Graeme Boyd (AceyBongos) Interview
So it is with absolute pleasure that I present my first interview. I couldn’t have asked for a better qualified person to speak to about community management. Graeme Boyd or as he is better known by the Xbox faithful, AceyBongos, is the Consultant Community Manager for Xbox Live in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa). I was fortunate to meet and work with him last year at the CoD: Black Ops launch event in Battersea Power Station and have since stayed in touch. I was very pleased that Graeme was keen to do this interview and now, via the power of Skype, this was our conversation...
Sam Hilary: First off what games are you playing right now?
Graeme Boyd: On Friday I had one of the proudest gaming moments of my life when I completed the first Dead Space. I unlocked achievements on the day it came out in 2008 and I didn’t complete it until Friday night! [Laughs] I don’t know whether that's pathetic or shows a good deal of determination. That was great, I think its an absolutely amazing game but its so intense that I’m not sure I can handle the second one yet, I think I’m going to have to play something else to calm down a little bit.
SH: Something nice and fluffy!
GB: Yeah exactly! I've been playing a lot of Battlefield Vietnam because I was doing a thing with the EA guys called Dogs of War, which was a really cool competition. It was really nice because I was using the game in a different way to engage with the community and have a tournament. Basically I was in with a squad of other people from the community and they were watching my back and other punters had to stab me. If you know Battlefield you’ll know that if you knife someone in you get their dog tags which has got their gamertag on it, which is really cool. So the idea was people had to try and knife me to take my dog tags and the people who took the most dog tags were in the running to win a trip to Sweden. So yeah I was playing a lot of Vietnam before hand to get some practice in. It was a really great laugh, good fun. So that’s it, with a 5 month old boy upstairs that’s severely curtailing my play time at the moment. Plus the wedding plans, 7 weeks to go!
SH: How have things been over at Xbox so far in 2011? We saw at CES the massive results for Kinect, it must be very busy.
GB: Yeah, it’s been really busy but really good, really positive busy. The Kinect results were fantastic and kind of a real validation into all the work we put into it last year and also the way the business rallied around it and took that big risk as well. It was something that, you know, when you’re working on something like that for 18 months and it’s such a new product and you’re being told to believe that it is going to do something really amazing but you actually haven’t necessarily tried it for yourself, it’s quite a strange position to be in. To actually see it all come together and then to see peoples reactions to it and see the feedback we got from consumers was just an incredible experience, great to be a part of that. Also great to have one in the house as well! You’re working on it for so long and it is only when you actually get it in the house and you try it for the first time in your own home environment that you think wow this actually really is something quite special. Even though you know all about it, it still kind of makes you take a double take.
So that was good and then there’s all the more core games that are really starting to ramp up again now. I’m doing a lot of work on Gears of War and Forza Motorsport is on the horizon and all these things. It’s nice because there are a real variety of things that we’re working on at the moment you know, it’s refreshing and it keeps things fresh. For instance I’m working on Gears of War but at the same time I’m working on our sponsorship of Kyle Minogue’s tour in Europe [laughs] so you know you couldn’t really get two more disparate things but you know that’s really nice because you can switch from one to the other and it keeps things really fresh.
It’s always busy at Xbox, never a quiet day but then I wouldn’t want it any other way.
SH: What were the beginnings of AceyBongos, how did you get into Community Management?
GB: Community Management was kind of a happy coincidence I suppose. I very happily fell into it. I started off as a games journalist in magazines and then moved online, I was at ComputerandVideoGames.com and then I stepped over to Official Xbox Magazine just as the 360 was a few months from coming out, it was just as the OXM, as it is now i.e. the 360 version was starting. I was the website editor there and launched a website for them. That was actually when I first got quite involved with community management per say, not by job title but just in terms of working with the community on the OXM website itself. Then also getting much more involved with the Xbox 360 community as it grew out of the Xbox community. It was a really interesting time because you had this real core community built around the new console coming out and there was all the shortages and those things. Then just through that got to know the guys at Xbox itself, the European Xbox team, and the community manager position came up so I was really interested in that and went for it and got lucky! I’ll be honest it was a real education to start with, coming from a very editorial background which definitely has it’s benefits for a community manager, but going into more a marketing department working very directly with community and working with community across region as well, for EMEA. That was a big education in terms of how communities are different from the UK to France to Germany to emerging markets like Czech Republic and Hungary and Poland and Russia, places like that where we expanded into, also balancing that with the community in the US. Obviously we’ve got a lot of work and creative that comes out of our global team in the US, balancing all those things was a real learning process, but a really good one. The great thing about Xbox is that, as I said, everyday is really different and over the course of the, I guess, 4 and a half years almost 5 years I’ve been in the European team as community manager, the job has completely changed. I started off working with community websites, and that was really the kind of focus of it, and just making sure that our really core evangelists were being looked after and listened to and being kept happy. And then that moved into things like working on Inside Xbox and reaching out to the community through that. That’s now managed by Dan Maher and Andy Farrant and the great team that they’ve built up and they’re doing an amazing job. Then over the past, I guess two years, especially the past year really moving heavily into social media as well. Which is just a whole new frontier for community management as well as brand management. That's a really big focus for me now, looking at how we use platforms like Facebook and YouTube and Twitter, then again how that changes when you move into mainland Europe and the different textured markets you have there. It’s been a really interesting journey and definitely one that's kept me on my toes the whole way through.
