And we’re back!

It’s been an exciting couple of weeks for me. I recently landed a gig as an online community manager for a prominent social gaming company. More on that later, but the short version has me living in San Francisco and kick-starting an exciting new career. Good times!

As a result of this long job hunt, I’ve been through a lot of job interviews. Some good, some bad. With the economy as rough as it is, and considering how competitive both the video game and social media industries can be, even a great interview often ends with “good luck in your search.”

But this post isn’t about how to land any community manager job (check out Blaise’s fantastic article for help on that front.) It’s about how to figure out if that specific position is right for you.

Nearly all interviewers will end with “So, do you have any questions for me?” Once you’ve finished impressing them with your savvy, well-informed questions about their products and company history, make sure you ask:

Where does the online community manager sit?

Will you be sitting with the engineers, the marketing team, or the customer support team? Or another team entirely? Because of the jack-of-all-trades nature of community management, and because many companies are hiring one for the first time, every organization has a different view on the CM’s role. The physical place that you sit gives you a great snapshot of what your primary tasks will be.

If you’re sitting with the engineers, your primary task is probably to engage with your members and relay bugs that the community finds. With marketing, you’ll be more focused on blogger outreach, social media and community involvement. Of course, you’ll probably be doing all of this regardless, just in different proportions.

The good news is, community management is such an encompassing role that once you get in the door, you can mold it into your ideal mix of abilities. All you have to do is be awesome at it.

Find out where your chair is, and you’ll learn a lot more than if you asked “so tell me about the position.”

Last week I attended a presentation by Shama Kabani as part of a lecture series put on by the Dallas chapter of Social Media Club (and also featuring a fantastic talk by the inimitable Eric Swayne). Shama is the president of the Dallas-based online marketing firm Marketing Zen Group and author of The Zen of Social Media Marketing.

Shama’s presentation was loaded with wisdom for exciting a social media following. The most important takeaway: people use social media to show off their identity. Keeping up with friends is nice. Sharing photos is cool. But showing yourself is what it’s all about. Any brand trying to build a community must first figure out how people will incorporate that brand into their online identities. (Social game developers know it’s also the secret to selling virtual goods.)

To accomplish this, Shama coined the ACT model for social media marketing — Attract, Convert, Transform. And it’s a great way to look at online community building.

Shama details the ACT model over at the Marketing Message Blog:

A is for Attract. To attract means to get attention or stand out. Practically, this means attracting traffic to your website—your main online marketing tool. Nowhere is social media marketing more successful and useful than in the “attracting” phase of online marketing. During the attraction phase, you are trying to drive traffic to your site and stand out from the masses.

C is for Convert. Conversion happens when you turn a stranger into a consumer or customer. And there is a difference between the two! A consumer may take in your information or even sample your product, but he or she may not always buy. That’s okay! Over time, that consumer may become a customer. The more expensive a purchase, the longer it may take. This means that you constantly have to work to convert people into consumers and customers.

T is for Transform. You transform when you turn past and present successes into magnetic forces of attraction.

Looking at this strictly from an online community management perspective, the ACT model matches both the lifecycle of a successful community and the lifecycle of your members themselves. When you’re first launching, your goal is to attract new members (but not too many). As your community matures, your membership coalesces into a more active group. Maybe they start referring to themselves as “Goons” or “Redditors”. Maybe they start holding offline events. Finally, once it hits critical mass, your community (hopefully) becomes a self-sustaining force that uses a rich history to draw in new members.

The ACT model also dovetails with the Membership Lifecycle for Online Communities, first put forth by Amy Jo Kim. According to Dr. Kim, online community members go through five stages:

1. Lurkers – newly exposed members who consume content without creating any. Many won’t even have registered. You’ve attracted them, but haven’t yet converted them into a real member.
2. Novices – Something triggers the lurker to contribute. For instance: a heated debate, an interesting topic, a new game release, a need for technical support, or a witty comment. The lurker has built enough comfort and trust to be willing to join up, but is still low on the reputation totem pole.
3. Regulars – After a period of sustained contribution, the novice becomes a regular both in terms of proficiency and in reputation. They are fully converted and participating in your community, rather than just consuming it.
4. Leaders – Your most valuable regulars will eventually take ownership of different aspects of your community. They have earned so much respect that, even if you haven’t endowed them with moderation-type powers, they still wield a great deal of influence. These are your movers and shakers. They create the memes, in-jokes and conversations that constitute your community’s engine.
5. Elders – Inevitably, users move on. This is another part of your community’s transformation. It must have an ability to adapt to a new environment. An elder still has great influence in an online community, but is probably no longer actively contributing.

