Hi hello hey!
Almost the end of the year!! I am trying to finish the first draft for my book about community management before 2025 so wish me luck aghhh puking crying screaming.
In the meantime, we have a very talented guest for this newsletter!
This month's newsletter dives into:
- How to sort through feedback with The ROSE System
- A community question about getting buy-in from management
- Several links to marketing-related updates and job posts
Guest Post: Mary Kish
We have a guest post today - please welcome in Mary Kish (merrykish), Head of Community at Twitch and cohost of the Fire Escape Cast!
Every wonder how community managers sort through waves and waves of feedback? Or maybe even how we can even use feedback, especially when it can come from sooo many different places? Yes? Good because that's what today's newsletter is about. Take it away, Mary~
Understanding Feedback
Mary Kish: *✧･ﾟ:* FEEDBACK *:･ﾟ✧*: You know it, you love it, you’ve received it. It's important to be able to accept feedback from others to grow and improve. But what happens when that feedback is coming from 10 people? What about 100? Ok, what if 100,000 people have feedback….
In an effort to maintain sanity and make genuine positive change from community feedback, here’s a feedback loop for your community and brand. I call it:
✾ ✿ ❀ The ROSE System ✾ ✿ ❀
Receive that sweet sweet feedback
You’d think this part comes naturally, but if you want good feedback, it's important to ask right! There are several methods but I encourage you to avoid tweeting out ‘tell us what you don’t like’ because the way you ask will set the tone for the feedback you receive. You may need to prompt your community to start the conversation, because while they probably have opinions, if you don’t ask they likely won't share.
You’ll want to put effort into your questions; start this conversation with empathy and an eagerness to learn. The location you choose will alter the types of responses, so it's helpful to think about reach vs value. For example, if you choose a public space, like X, you have high reach, but because anyone can respond, the value of each individual response is lower. Discord will have lower reach, but should include more dedicated community members, and should yield higher value responses. Here are a few examples:
- Geoff Keighly Tweets a poll after the Game Awards, you don’t even have to watch to vote, but it's a great indicator of public sentiment post show.
- Xbox sends a form in their Discord which gives creators an opportunity to let them know what they’re looking forward to.
- The St. Jude Playlive Discord offers small group sessions to learn what worked and could be improved in future events.
- Twitch constructed a forum space for users to upvote their own thoughts called Uservoice
Don’t forget to remind people that you’re asking because you’re genuinely interested in improving, and you care about what people have to say. If community members are taking valuable time out of their day to speak to you, you gotta appreciate it, even if the feedback isn’t positive!
I like to use data points in my feedback forms with yes/no questions for more accurate results. A good question will give you a direct answer, a bad question will leave you in a nebulous space where you don't know how they feel. Let’s say you want to gauge the community if they liked your recent event. Here’s two ways to ask:
Would you participate in this community event again? Yes/No
VS
What was your favorite part of the community event?
The first question will yield more accurate results. It's direct, requires choice, and doesn’t lead the user to a particular answer. The second question needs short form answers that are difficult to parse, and you led them to respond positively. Don’t be afraid to ask specific questions that may lead to negative feedback, I promise it will be ok!
Organize your data
Ok you have 50 opinions from your question….and they’re all different. Great. Start a document that helps you take data and organize it into various categories. A great way to start is based on sentiment - how much of this data leans Positive, Neutral or Negative? That will at least give you a gauge for where you stand on this topic with the community. Other categories to consider include conversation volume (how many people engaged with this topic over what period of time), and what themes were present? Was the community curious about the topic and had a lot of questions? Or were they opinionated and had a lot to say?
Collecting both anecdotal and data-based information helps paint a larger picture that will give you a better understanding of the feedback and next steps. If you’ve never received this type of data before then what you’re collecting is your baseline. You can measure over time if your sentiment has gone up or down, or if you’ve increased interactions on your posts. Standard measurements are usually monthly, but can be quarterly or even yearly based on need. It can be beneficial to track brand sentiment and awareness over long periods of time, so pick your questions carefully and try not to alter them. That way you have strong data points over time that help convey trends and predictions.
Don’t get too bogged down with takeaways, you should prioritize the biggest lessons from this data so it's not overwhelming for others to digest. I like to showcase ‘Wins’ and ‘Learnings’ as a way to capture events and programs that were successful and spaces where we can still improve. I end with Insights & Recommendations to interpret data into actionable feedback for the team.
