Metaverse Mod Squad

By Sanya Weathers

As we’ve discussed, the cheapest customer to acquire is the one you’ve already got. Every additional month, every item purchased from your cash shop by someone who is already a customer means more profit on the interaction for your company.

And your customer is hotly desired by all of your competitors. Unless you’re selling something the customer can’t get anywhere else, you can’t relax.

See, your player is constantly hearing about new products. Free trial this, sign up and get this free item that, join now and get 50% off everything. He’s also seeing what you’re doing to attract new customers in the way of freebies and discounts and special attention.

Don’t give him a reason to say, “What am I, chopped liver?” Don’t take him for granted. Here are some strategies that you could use, or that might spark your own ideas.

-    Give everyone who has been on your books for more than six months a special item. Make a big deal out of this item, make it clear that reaching the six month mark (or whatever point where you find people starting to drop away) will also get this item.

-    Consider real life items. The main trouble with virtual worlds is that they have nothing to hold, no tangible proof of the way they’ve been spending their time. Most virtual world citizens eventually reach a point where they realize that for all the time they spend woodcarving in your world, they could have carved a thousand totem poles in the physical world. Anyone who has spent more than a thousand hours in your world should get something to show for it – even if it’s just a keychain.

-    Each customer is special. You’ve got their birthdays in your database. It’s not hard to set the system to send a birthday email on the active customer’s special day. If you’ve got a small player base, consider having someone on the community team scribble a personal email.

-    Celebrate the most dedicated customers. Each year, figure out who has put in the most time. Write to them, thank them, and ask their permission to celebrate them on your website.

By Sanya Weathers

Don’t forget that a community person’s job is not just keeping up morale in the player base. The development team is part of the community. We need to keep ‘em happy.

That should not be confused with keeping management happy. That especially should not be confused with “telling managers what they want to hear.”

The vast majority of game company employees are just like the game’s customers, with the same passions and interests. (A fair number of the employees were probably posting regularly on the forums of the games that they played, before they became game developers and stopped posting on any forums but their own because that would be a conflict of interest, now, wouldn’t it. Ahem.)

So use the same techniques that you use to manage your customers. Respect their time, be concise, be funny. Be considerate. Put yourself in the shoes of the person you want to talk with.

But more important than technique is the content. Your devs often only hear bad news from you. Something that is broken or a balance decision that is enraging your forums or a website error that has dropped your signup rates to zero. YOU may be the only person on the entire dev team who sees the other side – the relationships formed, the friendships made, the exciting battles and fabulous stories. No one emails the front line content dev to let him know that two people who met in your game got married. No one sends pictures of the baby named after an NPC to the quest developer.

It’s up to us community types to communicate the joyful side of things, and the real impact our products have on the lives of the people who play them. Every job on the development team plays a role in making the magic happen, so don’t just tell the management team. Tell the labor force. Happy Labor Day.

by Sanya Weathers

One of the more amusing minor internet dramas of today involves a reporter for the Huffington Post getting taken in by one of the more convincing satire sites out there. But it did remind me of one of the most important protips of all time:

If you fall for a satire, a joke, or a scam, own it and forget it.

This reporter is making things so much worse by refusing to laugh at her own expense, and rewriting her published response to make it appear she wasn’t taken in.

In this age of Google cache… don’t bother. Besides, everyone likes a fellow human being.

By Sanya Weathers

Newsletters are a type of database marketing. So are the coupons you get in special mailers if you belong to the Super Shoppers club at your grocery store, as well as the “Tip of the Month” junk mail you get if you own a house and used a real estate agent to buy it. You hook people into joining your database by giving them something right away – a good deal on a house, or a gallon of free milk, or a chance to try out your product for free.

Once you’ve got the customer hooked, you have a recurring opportunity to increase the odds of each reader becoming a regular customer. You’ve probably heard the old saying that it’s cheaper to spend your money on keeping a customer than it is to go find a new one.

That one didn’t get to be an old saying because it overstated the case.

However, the thing you need to keep in mind is that a newsletter only works as a retention tool if it gives the customer an incentive to read it.

Common mistakes:

-    Length. Remember that this is junk mail to the user. Junk mail they may or may not remember agreeing to get, no less. A paragraph is too long, let alone a whole essay.

-    Content that you want to tell them, as opposed to content they want to read. If you’re using the newsletter to push a program or explain a design change, you probably lost your audience two lines in.