Your goal as online community manager is to guide both your community and your members through each of these steps. Attract the right people. Convert them into useful, content-producing, experience-improving members. And then build on those successes to transform the community as a whole.

Major thanks to Shama for the fresh perspective.

Image credit: Steve Snodgrass

Today, 4-16-10, is Foursquare Day. Rejoice, Foursquare users! (Foursquarers? Foursquares? Foursies?) Finally, you have a day of celebration where you can attend parties filled with Foursquare users. And earn a special badge. Also, you can check in to places. And stuff.

If you’re neither a Foursquare user nor a social media news junkie, you probably have no idea what that means. In fact, to the non-koolaid-drinker, the idea of a Global Social Media Holiday is exactly the kind of self-indulgent narcissism that is “wrong” with Social Media. Can you do that? Can you just… declare a holiday? And then get thousands of people to celebrate it?

Yep. You can now. And for online communities it’s really, really smart.

According to the official Foursquare Day website, here’s how it started:

Nate [Bonilla-Warford] is amused by simple number relationships like squares and primes and he makes a big deal about Pi Day each year. The thought struck him that since four-squared equals 16, it would be great to check into Foursquare on the 4^th 16^th of the year, otherwise known as 4 / 16 or April 16^th.

Nate floated the idea on Foursquare’s Getsatisfaction.com forum on March 12, 36 days before April 16th. An entire week passed with no activity before Kenneth Glanton suggested a Foursquare Day badge. He shared the idea with many of his friends on Twitter. Prompted by Ken’s enthusiasm and the recent excitement over Foursquare’s success at SXSW, Nate wrote up the Foursquare Day proposal and started a Facebook event on March 22, with 25 days left.

Nate then joined forces with Laura Petrolino and Jessica Barnet, which led to the creation of a Facebook Fan Page, multiple blog posts, and an official Foursquare Day Twitter account.

The idea took off. Users are hosting over 150 events all over the world today. Users. Not Foursquare. The Foursquare users. Foursquare Day is grassroots community building at its finest.

This is different than a corporation hosting hundreds of mini events. With social media, average users now have the ability to coordinate a network of simultaneous events. An influential blogger will suggest an idea, that idea gets put in motion, and then hundreds of people around the country think “wow, that sounds fun” and duplicate it.

For another example, look at mommy bloggers. Mom’s Nite Out started in similar fashion, with influential blogger Maria Bailey suggesting a national “night off” for moms to get together and have fun.

From the official Mom’s Nite Out website:

The National Mom’s Nite Out is the first nationally organized celebration of motherhood Intended to bring together today’s moms, physically and virtually, The National Mom’s Nite Out will unite over 150 social media groups, companies, local playgroups, mommy bloggers and mother social networks in giving moms a well deserved night off.

It worked. Hundreds of events popped up around the country. Power members among the mommy blogger community took it upon themselves to host them. “Hey, is anything going on in New York City? No? Ok, I’ll host one!” This led to a trickle down effect as more bloggers and readers followed suit.

Live events have a dramatic effect on your online community. When your users are the ones empowered to host live events for like-minded people, it multiplies that effect exponentially. They create a positive feedback loop, not only by instilling a strong sense of camraderie, but also by exposing your community to non-members in a fun and interesting way. How many people who don’t watch football attend Super Bowl parties?

This is exactly the kind of emergent behavior that Foursquare needs to target in order to melt faces.

Viral live events have a profound impact on gaming communities, too. Just look at any video game that has a robust grassroots tournament scene. Almost always, these tournaments developed in the living rooms of average gamers. They invited others to play, who in turn invited others to play, and so on until suddenly you have 6-figure prizes and rockstar professional gamers.

The lesson: powerful viral growth happens offline.

If you’ve been reading up on social gaming, you’re probably familiar with terms like “microtransaction,” “core gamer,” “casual gamer” and “viral.” Maybe even “Freemium.” But buried in all the talk of Farms and Fish is a new lexicon that combines old school statistics with the latest in search engine analytics.

So, for those of you who are neither stat geeks nor analytics jockeys, here’s a crash course in basic terminology for social games metrics.

