First, the Eve playerbase feels both empowered and angry. They feel very much as though they should have a voice in how the game is run. CCP has not disagreed with this, and their “Council of Stellar Management” player advisory council is currently winging its way to Iceland, at CCP’s expense (and knowing the expense of last-minute airline reservations, more than cancelling any benefit from selling virtual monocles). We’ve seen player protests in MMOs before, but this is the first overt player riot - enabled in part by Eve’s own strengths of being a unitary server game so that if, say, someone decides it’s a good idea to shoot up a statue commemorating the in-game NPC leaders as a political gesture, it can get legs.

CCP Zulu (aka Arnar Hrafn Gylfason, Eve’s senior producer)

The investment of money in EVE should not give you an unfair advantage over the investment of time. The CSM, under NDA, has been presented with CCP‘s plans for continued evolution of the business model and agrees that nothing they saw breaks this principle. CCP has committed to sharing their plans with the CSM on this front on an ongoing basis.

The Mittani (aka Alexander Gianturco, Eve’s senior politician)

We believe that the situation that has unfolded in the past week has been a perfect storm of CCP communication failures, poor planning and sheer bad luck.  Most of these issues, when dealt with in isolation, were reasonably simple to discuss and resolve, but combined they transformed a series of errors into the most significant crisis the EVE community has yet experienced.

If you’re an MMO designer, and you *still* don’t grok the griefer-mindset, or you somehow hope/believe that “one day, there will be no griefers”, then maybe this RPS interview with the always-fun-to-watch Goonswarm will help you:

I spent a good portion of my first day at SXSW Interactive sitting in on panels and sessions focusing on the ever-evolving issue of community management. I had the chance to hear many different perspectives on what it means for brands to effectively foster and manage the consumers who care to interact with them via social networks. I heard best practice examples from companies like Pepsi, Starbucks, Zappos, Dell, Ford and many more uberbrands that are pushing the boundaries of social media as a business tool.

Last night I returned home to see a post by Jeremiah Owyang about online community best practices. Included in the post was the following image of the life cycle of a successful online community:

If you take a look at this graph you may think, wow this is definitely how I’d like my community to end up. My immediate response was “is this possible?” Thanks to “continual improvements” these online communities appear to have continued growth even past the standard maturation phase of the business. If you’ve read “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore you will immediately realize that this chart makes no logical sense.

We have previously discussed how online communities are often characterized by vast participation inequality. The so-called 1% Rule states that 90% of a community’s membership will not participate; 9% will contribute only occasionally; and the eponymous 1% will participate frequently, contributing the vast majority of material.

This model of participation inequality holds true for many online communities, and especially for bulletin-board modes of interaction (such as forums, blogs, etc). What it doesn’t provide, however, is a more detailed look at just how these participants become involved in communities or how they transition between groups. Rationally it must hold true that the 1% shifts as the online community grows, its members age, and so on.

It’s almost everyday that I come across an awesome Facebook fan page. Then I go to their site, and wow – it’s in full flash and I can hardly navigate it without throwing up. I search for their topic and the brand is nowhere to be found.
The allure of social media has made brands throw out any semblance of a strategy and have just jumped in. Instead, brands should take a moment to consider your long term digital strategy.
If you’re not sure what a possible workflow should look like – I’ve outlined three steps to digital maturity below. Each step explains what should be happening across each individual media type.

Aktuell bin ich mit den Vorbereitungen für die neuen Kurse an der Social Media Akademie beschäftigt, speziell mit dem neuen Lehrgang “Community Manager SMA“. In diesem Zusammenhang habe ich einige namhafte Community Manager Deutschlands zur Rolle des Community Managers befragt.

It’s really, really easy to exceed customer expectations by doing one simple thing: Have the customer’s back. Customers want to feel like someone is on their side, and being on the customer’s side is the job of the community team.

Over the past 2 years, the relatively close knit blog universe has exploded in a massive confluence of social expression and corporate reaction. A cottage industry of owner-operators, trawling social media on behalf of themselves and others, has cropped up in lofts, dorms, agencies and iPhones.

These are the new social media Community Managers and corporate is clearly looking. This post offers a granular look at crucial skills, essential duties and a job description for the CM role.

Blizzard announced that they will be requiring anyone who posts on their Starcraft II and World of Warcraft forums to use their real first and last name, as identified by their account details.  Naturally, people are up in arms about this.  MMORPG forums are not the place for real life identities, it’s not for establishing relationships, or rekindling friendships with people you already know.

Of course, there are naysayers.  People are claiming that anyone who is vehemently opposed to the Real ID change are doing so by “fear mongering” or “blowing things out of proportion”.  Saying things like “this is no big deal”, or “this is the internet, you have no privacy anyway”.

Oh yeah?

- I’ve always said employees should be using their real names to provide transparency and accountability. If you can’t handle being the public face of a company and all that implies, get another job. It’s that easy. It is not always that FUN, mind you. - My customers are not public citizens. Making them public citizens against their will is crappy. I can think of half a dozen reasons why someone should be allowed to be anonymous, and I’m not going to list them because any one of them is good enough. Want people to stop acting like asshats on the boards? Suspend in game accounts for out of game behavior. Hire more mods. Close the board. Whatever. This is just chickenshit.

In Building Web Reputation Systems, we appropriate the term karma to mean a user reputation in an online service. As you might expect, karma is discussed heavily throughout the more than 300 pages. During the final editing process, it became clear that a simple summary of the main points would be helpful to those looking for guidance. It seemed that our first post in over a month (congratulations on the new delivery, Bryce!) should be something big and useful...