Great Expectations, Part One: Proportion

(Side note: Hello! My name is Sanya Weathers. I’ve been working as a director and a consultant in the MMO community management field since 2001. Before that, I had jobs in marketing, theatrical production, and journalism. Feel free to googlestalk me if you want to know more about my specific jobs. If you come across that photoshop job with the cow, don’t worry – I know about it already, and that kind of thing happens when your employer nerfs assassins. But that was long ago, and right now, I’m just excited to be on board the Metaverse Mod Squad train and writing some blog entries.)

If you get a few community professionals together to talk about best practices, “expectation management” is going to be the main topic. That’s not because we like beating dead horses (though we do, or we wouldn’t write FAQs for a living) or because we’ve been burned by improper management (though we have – do not ask to see the scars while you’re eating). It’s because expectation management is the main component of every community job from the part time forum mod to the director.

There are multiple components in proper expectation management, and we’ll discuss them all in coming weeks. Today’s component is “Proportion.”

Post launch, your community efforts must be in equal proportion to your marketing efforts.

We’ve seen it time and time again in the MMO market space. A product launches, immediately fails to be the perfect virtual world come to save us all, and the forums fill with disappointment. But some of those forums metastasize into festering cesspools, and others don’t. There is no relationship between the quality of the product and the fester factor, either. Instead, the key predictor is proportion.

If the pre-launch promotion presented the product as polished, and the development team as large and well funded (and the product and the team are usually presented that way, since the goal is to sell the product), customers will expect the best and resent anything less than perfection. That’s very normal.

If, post launch, the messaging continues to be entirely focused on the kind of positive-only material that drives sales, the customer will become equally as focused on the money. “Am I getting my money’s worth?” is a line of thought that turns people inwards. A sales-driven message to someone who has already bought the product will backfire in the long run.

In an MMO, you want to turn a customer’s thoughts outwards, and into areas that will aid retention. Community driven initiatives such as social bonding, planned activities, accomplishments, and comparative ranking accomplishes retention in a way that sales messaging doesn’t (and never has).

How do you ease the transition from sales to retention? Strategically positioning your community team before the launch. And moderating your forums with a velvet-clad iron fist, of course.