ARPU
A term carried over from Telecom companies, Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is measured as total revenue divided by the number of subscribers. This includes revenue from subscriber fees, virtual goods, affiliate marketing and ad impressions. Because social games are so metrics-heavy, ARPU can be broken down by day, by country, by demographic, or by pretty much any other metric.

Churn
The turnover rate (or “attrition rate“) of a social game’s active players. The noise level in casual gaming is extremely high, which means social games have a user base that is constantly changing as gamers abandon the game or delete the Facebook app. Churn refers to this constant loss and gain of members.

Cohort
A common term in statistics, a cohort is “a group of subjects who have shared a particular experience during a particular time span.” In social gaming metrics, cohorts are used for analyzing retention. By organizing users in groups such as “everyone that visited on June 10th” and analyzing the percentage that revisit, you can pinpoint what promotions are having the greatest effect.

DAU
Daily Active Users (DAU) is just what it sounds like: the number of active users over the course of a single day.

DAU/MAU
The DAU/MAU ratio is one of the hot metrics in social games. Comparing Daily Active Users to Monthly Active Users shows roughly how many days per month your average user engages with your game. If you have 500,000 daily users and 1 million monthly users, the DAU/MAU is .5, translating to the average user logging in ~15 days per month. The DAU/MAU ratio is strongly correlated with social gaming success.

According to Lisa Marino from RockYou, the minimum threshold for DAU/MAU is .2. This is necessary for a game to hit critical mass virality and engagement.

Engagement
Facebook players typically have dozens of “active” games at a time. Engagement measures how long they spend playing your game. How many features do they access? Are they spending hours or seconds? How many pages does the average user view? What percentage are returning visitors?

Entry Event
An entry event is the first action a user performs when they enter the game. Online social games can track every action you perform, and the Entry Event Distribution is one of the more important metrics to follow. What do your users do first? Which entry events are the most effective at bringing people back?

For example, you might find that a majority of your users log in when they receive a gift, and the first thing they do is check that gift. By determining the more popular entry events, you can push more resources towards them, thus increasing retention, engagement and re-engagement.

Exit Event
The opposite of entry events. Exit events are the last actions a user performs before exiting the game. Tracking the Exit Event Distribution helps show why users are disengaging with the game.

K Factor
K Factor measures the virality of your product. K Factor = (Infection Rate) * (Conversion Rate). An Infection Rate is how much a given user exposes the game to other players, such as through status updates or email invites. A conversion rate, as marketers know, is when that “infection” results in a new sign up (or “install”.)

Put more simply, a K Factor of 1 means every member is bringing you one additional member. A high K Factor is treasured by social game publishers, because it becomes a very effective vehicle for bringing in new players.

Lifetime Network Value
The value a user provides to your network over the course of their entire “lifetime” on the network. For instance, is the user contributing to viral effects? Evangelizing the game? Contributing positively to ARPU? This is compared to the User Acquisition Cost, or how much it costs (via marketing and viral efforts) to bring in new members.

According to Facebook app analytics provider Kontagent, a (very basic) equation is 1/(1-k) * Monthly ARPU * User Lifetime.

MAU
Like DAU, Monthly Active Users (MAU) tracks the total number of users in a given month.

Re-Engagement
Gamers stop playing eventually. Re-engagement is how you get them back. It includes re-engaging gamers who have been signed off for an hour, a day, a month, or more. There’s a lot of competition out there, so implementing and tracking re-engagement practices is a must.

Retention
Think of it as the opposite of churn. Retention is how well you maintain your userbase.

Viral Rate/Virality
Viral growth is the name of the social media game. Measured by K Factor, the Viral Rate/Virality shows how much your users are promoting, evangelizing and spreading your game. Because of this, social games are increasingly built around cooperation, competition and the constant addition of new features, which increase virality. Every feature is a source for growth, whether it’s “liking,” Facebook notifications or tweets. Not often confused with “virility.”

Photo credit: Nathanmac87

Social Media (and it’s parent buzzword “Web 2.0″) proves one thing: the most powerful force on the internet is narcissism. Well, and cats. Whether it’s a tweet, a blog or a Facebook status update, people love to talk about themselves. And when other people talk about them, they love it even more.

Is your online community hurting for activity? Then it’s time to stroke some egos. Here are 5 ways to turn everyone into frothing narcissists.

1) End of the Year Awards

Is it December? Good. Start your annual award thread. It’s not December? Then make some other excuse. With a good mix of categories, you’ll have a fun forum event that gets everyone involved in complimenting each other.

