Crowd Marketing

ArenaNet, the studio that develops Guild Wars, just fired two employees because of a furor that erupted in social media. The Verge covered it well; essentially, an ArenaNet narrative designer was tweeting about how she writes narratives in Guild Wars, and a streamer politely offered some commentary about how he’d like to see things done – and then the whole thing exploded as the narrative designer got angry at this, heated messages were exchanged, the issue became popular on Reddit, and then the designer was brought in to talk to the CEO of ArenaNet who fired her. He also fired another long-time developer who had come to her defense. Now the issue has become politically charged, and while outrage is spread around and amplified some important lessons from this incident may get lost.

The issue is much more complex than that simple summary above, of course. If you’re interested check out the articles on the incident, and especially read through the tweets that precipitated everything, and form your own opinions. I’m not sure if there’s clearcut right and wrong here, but there are important things marketers and game developers should learn, and that’s what I’m going to focus on.

Stepping back a bit, it’s certainly true that many companies expect or encourage or even require developers to interact with the community. Sometimes those interactions don’t go so well, which shouldn’t be a surprising outcome for people whose expertise does not lie in public speaking or community management. Community management is extremely important – it helps keep the audience engaged with your game, it’s a way to learn from the audience, and it’s a good way to try and deal with problems that occur. Like all tools, though, community management can be harmful in direct proportion to its power and utility.

How do you prevent a situation like this one from developing? By hiring good community managers and making them responsible for interactions with the audience, and by preventing anyone in the company from posting to social media or forums on behalf of the company. Employees (and contractors) need to put a disclaimer on their social media profiles and on the email signatures – Opinions expressed by me are not those of the company (there’s better language out there, but this is the gist of it). This is true even of small developers – if you only have a couple of people, figure out who’s better at talking to the public and have that person do it.

It’s great if you want to have other members of the team interact with the community, but the community manager should help with such interactions and oversee them. The community manager can then step in if things get out of hand on either side of the interaction. Here, it looks like the narrative designer got angry out of proportion to the commenter, and then matters escalated from there. (At least, that’s what it looks like from a distance – I’m sure there’s more to the story.) If a good community manager had been overseeing this, the escalation could likely have been defused before really bad things happened (like people getting fired, and large numbers of people getting upset with ArenaNet).

Was the CEO’s response appropriate? Perhaps, but I’d want to know the full story (including the company’s policies, if any, and what had been said before to the employee) before rendering a judgment on the CEO’s actions. Certainly the heated response to a polite inquiry seemed far out of proportion – and the continuing explosion of the developer was unnecessary and reflected badly on the company.

What’s important for other companies is to learn from this and try to set things up so it never happens to them. Marketers (and developers) need to realize that marketing isn’t entirely under their control now – and that’s a good thing. When you’ve got a strong message, an audience can help spread that if they’re treated right. But don’t delegate that responsibility to people that aren’t ready for it. Establish policies for employees about communicating with the public or the press. Have someone skilled at community relations and public relations available to step in and help as needed (even a small developer should know some PR-savvy person they can call in to help when the situation gets nasty).

Keeping your audience engaged with your content and your company is important, but leave it to people who are skilled at dealing with an audience – and who can keep their cool when provoked. Sure, sometimes you will get complete trolls attacking, but that’s when you really need to know how to deal with people like that. Pouring gasoline on them and setting it afire may be emotionally satisfying in the short term, but it’s probably not the best way to win the hearts and minds of the largest audience for your games.