SH: Leading nicely into my next question, in your opinion what impact has social media had on community management? Has it made it easier or more difficult?
GB: It has made it easier but it’s also made it more difficult. Community management, this sounds stupid, but it’s a full time job in that its twenty four hours a day seven days a week every single day of the year. You know the Internet never turns off and your community never turns off and social media has accelerated or amplified that because it’s increased people’s expectations about how they interact with communities and with brands that have communities and with people who work for brands as well. I think community managers have really been at the forefront of that, they’ve really become the social media and the online touch point or spokesperson in a lot of cases, perhaps in a more unofficial or a more informal way. But it’s definitely become a really important part of the community manager’s job to be on call all the time and to match up to those expectations of the users. Facebook has trained people to always check their profiles, always check their groups and communities that they are a part of on there and then Twitter just came along and made that even more intense just in terms of how easy it is to communicate to people quickly and get answers and share information and also affect change! If something isn’t working right or people don’t like something then Twitter’s really given people an ability to very quickly snowball opinion and affect change, you know you see that in some of the more important things happening in the world as well as some of the more enjoyable and more fun things that are happening as well. I’ve really enjoyed getting used to Twitter and using that as part of my daily working life as well as my more personal life. It’s interesting as it really starts to blur the boundaries between those two things and I think you have to go with that a little bit.
So yeah it is a wonderful thing as long as it’s used in the correct way and that community managers, marketing and PR departments accept that there is a slight loss of control, we have to accept that people will be very vocal, be very open and will expect contact as well. As long as you play by those rules it is a wonderful thing, you just have to be aware that it’s a lot of effort and energy and resource as well. I’m always weary of brands who treat social media as a tick box “oh yeah we’ve got to do social media, we’ll get a Facebook Page up and we’ll have a brand Twitter feed”. That’s really dangerous if you don’t actually think “I need to be watching this very closely all the time” and be ready to react to it as well.
SH: What for you have been the hardest aspects of the job?
GB: It’s the amount of time and the managing people’s expectations I think is probably the best way to put it. Because it is a full on thing as we just talked about, the social media, it really dissolves the 9 to 5 working day. Especially when you are dealing a video gaming community which classically comes online at the end of the working day and usually quite late into the night as well. I even see it in some of the social media work that we do, I try and gauge what time of the day is most affective for us putting out messages on social media. For me just personally tweeting information we find it’s from 5 o’clock onwards that you’re getting the big audience on those channels and on forums and those touch points as well. [Laughs] Which is great but when you’re in the office you are not necessarily having the biggest impact if that’s when you are doing all your messaging. That’s the really cool part of it as well, the talking to people directly and having that direct contact with real people in the community, it is definitely time consuming and especially in times when things aren’t necessarily going that well or there are issues then it can definitely become a very full on occupation, but in a really cool way you get benefits out of that.
SH: Talking about the fans, what do you think they value most in a community manager?
GB: Openness, honesty, transparency and a willingness to actually be a genuine point of contact rather than just a broadcast channel. Going back to social media Twitter feeds are great but only if they are used as a two way communication tool rather than just an RSS feed. We’ve had websites and RSS feed and other broadcast media for years now and I don’t think that’s what social media should be used for. Being a contactable part of the community that’s open and a community manager who makes themselves available to the community, that’s really important. There is a level of expectation management, that is a really important part of it as well, you can’t respond to everything, you can’t solve everything and I think that’s where the openness comes in. Sometimes you have to say “thank you for the feedback, thank you for your thoughts and opinions and we will do what we can but we can’t always make all your dreams come true”. I think people value that kind of honesty more than silence or a nodding dog approach “oh yeah yeah we’ll do all that” and then just disappearing, it is hard reconciling the two sometimes. I’ve had some situations recently with our Xbox.com forums where when you work within a big corporation like Microsoft things don’t always move as quickly as you’d like them to and you’ve got lots of people, lots of roles and responsibilities, lots of sign offs, and sometimes what can seem to the community very simple can actually be quite a long winded process internally. There’s an art, and I don’t claim to have mastered it, to communicating the things you have to go through in corporations to affect quite small changes or certainly what seem like quite small changes.