-    Old content. I have three newsletters in my inbox right now consisting of “news” I already saw on the website/industry mailing lists. I get that newsletters have to be approved. I get that a studio beholden to a corporate overlord has multiple approval gauntlets to run. But as a customer, I do not actually care about your problems. If it’s not exclusive to the newsletter, get the newsletter out within a week of the story breaking elsewhere.

Things you can do that are awesome:

-    Reward them for reading. A code for an in-game item. A fancy badge on the forum. 10% off a month’s subscription fee. Whatever. Just give them free stuff and watch your click-through rate soar.

-    Reward them for reading regularly. Anyone signing in three months in a row to redeem the monthly prize gets a bigger prize.

-    Talk to them like insiders. Stop trying to sell the product. They’ve bought it. Now they’re part of the inner circle, so treat them accordingly. Be straightforward. Make inside jokes. Show them they’re part of something special.

-    Special opportunities. There are focus groups, and then there are focus groups. Some require a true random sample of the user base. For all those that don’t, give your newsletter subscribers first crack at the fun.

Make your next newsletter one that incentivizes readers, and directly increases your retention.

By Sanya Weathers

On the heels of the followup column I posted last week, I came across this gem in the New York Times. (I know this blog makes hot links hard to see – just mouseover the words “this gem.”) Basically, it’s the ultimate in following up with a potential customer. Someone spends ten minutes looking at a part of shoes on one website, and a custom ad featuring those shoes appear on other websites visited by that customer.

The article itself contains a fair bit of worrying about vast networks watching your every move, privacy concerns, and whatnot. I’m a big fan of privacy and think we should be doing more as an industry to make the sharing of personal information optional and the mechanisms transparent.

But this is a no brainer. This is cookie driven advertising, and it is brilliant. It has the world’s easiest fix if you don’t like it.  (There’s another mouseover there.) This kind of ad reaches a customer that was interested enough to come to your website, but left without making a commitment. Furthermore, this kind of ad reaches the customers who did sign up/download/whatever. The presence of your ad will subconsciously assure the user that he has made a good choice. (Go to any forum for a product without a significant ad presence, and you’ll see concerns that the company isn’t really serious about success or staying power.)

As for the people who are disturbed by it, I’m willing to guess that none of them are under 30. I’m willing to bet hard cash than none of them are under 20. The generation currently making their first purchasing decisions do not know a world without ads precisely calibrated to their age, gender, and buying habits. They aren’t creeped out by the phenomenon. They expect it.

by Sanya Weathers

When you make an announcement, reach out to a potential partner, or just post a link to a news article on your forum, it’s all part of your communications strategy. It’s scheduled and timed. To maximize your return (and to be sure your intentions are clear to your users) schedule your followup as an integral part of the initial action.

Or, put in plain English - if you make an announcement on Tuesday, reserve an hour on Wednesday to check and respond to user questions on Facebook or your forum.

By Sanya Weathers

You hear it at meetings a lot – someone who looks good in khaki and collared shirts bragging about eyeball acquisition. I’m not making light of the ability to acquire viewers and drive traffic to products, mind you. I often wish I had that ability. The results are easy to quantify, allowing the practitioners of this arcane art to set goals and meet them.

Community, despite the great strides in metrics in the last few years, is still a little fuzzier around the edges. We specialize in user retention, and short of time travel, there is no way to determine how much more  money an individual customer gave our companies (as opposed to how much they’d have spent without a community specialist). The best we can do is group players according to who and who does not take advantage of the features we design, and compare the aggregate spending rates. But I digress.

At any rate, driving high numbers of users to a product or a registration form is a crucial step in any growth plan. But what happens after the users get there?

If your plan is “build a great product that people can’t help but want to use,” that’s great. Since you won’t know if you’ve done that until after your acquisitions team has worked their magic, you should put a plan in place to do some follow up.

-    Make new arrivals feel welcome. A short (really short) note explaining a few basic FAQs that will help them get right into the swing of things. A no-tolerance policy when it comes to existing customers mocking newcomers. Provide contact information for feedback.

-    Offer a survey, both at your site and at the site where users originated, stressing the value of their first impressions. Offer a reward for filling out that survey.

-    Fast response to feedback. If you must use form letters, be sure to include a personal line at the top of the canned response.

-    “Tours.” Invite new users to join a daily live chat where you answer questions and make suggestions.

-    Run through the new user experience yourself. Listen to what the true new users are saying.

-    Follow up on the phone with the most influential new users (bloggers, people with large social networks, etc) – nothing says “you’re valuable” like physical-world contact.