Get your community voting on as much as possible. Ask for categories and accept both the sensible and the silly. Once the categories are set, have a nomination period. And once the nominees are filtered down, begin final voting.

Possible forum award categories:

• Most helpful – who’s always the first to help a newbie?
• Smartest member – who always kicks your ass in forum debates?
• Spamtastic – but Matt! Spamming is against the rules! Yes, but every community has that overenthusiastic member who is online 24/7 and answers every post, without violating the rules. Make them smile.
• Sexiest mod – again, don’t take it too seriously. There’s a line between having fun and flouting your own rules. So long as you can enforce that line, this is always a popular category.
• Member of the year – “Best in Show,” only with less tail wagging and drooling. Ok, maybe just less tail wagging.

Forum awards are a fun way to get your community to reward your best posters. But! Do not give actual prizes. This is about social recognition, which is much more powerful. The more you pay to forum award winners, the cheaper the award itself.

2) Call your users a bunch of dogs

You’ve seen those infernal Facebook quizzes. What animal are you? What Apple product are you? What toenail clipper are you? “What ____ are you” games are annoying in your feed, but are always a hit on message boards.

Create a thread where you compare 10-20 of your top, most beloved members to anything. Animals, Pokemon, household appliances, whatever. Make sure you’re saying good things about them – or at the very least, giving them a loving punch to the shoulder. The goal is to get everyone agreeing, disagreeing and laughing. More importantly, you want them making more comparisons. End the post with “what ____ are you?” Invite everyone to keep the game going.

3) Spotlight user generated content

This holds doubly true if you run a community focused on said user generated content. But even if you don’t, there are things you can do to make a member feel awesome. For example, if you manage a forum, start a “weekly sticky”, which sticks a new thread at the top. This has the added benefit of praising good behavior. It sets an example that for what a “good thread” is.

More random ways to spotlight a member:

• Create a “Member of the Month” award
• Promote fan-made artwork to the front page
• Feature a user blog post in the site news
• Supply commentary to an online gaming match

Use these spotlights to give your users something to aspire to. Think of it as an “Employee of the Month” program, only less soul crushing.

4) Trophies, achievements and badges

Foursquare and Gowalla leverage this to great effect. Xbox Live discovered that achievements excite both the completionist and the casual player. In some ways it’s obvious, but there are still communities out there that don’t have any kind of reputation metric whatsoever.

These virtual trinkets turn your community into a powerful Skinner Machine. So long as they are a publicly visible status symbol, they will create excitement. (Remember: the whole point of virtual goods is to look awesome in front of your friends.)

5) Give your members cameos

Admit it. You’ve done it. You’ve gone into a thread and done a Ctrl-F for your name, just to see if you were mentioned. Users love to be mentioned by name. Find some way to incorporate a popular user into your content. The more in-jokes and references you can cram in, the healthier your community. Just don’t let all of your content become self-referential. The goal is occasional ego indulgence, not ego masturbation.

A few ways to give a community member a cameo:

• Create a webcomic starring caricatures of your members
• Interview top users
• Start a collaborative fan fiction based on your community (does it get any more delightfully nerdy and self indulgent than that?)

If you do it right, then many members you include will become evangelists. They’ll feel like they “own” a piece of your community. Which is a good thing.

The power of a grassroots gaming community is that your members are the ones spreading the word. Get them involved by stroking their egos, and your community will reap the benefits.

Photo credit: Marina(im.back)

We’ve been experimenting with using Twitter at live game tournaments. Already it’s proved extremely useful for delivering match results which, coupled with Livestreaming, bring real-time updates of your event to those not in attendance. Several corporate tournaments use Twitter to fantastic effect – for instance, Magic: The Gathering’s live event coverage is a thing of sheer beauty. But while the big players in eSports have adopted Twitter, grassroots tournaments have not. To help, here are 5 ways to instantly improve your Twitter feed during a live event.

Aside: for this article, let’s say we’re hosting an aptly-named Super Smash Bros. tournament called the “Best Official Awesome Smash Tournament,” or BOAST.

Hosting an event entirely unrelated to grassroots gamingt? These practices still help! This is the best way I’ve found to organize a complex, constantly-updated Twitter stream for events that need to disseminate lots of information quickly. The goal is to create a feed that immerses your Twitter followers while also engaging your event attendees.

1) Use consistent formatting when reporting results.

