Azaroth

Or “It’s Not Your Fucking Job To Be A Jerk”

Now, I’ve seen the bad, and I’ve seen the good.

Problem is, you don’t notice the good. That’s sort of the point. Your CMs are not superstars, and they should get that the hell out of their heads from day one.

There is no place for ego in this position. You’re not there to make people notice you. You’re not there to be witty, stand out, or “lay the smack down” publicly. This is not your job.

I suppose this all seems rather simple, or even obvious, while you read this. However, it can be far from it once you actually end up in a community position.

Community Managers sometimes suffer from a god complex.

The job description is not “wrangling retards”, no matter how much frustration comes flying at you from every direction and no matter how easy it is to sit back and chortle with your coworkers while putting your customers down.

If it were, you’d be expected to work in a group home and call the people you’re caring for “individuals” or, possibly, if the rules are extremely lax, “handicapped”. Respect is still demanded in a job literally caring for the retarded.

The people on your messageboard - for the most part - are not.

And guess what? They deserve to be treated with respect, too.

Looking down your nose at your community is the biggest mistake any person in a MMO community position can make. It’s not mistake #1, or mistake #10. It’s the cause AND effect. It’s the end, and it’s the beginning. If you catch yourself doing it, you need to realign your thinking immediately before you next go in to work.

The problem? It’s such a big mistake, and it’s so often seen as something that’s okay, or even funny, to do.

Laughing with your buddies at the office and enjoying the adorations of the constant waves of sycophants is not your job. Stopping by to troll threads and make people look stupid with your incredible wit is not your job.

Criticism is the easiest thing in the world. I can criticize you up and down just for sitting there with that stupid look on your face. Trolling and putting people down constantly are stupid, too, and somehow an alarming about of community “professionals” think it’s quite alright to do these things when dealing with their customers.

More (much, much more) importantly, it makes the company look unprofessional. That means it makes me, the guy who is paying your unprofessional ass, look bad. I don’t pay you for that. Promise.

The need for a basic understanding of the job is required here. Regardless of the immediate consequences of the x, y, and z (and trust me, you catch more flies with honey.. especially when you’re dealing with people on the internet) of bad community management - the entire point is that you’re NOT DOING YOUR JOB CORRECTLY.

I promise, promise, promise you that the ad did not say “We need a highly motivated trash talker to smack aleck his way through the day and troll our customers on our official messageboards for the glorification of his/her own ego”.

Another problem here is that this becomes the game. The customers become known as whiners, as stupid, as idiots. Joked about and put down, they become a running gag around the office. The Community Manager who trolls them on the board becomes some kind of hero around the office who is patted on the back every time he or she crafts a particularly cutting reply in response to one of the poor unsuspecting troglodytes.

Here’s the thing, folks. My customers are not troglodytes. My customers are not stupid, idiots, or jokes. They’re the reason you’ve got that job, and since you took the position in which you’re directly responsible for handling them, you god damn well better make sure you don’t handle them with a pitchfork.

I realize you’re all very intelligent. I realize that the players are often very, very wrong or entirely shortsighted or self serving in their demands. I understand they often have no class. I realize that they even seem stupid sometimes (or are).

Problem is… you’re in a CUSTOMER SERVICE job. Just repeat that over to yourself a few times, please.

My frustration in this area comes both from experience and from watching trainwrecks like WoW’s community management.

It’s not easy to tell you that I failed miserably at just about everything when I ran IPY. It was a learning experience, at least. And one thing I learned is that I did Community Management and Customer Service wrong in just about every way I possibly could. A lot of private lessons I keep to myself. And they’re important lessons too, but lean more toward being filed under “strategies for next time”.

However, I violated Lesson 1 repeatedly. See, all of the yelling I did in this post is directly applicable to myself of a few years ago. While some may excuse that because of the nature of the service (amateur, free, etc) and the number of jobs I was holding down for the amount of pay (not one red cent, Ethel) - it’s still no excuse. Customers were still customers. Being a snarky jerk is still being a snarky jerk. Not understanding my position was my flaw, and I never once realized that it was time to put ego aside when dealing with customers (or “users” in this case).

I could go on for three days talking about all of the finer points of what I did wrong, why they were wrong, and what the consequences were. I think that the most shocking part of this entire post, and everything I’ve said about myself, is that the “professionals” managing Blizzard’s World of Warcraft community are guilty as sin of the exact same things.

It’s hard to believe what I’m reading nearly 100% of the time I read a Community Manager response to a player on the message boards, among other things. And it’s been this way for years, betraying the internal culture in the Blizzard offices of looking down at players.

Now, I understand the cockiness. They’re number one. They’re the best. Nobody else is even in the same hemisphere when it comes to subscriptions. So if some of these “idiots” get angry and leave, who cares right?

Not only that, but there’s SO MANY of them. It’s hard NOT to be overwhelmed by the jaw dropping level of stupid on a daily basis and begin to compensate for your frustration by acting aggressively toward the players and making fun of them around the office.

The problem is, as much as this is partially a result of doing a diffcult job, and we all know that dealing with people is very difficult - again, being a jerk is not your job. If you are UNABLE to meet the most basic requirements of this job, please do not apply. If you have the job and find that you cannot properly do it, please stop before you piss off all of the players and give yourself an aneurysm.

Some people are suited for the job, some aren’t. If you aren’t and are forced into the situation, I hope you have enough experience to be able to form personal strategies around your problem areas.

Remember that dealing with people is the real job description here, and that doesn’t just mean the customers. A professional handling of customers is part of the job, and so is a professional handling of your coworkers. Just as you would never badmouth the developers in public (or, hopefully, at all) to a player - I would hope you’re not going to badmouth players to developers. A culture of looking down on the players is just as important to avoid as players hating the company.

Please create strict rules for engagement, and make sure your people are never, EVER “winging it” or running around badmouthing people. If this is their main objective, like a programmer who can’t do basic math, or a pilot who has a fear of heights, they are in the WRONG POSITION.

Seems so simple, doesn’t it.