These are some of my thoughts of observations from day 2 of the Virtual Worlds Fall conference in San Jose, California.

Community management in 3D spaces

• When brands come in, you look at ways to get them the most success in interacting with the community – what makes sense with their brand, etc.
• Member advisory board – members participate in a 6-month term; they meet every other week and work with There.com to help communicate about upcoming features, problems, wants, needs, etc.
• Managing a community in a gamin space is easier than in a virtual world. MMORPGs have a common set of goals and you can manage around that. Virtual worlds don’t have explicit goals, so all kinds of people come with all kinds of thoughts, desires, styles and goals.
• SL started out with forums, and community management was basically moderating forums. Then they started blogs, and now in-world press has become a big method for gathering feedback.
• Volunteers who are active in-world are also a good way to get information about the community, and to distribute information within the community. But, there are issues there, such as legal issues that came out of previous cases.
• Volunteer programs have a lot of limitations in that regard for U.S.-based companies, like the inability to ask them to take shifts, set hours, take tickets, etc. You have to be very careful.
• How does community management change from alpha to beta to public release? User motivations change, and you need to adapt to what they want and need through those phases. The bigger changes through those phases are actually internally – taking community needs to the decision-makers in the business and development roles internally, and getting buy-in on fulfilling those needs.
• While it wasn’t said explicitly, the word organization came up several times during the session. Organizing information, organizing communication, and especially organizing help resources are key things for community management.
• In branded spaces, it may depend on what the brand owner wants the experience to be like for the users.
• There is a person behind every avatar. Remember that.
• For kids communities, you have to make sure that you get parents’ permission. You have to build that into your systems.
• Alpha is usually small – friends and family. You don’t need that much community management there. Beta is really the make-or-break phase for setting the tone, getting a good relationship with people and so on.
• Age and identity verification are good steps for protecting minors in virtual worlds. They give you accountability.
• The sooner you start thinking about community management during the development cycle, the better.
• It’s very hard to set a formula for how to scale your team as your world grows – it all depends on how you want to provide service.
• Letting people control their own experience (who can talk to them, IM them, etc) is the best way to keep them from getting griefed, spammed, etc.
• Real world member gatherings are really valuable experiences. You learn a lot and it boosts loyalty to the world. You can usually piggyback on another event to make it easier for the members to come.
• Customer support and community management can co-exist at a smaller size. As you grow, you can split those between technical problems (customer support) and experience/content issues (community management). But there was disagreement over that – There.com’s rep advocated keeping them together all the time, either the same people or working together constantly. Cartoon Network’s rep made the point that support is one-to-one, fixing a problem, while community management is one to many.
• Internal communication is key for making sure the whole community management team enforces the same community standards.
• You should push to make sure the needed communication and event management tools get into your world early and are well-done.
• Large-scale events that get the whole world involved are really great for keeping people engaged.

This entry was posted by jeremy on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.