SH: Leading on from that what do you believe companies value most in these positions?
GB: I think companies are just starting to figure it out, what they value most. I think historically community managers have been seen as someone who looks after the forums, someone who does a bit of feedback of what your most loyal and vocal consumers are saying. Whereas I think now community managers are becoming much more of a integral part of the marcoms team, so marketing as well as communications, PR and those disciplines as well. Just because they have a different angle of attack... maybe I shouldn’t say angle of attack that sounds a bit aggressive [laughs] Line of communication I should say! The value that brands and organisations can get out of it is that two way dialogue. A lot of marketing teams are quite alienated from the consumers that they’re speaking to. They might have audience segmentation and business insights but if you’re not speaking directly, and I mean actually talking to someone like your most loyal consumers, then you won’t get the full picture. A good community manager can add that full picture to the wider team that they are working with and really get that across, ideally in quite a succinct and manageable way. They don’t need to trawl through every forum, they don’t need to look at a million Twitter feeds, they can get a quick snap shot of sentiment and what people are saying. Brands are really starting to get that now and you certainly see when you look at the marketing industry press the community manager roll has become quite a sexy role now. Someone in my team, I think they were trying to be funny, sent me a link to a 2011 trends document that some marketing consultancy had put out, and their top trend of the year was the rise of the community manager. This year the job everyone wants to have is community manager because it’s becoming the role that everyone is turning to develop their communications and their root into their high value customers. [Laughs] It’s a good place to be I suppose, finally! The community manager used to be the guy in the broom cupboard, the nerd sitting on the forums all day, and so it’s nice to have the value of the community manager recognised a bit more.
SH: So who do you think are currently the leaders in engaging with their community the best? Aside from Microsoft of course!
GB: [Laughs] Thank you for saying that! Well I’m quite lucky to work in the games industry where there has always been a really rich tradition of community management that’s grown with the games industry by virtue of how the games industry has grown, from bedroom coding and small but very passionate communities right through the history of video gaming. So just by virtue of games publishers and games companies growth, community management has been a very important aspect of their organisation.
When I think about companies that are doing good community management it’s always gaming companies that come to mind first. I do a lot of work with people like Codemasters who are incredibly well clued into their community and do lots of great stuff to satisfy that community. Ubisoft particularly, and I’ll come back to them because I think there is another interesting point there. Electronic Arts are really stepping up their game in community management and they’re investing in that aspect of their business and that is really paying dividends for them. When you look at something like Need For Speed and the community they’ve been able to build around that and then the way they’re supporting that community with things like Autolog in Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit. That’s when community management becomes really interesting because it’s part of the product as well, it’s part of the feature set. That’s a really interesting way that brands are starting to engage more with their communities, it’s definitely exciting for community managers.
Outside of the gaming category, I don’t actually buy anything from them as I think I’m probably getting a bit to old for it, but I really like As Seen On Screen, in terms of their whole digital presence. They have a really nice organisational view on the way they deal with their community as a whole. And that is a really interesting thing, community management shouldn’t just be about one person and the job they do, there needs to be an understanding across an organisation of how communities work and how you should interact with them, and that should be across the board.
I said I would come back to Ubisoft, they’ve historically always done great stuff with communities. They invest a lot of money through their marketing in quite core community executions and certainly do lots of interesting stuff often before other people do it. They were doing lots of cool stuff on Facebook before most brands had taken the plunge for instance. The reason why I wanted to come back to it was because Ubisoft are French, and one of the things i have learned being in an EMEA team is that the work that community management teams do in some of the continental countries, I think is best in class. I think France has a rich tradition of community, it’s part of their national identity as much as anything. It’s part of their language as well, so the fact they are so protective of their language, which is great, and therefore the communities that they have are very bonded by that language. I’m sure that is the case in other countries across Europe as well. If I was looking to hire a community manager or I was looking for best practice in community, I wouldn’t actually initially look in the UK or the US, I would go to what are French community managers doing, what are French community agencies doing, what are they doing in Spain, Italy, Germany, because in my experience the work that some of our local Xbox teams do with their local communities is really best in class.
