Turbine is best known for The Lord of the Rings Online, Infinite Crisis, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and Asheron’s Call. They also have a record of employing fans of the game to work the customer service side of the company. Maybe this is part of the reason they have been nominated a Dragon Slayer Award for best community management team.
As you may have heard, the annual Dragon Slayer Awards are going on. Every year gamers can go to GameSkinny’s sister site, Guild Launch, and get the chance to vote on who they think deserves recognition from the gaming community.
Maintaining a successful community is a difficult. Let’s take a moment to see how Turbine handles the task.
Responsibilities
First of all, what are the responsibilities of community management?
According to Meghan Jenks, a former senior community manager for Turbine, the responsibilities of a community manager can be broken down into a several important responsibilities.
- Moderation and management of owned forums
- Creating and managing policy for both our external and/or owned communities and the employees who interact with them
- Interfacing with the development teams to bring feedback and advocate on behalf of the consumer
- Reporting traffic metrics and other community-specific stats
- Prepping and publishing release notes
- Supporting multiple and ongoing development cycles (alpha, closed beta, open beta, launch, content updates, DLC, expansions, etc.)
- Editorial content (developer diaries, tutorials, etc)
- In-game live event support
- Real-life event organization and support, e.g. trade shows, player gatherings, etc.
- Contests and other community activities (screenshot contests are one example)
- Marketing and communications support
- Requesting tools and features for both our owned communities (forums, social networks, wikis) and games (chat UI and improvements, social features like friends lists, guild functions)
- Regularly featuring players and UGC like videos, blogs, etc.
- Disaster management (servers go down, critical bug found, etc.)
These tasks are all shared between the entire community management team. Together they create a successful community and keep their players entertained and updated with gaming news and support.
Social Media
Turbine has a team of several community managers who work together to balance the workload. News is always released to Turbine’s Twitter first. All members of the team can then retweet the information to their personal Twitters, if they wish. The goal is to put Turbine and the community first, not the celebrity of the individual community managers.
One of Turbine’s most popular game, The Lord of the Rings Online, has also been nominated. Maybe it’s because LOTR has its own Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. From there, fans can get news and updates focusing on just the game. It also allows players to voice issues they experience and get immediate feedback.
Overall
Turbine’s community management team works hard to deliver satisfaction to the players. And that testament can be seen through their nomination for the Dragon Slayer Awards. Be sure to check out the site because voting ends on September 2nd!