Keep things clear and consistent in your results. You can add more tweets to pump up excitement, but the results needs to be as easy to read as possible. Include the screen name and a clear verb. You can always add another Tweet (perhaps on your primary account – more on that later) designed to stoke a frenzy about an upset. But when reporting results, keep it clear and consistent, in the same format every time.

• Bad: “OMG Logic got beat. DrDrew is too good!”
• Good: “DrDrew beats Logic”

Decide your verbs in advance. “DrDrew beats Logic” means something different than “DrDrew eliminates Logic”. In a double elimination bracket, you’ll be using both. “Beats” when talking about the Winners Bracket, and “Eliminates” when talking about the Losers Bracket.

Results will be coming at you fast, so don’t get bogged down in too much information. When streaming tournament results, all you need is Noun Verbs Noun.

If you’re using Twitter to announce active matches, provide all the necessary information for people to watch it. If it’s on a livestream, include the link. If not, include the station where they are playing.

But wait! Results? Announcements? Livestream links? How do you keep all of this crazy information organized?

2) Use #hashtags to organize your content

During your live event, hashtags serve two functions: to label your content for quick scanning, and to organize your feed. If someone is only interested in 1v1 results, they can search for it. Also, followers will know at a glance whether your update is a player interview or a livestream announcement.

• Bad: DrDrew is playing Logic on the livestream!
• Good: Now streaming: DrDrew vs Logic! #Livestream http://bit.ly/link

Keep your hashtags short and simple. #1v1, #2v2, etc. The longer the hashtag, the less room you have for the announcement – and even less for retweeting.

Hashtags are especially handy if you’re running more than one tournament at a time. They allow your followers to filter your content based on what game is being played.

Hashtags to consider:

• Tournament format – #1v1, #2v2, #CTF
• Game name – #Smash, #SF4, #Tek, #WoW, #Halo (remember: shorter is better!)
• Content type – #LiveStream, #Live, #Stream, #Podcast, #Interview, #News, #Nowplaying

Then, select an official hashtag for your event. Tell all of your followers and attendees about this hashtag, and encourage them to use it while tweeting. For our sample tournament, we’ll use #BOAST.

The official hashtag encourages engagement both with your attendees and your followers. Make sure you retweet great comments that use your hashtag. Promoting your followers is a good thing! And, it further builds buzz about your event.

Bonus Tip: Brightkite Wall lets you create a live “wall” of filtered Twitter results. Set it to full screen and hook your computer up to a TV/projector, and you have a live, real-time display of your Twitter account and #event hashtag. You can use it as a display board for what’s going on (creating a live brochure), or as a way to encourage everyone at the event to participate in the Twitter stream.

3) Respond to and retweet people that are talking about your event

I mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating. If someone at the event tweets “Big name player is playing other big name player!”, retweet them. If someone NOT at your event tweets how excited they are, or if they just saw something cool on your livestream, point it out.

Of course, follow good retweeting practices.

When applicable, add a hashtag or link that explains what they are discussing.

The primary purpose of your livetweeting is to provide a service for your followers. But, this is Twitter. Even on event day you want to be promoting yourself, followers and conversations. Get people to join in, and then reward them.

4) Make an Event-Day Twitter Plan

Don’t just go into The Big Day with the intent to tweet the hell out of it. Figure out what information is most valuable to your followers. Are you targeting the people at your event? Or are you targeting everyone NOT at your event? (Hint: you should be doing both.)

Your Twitter stream serves two purposes: for people at home to know what’s going on (and spread the word – “Hey, check out the live stream!”), and as a live program guide for those in attendance to figure out what to do next.

Keeping a live Twitter up-to-date is constant work. If you’re flush with volunteers, make sure you have enough social media help. And, make sure they know what to do.

Do not assign Twitter duties to the poor soul running your bracket software! Ideally, you’ll have someone with enough availability to be constantly feeding links, results and updates. If not, you’ll have to spread responsibility around.

This means you need to have a concrete plan, and you need to communicate that plan to your volunteers. Are they expected to post live results as they come in? In what format? Do they know about your hashtags? Will your venue have internet, or are you updating via cellphone?

And finally, are all of your social media assets, such as your Facebook page and Justin.TV account, integrated with Twitter?

5) Create an alternate Twitter account for live events.