By Sanya Weathers

I got online this morning, and I was greeted with the information that a former coworker, an ex-boyfriend, and one of my best friends from high school all thought a particular link was important enough to share. I had not yet had any caffeine, and I blinked in confusion. Had I messed up my usual ritual, and gone to Facebook before checking the headlines?

No. My local paper (the Washington Post) just implemented their Facebook integration toolset.

Facebook been called a time suck, shallow, and trivial – and that’s before we get into the myriad legitimate privacy concerns. Plenty of people are predicting the end of Facebook, pointing at the rise and fall of older networking applications as evidence. It’s a fad, it’s silly, it’s teaching an entire generation new ways to be embarrassed on Monday morning. And you can’t afford to skip it.

No matter what the problems are, there are still 500 million people (mostly college educated or college bound, with the resulting higher level of disposable income) on Facebook. The most active users have big social networks with whom they love to share videos and links. Sharing stuff on Facebook is both a thrill for the people who love to be the first to discover a new thing, and fun for the social animals who get a kick out of being part of a larger community.

And Facebook keeps going further and further with its plug and play tools to make it even easier to for users to share your content with their networks with a single click.

A simple “share this on Facebook” button is the closest thing to free advertising there is.

By Sanya Weathers

There are two things more contagious that spread faster than flu germs at a trade show – fear and fun. With wide swaths of the global economy in tatters, fear is certainly well known these days. People just don’t have much disposable income. In fact, one of the most affordable means of entertainment is online and social gaming. Subscription products offer more bang for the buck than movies, restaurants, cable television, or travel. Free to play products are even more affordable, even if the strictly free form of the products tend to be limited in scope.

The entertainment industry has responded, and created a lot of competition in the online/social gaming space. People have a choice in products, and they want to spend their time with the options that give them the most fun and the biggest escape from fear.

The best way to associate your product with escapism and fun is to have fun where your players can see you. If customers know that time with you – on your website, forum, Twitter feed, and even the product itself – is good for a guaranteed smile, they’ll keep coming back.

As we saw on Monday, you position yourself as fun with the tone of your corporate communications. Don’t take yourself too seriously, even as you take the work you do and the quality of your product VERY seriously. Be ready to laugh at yourself, even though you never laugh at the employees or the developers.

But the real key to fun as it pertains to retention is to watch for the things your customers are doing for fun, and to support and augment their efforts. If a player has organized a tournament, offer prizes. If a player starts a screenshot contest, make it official with promotion on your website. Did a player write a unique bit of fanfiction? Find a way to put it into the game. Hilarious YouTube video making the rounds? Show it at your next live event.

The fun your players come up with will be more authentic than the activities you provide. By openly enjoying and supporting what they do, you build your relationship with them and encourage them to stick with a company that appreciates and celebrates the customer. And the positive attitude is contagious, leading to all kinds of benefits in terms of easier to manage forums, good word of mouth, and better press coverage.

By Sanya Weathers

My favorite secret weapon when it comes to community management is humor. I assume it’s a secret, anyway, because so few people seem to know about it.

Community managers are at a disadvantage when it comes to communication, because it is assumed by the typical user that we exist solely to advance the interests of our company – and furthermore, that those interests are in direct opposition to the interests of the customer. As such, the things we say are taken with a grain of salt, and perceived as being less than fully authentic.

The usual reaction to this is to adopt a polished, professional tone, and an image that never has a bad day.

That might even be fine if the product never has a bad day. If you’ve got such a product under development, be sure and patent the process.

At any rate, with humor, you need to be aware that there are only two acceptable targets – yourself, and strawmen set up for comedic purposes. I don’t recommend teasing your actual customers, because even if they laugh, outsiders and lurkers can easily get the wrong idea, and your teasing when removed from its context will sound cruel.

Laughing at yourself is always acceptable, and it can enhance your reputation. The best example of this that I’ve seen in the last week came from Jet Blue, in the aftermath of “hit the slide”:

“Perhaps you heard a little story about one of our flight attendants? While we can’t discuss the details of what is an ongoing investigation, plenty of others have already formed opinions on the matter. Like, the entire Internet. (The reason we’re not commenting is that we respect the privacy of the individual. People can speak on their own behalf; we won’t do it for them.)” Read the whole post here.

Wry, clever, charming. Also clearly stating a company policy, reinforcing company values, and obliquely reassuring customers that they probably won’t see their own rogue attendant. It’s a brilliant post, and ought to be in a textbook somewhere. “We get the joke because we’re in on it” is always superior strategy to “we’re humorless, faceless drones concerned about liability” – but only assuming you’ve established a personality in advance.