Tony Jones, Daybreak’s Senior Community Relations Manager, sheds light on the how the company handles social media during his panel at GDC this week, entitled, “Balancing Community Management With Transparent Development”.
During the talk, Jones stressed a few fundamental points. “Training is crucial for development teams. Putting your teams on Twitter with no training, you might as well just hand them a loaded gun. The ability to say whatever we want when we want to say it is extraordinarily dangerous.” Jones also said that it is his job job to constantly listen and provide insights, but not to police developers’ tweets. “It’s not that you try to restrict what they’re saying, it’s that you try and slow them down and think about what they’re saying before they say it. Everyone’s tone should be the same. Don’t have ‘grumpy cat’ on one side and, you know, super hyper guy on the other side. You want to kind of make that middle ground and make them appear as a cohesive team. Show them the common pitfalls. Show them what trolling looks like. Show them what kind of things… maybe you don’t want to tweet a lot about Gamergate, maybe you can tweet a statement and just kind of walk away from it. Things that get them into trouble later on, things that may cause them additional grief. Maybe they want to tweet about Gamergate, just tell them what’s going to happen in advance.”
When the Q&A section of the talk came, Jones shared an anecdote of a certain time when he had to respond to a developer doing it wrong on Twitter. “When you’re working with a developer who says things that you’re not particularly wanting them to say, there’s a couple different things they should know. First of all, if it’s already out there, it’s already out there. I had an associate programmer who got really engaged with at Gamergate. It started out as a ‘Hey, you may want to be careful with this’ and it got to be a ‘Hey, dial it back a bit.’ You can put a disclaimer in your ‘about’ section all day, but [players] still know that you’re an associate programmer on this game. Part of it’s training, part of it is just building up a relationship and asking them. They’re making your job harder. I’m not saying go to them and beg and cry, I’m not saying that’s worked—but it has. Making them aware of the potential impact of what they do I think is crucial.”
“Your Twitter followers are not a Gamerscore. It is all about your team. Everyone should be working together, not jockeying for position on Twitter or on Reddit. Everyone works together, succeeds and fails together as a team, that includes the community management team”, Jones added.
According to Jones, one of the biggest challenges that studios are facing is knowing how much information they can give to players. “There’s plenty of risks and rewards to it.”