People don’t like spammed-up Twitter feeds. No, you’re not splitting your market. You’re not cannibalizing your followers. If you have marketed your event’s Twitter to provide news, updates, contests and conversations, then you probably have a lot of followers interested only in the occasional update. On the day of your event, when you’re spamming 30 updates an hour, they will unfollow you. Fast.

Create a new account, and keep it on brand. In our example, we have twitter accounts “@BOAST” and “@BOAST_Live”.

Promote the new account beforehand. Make sure all of your followers and attendees know about it. If you’re creating a landing page, the live account is the one you attach to it.

Don’t neglect your primary account! Crosspost your biggest news there. Remind your followers that you’re hosting a kick-ass tournament that day. Say “Hey, follow @BOAST_live for live updates from BOAST!”

Good luck

It’s a beast to keep up with, but once you train your team and put in the preparation, you’ll have a fantastic compliment to your livestreams, liveblogs, Flickr pools and other social media assets.

There’s a lot of talk going on about virtual goods economics in games. The developers hail it as the monetization strategy of the future. Economists love it because they can see results in real time. This ain’t your grandpa’s ultimatum game.

But as usual, it’s The Onion who reduces the new business model to its core essence.

Virtual goods are the golden egg laid by the social gaming goose. Social games are built around inviting your friends, and virtual goods are about looking awesome in front of your friends.

The successful social games developers know what’s up. In an interview with FreshNetworks at SXSW, Playfish cofounder Sebastien de Halleux said:

In-game micro-transactions are key. The game is free and we create emotional incentives that make people want more of the game. Audiences are ready to pay for good games, but in small chunks. Just don’t get fooled into believing that you need large ticket transactions. Try not to think in terms of a business plan based on: Price x Quantity. Instead, think about Distribution x Engagement x Lifetime User Value.

To which Eric Todd from Playdom added:

we’ve found that there are two things that can have a disproportionate impact on profitability:
• Creativity / self-expression – allowing people to be creators makes them care more and increases their life time value.
• Competition – player vs. player conflict drives a willingness to pay for competitive advantage.

Remember: the happiest man in the world is the one who makes $1 more than his neighbor. Only now, that neighbor is in Farmville.

Games industry consultant Nicholas Lovell gives his clients this simple question: “when you are at home, with no one watching you, do you dress up in your best trendy clothes, or hang out in an old T-shirt and tracksuit?”

Admit it: you answered the latter. Everyone else does, too.

Lovell goes on to point out the difference between a “reward” (as you get in a single player experience) and a “purchase” (usually as a microtransaction.) Purchases of virtual goods must give you “a feeling, an experience or a social benefit.” They must allow you:

to feel more powerful (i.e. have better weapons, level up faster)

to fit in (like the one million people who bought a Santa Hat in Kart Rider in the run up to Christmas 2007)

to stand out (like anyone buying a unique set of clothes for their avatar)

or a combination (like a guild all kitting themselves out in purple clothes so everyone recognises them).

Game developers are catching on. And they’d better do it fast, because virtual goods were worth over $1 billion in 2009. That number is expected to grow to $1.6 billion in 2010 in the US alone.

That’s a lot of fake farming.

Image credit: p e e p e r

Video game community manager David “Historian” DeWald has a great article up on why your company needs a community manager.

One key point:

The launch phase of any community requires someone that is passionate and “transacting” a lot. Building communities is not about collecting as many people as possible and communities often don’t grow the way they are planned. The CM role will change as the needs of the community change. This means the CM doesn’t fit into any single definition. I often refer the to the role as being similar to a liaison, bridging the gap between those inside and outside the organization.

The important subtext here managing a community is a complex responsibility. You’re hiring a customer liaison, a marketer, a writer, a blogger, a human resources administrator and a product manager, and you’re probably expecting him/her to know about the tech, too. This takes substantial work from at least one person, and probably more than that. Remember: a big reason why most online communities fail is because they are understaffed.

This is just as important whether you’re building a brand-driven or a grassroots gaming community. Even if you’re giving users most of the control over the content, you need a hands-on CM to keep promote growth and encourage good behavior.

Image credit: Horia Varlan

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article up about Foursquare. Only it’s not about what Foursquare’s creators designed it for.

College students at University of Texas are tagging their campus with jokes, tips and gags. Not “tips” as in “I checked in on Foursquare and then left a tip.” No, students are leaving behind tags marking “the teacher they loathed,” “the room they smoked pot in,” and “the couch they had sex on.”

Awesome. Now THAT’S how you build an online grassroots community.

