them directly while they’re trying to focus on their work.
Humility and Empathy: While your messaging and strategy is the most important thing on your plate, every person and team at the studio you’re working with has a slate of their own tasks and deliverables that they’re executing upon. So long as you’re working with the team to help them understand your desires, it can really help alleviate the team’s potential feelings of a given CM looking for stardom or spotlight over supporting the project.
Now, let’s look at the next piece of the question; how do you give yourself credit?
Job first, public reputation second: First and foremost, track your work. Not only the things you were responsible for (Ex: Writing a blog entry), but the things you also coordinated. This can include team outreach, meeting coordination for fact syncing, editorial processes, asset creation or coordination, and more. A large piece of community management isn’t just delivering the news, but the actual process of getting the information internally. This consists of teambuilding, collaboration, project management to a degree, and a ton more. These things look great on resumes and are awesome for review cycles.
Speaking of review cycles, follow up with your manager to discuss your contributions and achievements. You’ll notice that my first inclination is to focus on credit when it comes to your job, rather than your face or reputation. You can build a stellar reputation among fans for delivering the news they want (or sometimes don’t want) to hear, but your manager(s), HR and Payroll will ultimately decide what your level is and what your paycheck is. Without you tracking and reporting the appropriate facts of your success and how it positively impacted the studio, there’s not much more for folks to think aside from “Ah, you’re the CM that does the tweets, right?”
Data correlation can get a bit tricky in this space – what do you (as a community manager) directly drive? Sentiment isn’t entirely your domain, as the state of the world can impact it, let alone the state of the game you’re working on. Poke at different things with your manager to see what best applies. This can range from increases or decreases in trends, pageviews, direct purchases of store items you have highlighted through community content, and more.
Look at your job description, look at where you want to be, and take the things you’ve tracked to show how you’ve progressed. Look at the things you’ve done well, what you may not have done well, and continue to create goals to further your career.
Teamwork makes the Dream Work: When you do wish to speak publicly about the things you’re proud of, you need to ensure that it’s in the form of a team product. Don’t take this as “focus on the things you didn’t do,” but rather “focus on the things you and the team accomplished” while giving appropriate credit to the folks involved. Often enough, the community team is credited with the by-line of a given blog article. Whether it be your personal gamertag or a more generic Community Team accreditation, players can very clearly see the end-product of what you’ve done. In this instance, it’s really key to share that spotlight and ensure players understand it’s more than just you. It’s super easy to point to that article and say “look at the thing I did!” – but in reality it’s a thing we did.
And finally, a word of warning: If you’re looking to purely elevate your own face or notoriety, being a Community Manager may not be the right position for you. While pieces of this job may ask you to step in front of an audience to deliver some spectacular (or expectation setting) news, your role at a studio is not to grow your own audience. There will be moments in the job where you can define your voice, your role, and your perceived personality, but those are side objectives in humanizing a message. You’re not being hired to be or become a celebrity. You’re being hired for your skills in communication, your problem-solving skills in a sentiment heavy landscape where a misplaced comma or turn of phrase could lead to negativity or mistrust. You may end up being in a “Quarterback” style role, but ultimately, you’re here to elevate the studio, the team, and even build up your resume. Your follow count may grow if the product does well, but that shouldn’t be your endgame.
If you’re in a content creation or streamer career, your product (being your stream) may lead studios to believe that you’ll be good under pressure or can help deliver some amazing marketing assets. You may bring some of your audience into a fandom when getting hired, but the picture is far greater than that. What is the endgame? Making sure the comms go out factual, the marketing beats hit as high as they can, the team is represented in the best light possible, and that players feel heard or at the very least understand the goals behind what’s going on in the game. Surprise and delight, baby.
I’m going to be straight with you all – this is a question that I’ve been thinking about since starting in 2015. There’s a bit more we could dive through, too. Analytics & data to prove out your worth, how to handle yourself as the “community voice” in a triage session, how to have the hard conversations of asking for a raise when comparing your salary to another studio, understanding why you may have missed a level bump in a review cycle due to economic uncertainty, how to keep your home life separate from your “face” life for a studio, how to handle layoffs without letting them impact how you appropriately value and credit your work… but we’ll leave that for another time.
Back to you, Victoria!
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Thanks again to Dylan for taking the time to share his expertise (and contributing to the community question below)! You can keep up with his future community management thoughts on Twitter/X or LinkedIn.
Community Activity 📝
Every month we do a new skill testing exercise or discussion question together.
The question:
Rewrite this mini dev log to better credit the development team. For bonus points, explain why you thought this did or didn't miss the mark.
Hi players! It's me, your favorite community manager Name McNameFace! I hunted down all the news for you from the dev team and I can't wait to dive into it. First, our programmer Taylor fixed that ladder bug that was bothering soooo many of you after I poked them a ton about it haha. Next, you know that new hot dog cosmetic you've been begging me to add? Wellll the team didn't want to add it. Sorry, don't hate me! We also got a new office, you can see it over on the studio account (or check my personal Instagram for some more behind the scenes!)