Sequence the information with your team
Once you feel like you have a good chunk of feedback that can help you and the team to take action, you need to contextualize it into a format for discussion and prioritization. Here's a thought starter on how you can position the feedback with your team:
- Context - What brought you here? Why did you get this feedback in the first place?
- Social Listening Analysis - What data did you collect? How can it be interpreted?
- Considerations - What needs to be considered with this feedback? How can this impact the Brand, Community Interaction, Sales and more?
- Immediate/Long terms Actions - What actions you recommend and why. Which ones can be implemented quickly, what are longer term solutions that will take further discussion?
Ultimately decisions are not made in isolation, you’ll need to ensure you have all the right people in the room to make the appropriate decisions, but your role is an advocate. You are the voice for people who are not in the room, you are a liaison to help add a perspective for a large group. Try not to be overly critical and keep in mind that the solution may not be what you think it is. In fact, there may not be a clear solution at all, but hearing others and working together to align on the main goals will help the team make better decisions moving forward.
Execute your choices
You have come to decisions based on collective feedback that the team can take action on. Good for you. Don’t forget to tell your community you’ve made changes because of them! Personalizing your changes and showing that you’re actively listening to the community is a good thing. Just be aware that even though you captured data and you might have a good indication of the community sentiment, there’s always deviation. You can’t speak for your community as an entire monolith. You can say that you received feedback that gave you direction, and the next steps you're taking as a result.
What happens when you can’t take action on their feedback? This one is tricky. Sometimes, I respond to the individual via email/DM to express how we appreciate raising the flag, but we have more internal work to do before taking action. Sometimes we don’t respond at all, as a way to keep the feedback for a later time when we can take action on it.
For example, safety features on Twitch took a long time to release, by the time we announced them, the initial feedback was years old! But we still took the time to remind the community that it's because of their feedback that these features were added. I also always like to remind the community via blog/livestream that the work is never over, just because we haven’t responded doesn’t mean we’re not actively thinking about the issue and ideating on solutions.
Think about where to share this! In some cases it's best to only share next steps with users that are heavily invested in your brand, but in others it's best to shout from the rooftops! When a user has notified us of a bug, we send them an individual email of the incident and how we’ve resolved it. There’s no need to let the wider community know unless it’s a widespread issue. If we have evidence that the issue is impacting a large number of users, we release a Tweet so the public knows and that we’re working to resolve. There’s no perfect barometer for when to make a public post, but generally if over 5% of users are aware of the issue I look to escalate to the wider team. I also tend to believe where there's smoke there's fire. Which is to say, if there's a small number of impacted users but they’re very upset, it could be reflective of a larger problem.
After you make your announcement about your recent changes based on community feedback, you may get feedback on your feedback, and that's when the ❀ The ROSE System ❀ begins anew. Please refer to the top of this post.
That’s it! The last thing I want to end with is this. Being a community manager is hard. It takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there and hear people fully and genuinely. Your empathy and your understanding is what makes you an ideal fit to speak to the community and address concerns that they have, but it also makes you squishy and sad if people are not happy. This is the duality of community management. Ultimately, even negative feedback is better than no feedback, because it means someone cares enough to tell you how they feel, and that's meaningful. Feedback truly is a gift. You may not win every battle, and sometimes the community may be angry with you, but if you move the needle little by little, you are contributing a great deal, and you matter.
Community Activity 📝
Every month we do a skill testing exercise or discussion question together.
Have an activity idea or want to ask a question? Submit one anonymously!
The question:
What do you do if you (a project manger/community manager) have ideas for the company community and social channels but the higher ups think that it's too cringe even though you know it will do well?
You've showed evidence that it has done well with others but they are still resistant. The game would be also suited to that style of fun marketing.
This one was a submitted question, thank you!! Feel free to email me back with your answer - I always respond. My answer will be in the next newsletter.
Last week's activity:
Do you have any tips/advice for presenting games at events like GDC, PAX, Gamescom, etc.?
For this, I'll reference and old blog post I wrote in my Kitfox Games days about game demos!
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.
Aaand you did it! Another month of learning done. Congratulations, now you can slack off for the rest of the year! (Do not tell your boss I said that. Unless you are the boss. In which case your employees can slack off for the rest of the year.)
❤️
Victoria
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8:49 PM • Oct 28, 2024
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