This is the kind of emergence that separates a Plurk from Twitter. Friendster from Facebook. Google Video from YouTube. To truly grow an online community, you have to get lucky and have one of these emergent lightning strikes. You have to encourage your community to use your product in a way you had NO IDEA existed.

If you’re really lucky, this emergent behavior will be self-replicating. For instance, “retweeting” and “follow friday”, had nothing to do with Twitter. They were created by the users. The exceptional part is how retweeting and follow friday reproduce themselves. If someone #Followfridays you, you are exposed to the trend. You then #Followfriday someone else. Other people see you tweet the tag. They do it to. It spreads faster than an chain email from your mom.

In the gaming space, World of Warcraft was amazing at promoting memes in its community. Blizzard did this by giving their massive player base a central place to talk – the Official WoW Forums – and making sure their customer service reps (Blues) allowed these memes to unfold. Want an example? Let’s melt some faces.

So there’s your answer, Foursquare. Give students easy ways to deface their colleges.

The most important rule of blogging: choose a subject.

I started this blog as more of a scratchboard. A placeholder for ideas spread across various interests, including fiction, copywriting, creative agency life, social media, online community building, and video games. The old tagline, “Writing, Gaming and Brazen Geekery” expressed this.

As a personal project, that’s fine. As a blog? Ineffective.

Now I have a subject. For the past several months I’ve been diving back into online community management and social media management, with a particular focus on gaming communities. It’s a subject I’ve been immersed in for almost a decade. I’m good at it, and I love it. So, as a start to a new personal brand, Wavedash.net is relaunching.

What is a Wavedash?

From SmashWiki:

A wavedash is a technique in Melee that causes a character to slide along the ground without walking or running. It transfers the momentum of the air dodge into a spurt of ground-based movement. Like l-canceling and Short Hopping, wavedashing is considered an advanced technique, and one of the first techniques smashers learn when they train for tournaments.

How’s that for confusing? Wavedashing is a technique used in Super Smash Bros. Melee to move without changing direction. It lets you do standing attacks while moving. You can do it out of a shield. You can use it to change the way you land after jumping. It’s considered the gateway to advanced play: wavedashing doesn’t make you good, but because of the complex hand motions it requires, learning it puts you on the path to competitive play. It’s like learning about foreshortening when painting.

There’s a reason why this site is called Wavedash. The technique is an example of emergence in a gaming community, facilitated by modern technology. At the time, thousands of Smashers were talking strategy on one website, Smashboards.com. They shared techniques, exploits and crazy bugs. At the same time, all of these gamers from all over the world voluntarily began hosting tournaments. They created their own meetups, shared ideas and evangelized the game to their friends.

Bear in mind that this was already years after SSBM had been released.

Wavedashing was the first truly “advanced” technique that Smashers collectively identified. It’s an exploit of the phsyics engine. It doesn’t exist anywhere in the rulebook. Nintendo has never spoken the word out loud. But if you wanted to compete in the dozens of tournaments popping up, you learned to wavedash.

Since then, wavedashing has taken on a bad rap. Casual players talk about banning it. Funny thing is, it doesn’t actually do anything. It’s not a powerful strategy. Some top players don’t use it at all. But it’s become so synonymous with competitive play that it represents the entire competitive Smash community, complete with rules, philosophies and strategies that are anathema to the casual.

I’m fascinated by this emergence. The Internet has created a way for fans of a game to connect and have conversations. This leads to completely new rules that the designers never foresaw. More importantly, it leads to the creation of a frothing enthusiastic fanbase that promotes the game. With zero support from Nintendo, the Wavedashers made the competitive Smash community into one of the largest for any game on any platform.

This is Grassroots Gaming

Esports like MLG and NVGA have finally taken off. Game companies the world over have identified the value in having a dedicated community. “Community Manager” and “Social Media Manager” are both real job titles. Just look at Bungie, Blizzard, Valve and a dozen other developers who have given their fans a place to play. It translates to real dollars.

Grassroots gaming is different. It’s the holy grail that all of these companies, from the competitive league to the publisher, want to grab. It combines the hardcore fervor of competitive play with the friendly frolicking of social media.

In short, “grassroots gaming” is about harnessing emergence to turn fans into community builders. It’s about tapping the casual fan as well as the hardcore, and exciting them about getting their friends to play. It’s part word of mouth, part marketing, part community management, and part chaos.

There’s the Wavedash wheelhouse. Welcome.