Feel free to email me back with your answer - I always respond to them! My answer will be in the next newsletter. If you have future questions you'd like to ask the community, let me know.
Last week's activity:
Improve the text on this fake game's feature description!
(Feel free to take creative liberties with the game concept - e.g. if it just says "Monsters", you can add adjectives like "Terrifying monsters" or "Hand-drawn monsters that are hungry for lemons"):
Shooty McShootFace is the latest and greatest shoot-em-up featuring
- Multiplayer (4 people)
- Lots of guns
- Procedurally generated levels
- Monsters
- Good music
I loved some of the creative takes on this question! There isn't necessarily one right answer based on how you themed this, but one of the things I'd recommend you think of when writing feature lists is the "And why is that a good thing?" question. Basically always think about why something matters to someone and what they get value from. For instance, it doesn't matter if an umbrella blocks rain. It matters if it keeps you dry!
With that being said, here's a sample copy we could make with this idea:
Shooty McShootFace is the latest and greatest shoot-em-up featuring:
- Finally! Something to do with friends. Get up to 4 of your best friends together for chaos, laughs, and indescribable fear.
- Pick your favorite play style. Over 50 gun types ensures you'll find the gun that'll make you the most masterful McShootFace in all the land.
- New challenges every round. Think you can handle a constantly changing landscape? Good luck!
- Survive - if you can. Monsters are everywhere. Assert your dominance and face your fears in front of these handcrafted horrors!
- Blood-pumping tunes. Hardcore beats to shoot/get pumped to. This EDM-inspired tracklist is going to get you running.
And this idea isn't limited to feature lists either! Whether you're writing dev logs, announcements, or marketing copy, always think how the other person feels and why the thing you're writing about is something that matters to the reader.
Community Chatter 💬
Here are the interesting and helpful things I've seen this past month.
General News
Games Resources
Community & Marketing Game Jobs
These are not endorsements.
- 2K - Director, Player Lifecycle Management (Novato, US)
- Assembly Media - Community Manager (Seattle or Los Angeles, USA)
- Artificial Core - Senior Game Community Manager (Hybrid, Netherlands..? Remote?)
- Behaviour Interactive - Email & CRM Coordinator (Montreal, Canada)
-
CD Projekt - Marketing Specialist (Warsaw, Poland)
- Coolmath Games - Social Media Marketing Specialist (Remote)
- Corsair - Influencer Manager (Milpitas, US)
- Cult Games - Marketing Manager (Remote or London, UK)
- Cure Cancer - Head of Gaming & Streaming (Hybrid, Sydney, Australia)
- Eastside Games - Performance Marketing Manager (Remote, US/Canada)
- Elsewhere - Marketing and Community Manager (San Francisco, US)
- Fire Hose Games - Marketing Director (Remote)
- Fortis Games - Senior Social Media Manager (Remote, Canada)
- Halfbrick - Community Manager (Remote)
- HoYoverse - Senior Community Director - Genshin Impact (Remote)
- Infernozilla - Community Manager (Remote)
- Kickstarter - Head of Games, Outreach (Remote)
- Kabam - Product Marketing Manager (Hybrid, Vancouver, Canada)
- Kyma - Social Media Executive (Hybrid, Manchester, UK)
- Mob Entertainment - Associate Marketing Manager (Remote)
- Neonhive Games - Freelance Community Manager (Remote)
- Netflix - Social Manager, Games - UCAN (Los Angeles, US)
-
Red Bull - Manager, Social Media - Gaming Network (Santa Monica, US)
- Skybound - Senior Marketing Manager (Remote)
- Singularity 6 - Contract Community Manager (Remote or Hybrid, US)
- Space Ace Games - Part-Time Discord Community Manager (Remote)
- Supercell - Senior Community Manager, Clash of Clans or New Game (Helsinki, Finland)
- The Game Kitchen - Community Manager and Content Creator Contract (Canary Islands)
- The Pokémon Company International - Sr. Corporate Communications Manager (Bellevue, US)
- Twitch - Unity Guild Community Manager (Remote in some US locations)
- Wizards of the Coast - Community Manager (Renton, US)
- Wolfjaw Studios - Community Management & Studio Operations Intern (Hybrid, NY)
- Worlds - Marketing Director (Remote)
- Xbox - Head of Xbox Global Communications (Remote, US)
- YouTube - Strategic Partner Manager, Creators and Gaming (Toronto, Canada)
In other news, I'm finally working on proper branding for my newsletter and website with a graphic designer haha. Keep an eye out for that! Oh oh oh also I haven't forgotten about that RSS Feed some of you requested - it looks like my newsletter service doesn't really have that yet so...???????????? Maybe I need to hire a web dev...
Anyways. Thanks for reading as always. It's been rough out there in the industry and I hope you've been taking care of yourselves. Biggest hugs and well wishes.
❤️
Victoria
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4:46 PM • Feb 7, 2024
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