The Historian

Facebook has a new security feature called “Profile Review” so that when you are tagged in a photo or a post, you’ll will get to approve it before it shows on your wall or news feed. Unapproved tagged posts and photos will appear in a new section called “Pending posts.”

This really should be the default, instead of an opt-in feature.

Here’s how to activate Profile Review:

1. Go to Account> Privacy Settings.
2. Next to “How Tags Work” click “Edit Settings”.
3. In the “How Tags Work” pop-up, click “Edit” next to “Profile Review”.
4. In the next pop-up, click “Turn on Profile Review”.

Click the image for a better view.

I recently inherited a few twitter accounts with well over 3000 followers each that were following almost as many twitter feeds. Unfortunately the quality of these followers and those we were following were not that great. A significant number of them wouldn’t typically be interested in what we were posting and we certainly didn’t want to see “$50 FREE SLOT PLAY” every few minutes in our feeds. For our feed to be valuable to us, we need to know our audience so that we can communicate things that are valuable to them. You have to get to know the users the community will potentially serve.

Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others. – Seth Godin: What do you know?

Start by gathering information. If you can, have person interviews.  Ask what your users need?  Do they have problems?  Where do they hang out online and how do they participate?  What are their likes and dislikes in those communities? Who are the most important people in the community?

Leverage this listening data and make changes. From there, keep two questions in mind. “What are we doing wrong?” and “What are we doing that we can we do better?”.

I’ve been sitting back for a few a bit trying to take in all the changes that have been going on with Community Management and the “Rise of Social Media”. I put that in quotes because most CMs have been doing Social Media forever, we just didn’t call it “Social Media”. So here are a few things that I think today’s CMs should really take to heart.

Be Human

Today, being a Community Manager is so much than running a forum and posting news and updates. Be a real person, if you are having a great day let the world know! If you are having a busy day, drop a tweet or status update that says, “Leaving one meeting, heading to another”. Anything you can do to become someone they want to know.

You should also be engaging beyond text-based mediums. Get a podcast going, or make yourself available to other podcasters. Hold webinars and plan face to face meet-ups with your audience. Record interviews with interesting people In and around your community. Be visible in as many ways as possible.

Go Easy On The Marketing

You represent the brand, but you shouldn’t be the total marketing force. Do not let yourself become a “Social Media Marketer” where your only goal is to drive numbers and analyze metrics. Some marketing is fine and you do want to help promote things, but try not to be overly formal. Your forums, Facebook Pages and Twitter are all great places to drive marketing but you want them to be sociable too. Engage your users and be friendly; make it fun to keep up with what you and the community are doing.

Take Your Days Off

This, is a tough one. We all know that the Community doesn’t sleep, doesn’t take vacations or even take the holidays off. We often feel like we need to check in every day to make sure things are running smooth. And you know, it’s fine to check in, but don’t get sucked in. You need to have time to process things and to have a life beyond your community. If you have a team working with you then make sure you have people there to help, if the community needs it. If you need to make announcements, Tweets or Facebook posts there are a number of tools to help automate things so you don’t need to be “on” 24/7. Relax and get away for a bit or you will burn out.

I hope you found this useful and good luck with your Community.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

I cannot describe how I’ve felt these past few months as I’ve continued to look for work. Sure I had a job, when many can’t find one. I liked where I worked and the people I worked with. And yes the ending of a nearly 2 year relationship in the middle of all that didn’t help. But I still felt like something else was missing from me.

Enter the new job. On Monday, I start working with BioWare working with the Community around Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The world just seems so different today and has for the past week as I’ve been slowing moving towards my first day. I feel amazing.

I get to work with BioWare… BIOWARE!

I get to work on a Star Wars game… STAR WARS!

And I once again get to be a part of a fanatical, fantastic and fascinating community.

I’m Alive… So Alive…

In order to tell my tale at Acclaim I need to take you back, all the way back to 1998. It was that year that a few things came together for me but most importantly it is the year that I started my second fan site. My first was for a game called Creatures; the second was for a game to be made by a newly founded game company funded by Microsoft. That game was Dungeon Siege, created by Chris Taylor at his new Gas Powered Games studio.

That site was called “The Dungeon Siege Historian”. It wasn’t the first fan site for DS, one started a week before mine, but it didn’t last… Mine did. That site grew and was picked up by GameSpy as a hosted site under Planet RPG. We then merged with another fan site out there and eventually grew to become Planet Dungeon Siege. This site is still up and running 12 years later and with Dungeon Siege 3 in the works looks like it will be around for quite some time. But in 2007 after DS2 I was getting a little bored with the site and the franchise and was looking around for something new to play in the MMO space. I was a huge fan of Asheron’s Call, a game that I still think is one of the best MMOs of all time, and was looking for another fantasy based game to fill my time. As I searched around I found that the Acclaim brand had been resurrected and was putting out Asian MMOs in the US. One of the games coming was 2Moons, an adaptation of the Korean Dekaron. I loved the over the top style of the game and decided to join the community and see what it was about.

At the time there was much of a moderation team, in fact I think there might have only been one who worked for Acclaim. So I decided to offer my help, using my experience with PDS as proof of my competency. I contacted David Perry, who directed me to David Jun in Acclaim’s Marketing. He brought me onboard as one of the first volunteer moderators for 2Moons, with 2 other people. One really never made an effort and the other worked out well for some time, but eventually was let go.

I continued to grow the team adding those that I thought really helped the community. I will eventually write about some of them but for now I will only mention Jill Sullivan. Jill was my “wonder twin”… Between the two of us we could do just about any project Acclaim threw at us, in record time and above expectations. It was her video creation for 2Moons that led to David Perry hiring her to work for him, and her encouragement with him and Howard Marks that helped Acclaim hire me. I cannot ever thank her enough for that. She is currently looking for work in the Gaming Industry and I would highly recommend her to any company.

And that brings us right up to the point of me being hired at Acclaim.

Next up, my first few weeks at Acclaim and the challenges of taking on Communities that really didn’t want me there.