SH: Is there anyone you look to for inspiration then?
GB: Hmmmm... no. [Laughs] Good question... I wouldn’t necessarily say for inspiration I am just always looking around for what people are doing and what is working well and just trying to learn from people all the time. It’s one of those jobs that you need to be listening all the time, I guess in a cheesy way some of the best inspiration you get is from your consumers and your community. As long as you are listening to them all the time then you’ll definitely always be learning.
SH: As 2011 is apparently our year then, do you think it is better for a company to have the community manager internally or do you think there are benefits to outside agencies taking charge which we are now starting to see a lot more of?
GB: You know that is a really interesting question and one that over the past year I have been thinking a lot about myself. As we’ve moved more into social media and those spaces then we’ve needed to think about adding resource to the team, going back to my earlier point if you are going to play in social media you really need to be staffed and resourced to be able to do that.
There is definitely a really big role for agencies to play in that, I think because it is quite resource heavy, you need to watch the budgets very carefully. If you are going to be paying someone to spend an awful lot of time managing communities you need to weigh up the numbers in terms of whether it’s cheaper to do it internally or externally.
The benefit of going internal, and certainly this is the way we’ve gone and we have seen the real benefits of it, you have someone who is embedded in the culture of the team, in the product, they are just naturally soaking up information and news and what’s coming up, what’s interesting and what’s exciting. That really is valuable, not to denigrate the role of the agency in that because there is definitely a big role for the agency, I don’t think you’ll get that if you are sitting externally to a company. So for me the ideal is a partnership. The way we’ve done it is that we have me internally, I have a social media editor internally, who is a community manager of sorts, then we use the agency to do a lot of strategic stuff to help us with builds and executions and help us with platform level stuff as well, which benefits the community as a whole. Ideally it’s a combination of both but there definitely needs to be someone who really champions it internally. You’ve always got to have that, it’s not something you can just outsource and forget about. That’s when you, I won’t mention any names, but you can very quickly, especially with the world of social media, get into a situation where someone whose maybe not as embedded with your brand as you would like is acting as a spokes person, either by name or behind the curtain of the brand. As we’ve seen quite a few times in the past that can really quickly spiral out of control and become a real PR issue for your company as well.
So yeah a nice managed partnership is the best way to approach it.
SH: Trouble makers that you have in your community and PR crisis management, how do you deal with real problem people that exist? Trolls if you will.
GB: I don’t think there is any hard and fast answer to that, it’s case by case. In social media we have very robust moderation policies in place now which tends to take care of a lot of the issues we have. When you are talking about a more core or engaged community, I’m thinking of something like your official forums or the community that you build around perhaps a Twitter feed, for instance, then it becomes a much more case by case approach to it.
It’s a really tricky one and it’s kind of hard, as I say there is no really hard and fast rules. There is a point which you get to where you have to accept that you can’t please everyone all the time and that sometimes the damage that someone is doing to your efforts can outweigh the efforts you need to go to placate them. And that goes back to the openness and honesty and sometimes you just have to be like “I’m not sure we can really help or we can really make you happy” and you can have all the terms of use and codes of conduct and moderation in place but you will always get situations where you just can’t make things better for someone. It’s important not to get bogged down in that, I have actually done it quite a lot myself as it’s very easy to blow problems out of all proportion. To hear the voice of a vocal minority very loud and actually over stating the importance of that in your mind. Being sober about these things and always evaluating the impact of a problem or a problem person is really important.
People say don’t feed the trolls and there is a great deal of truth in that. There is an acceptance as well that sometimes people just want to make their voice heard and sometimes it’s enough just for them to have done that, then it is good to move on.
SH: What do you think makes a good community manager then? What are the key areas they should be focusing on?
In terms of functional skills, I definitely think a good grasp of editorial being a good writer a good communicator, those are really valuable. The community manager is becoming more of a mouth piece or a communications channel I think it’s really important to be able to put things across clearly and in a really engaging way as well because communities need interesting content, that adds another level to a press release for instance, something that they can get their teeth into a bit more. Joking aside, patience is a valuable characteristic. A willingness to be open and honest as we touched on earlier. Friendliness [laughs] and I guess, it is a position where you need to be, certainly in the makeup of organisations and marketing teams as they stand now, you need to be a classic marketer Jack of all trades. So you can sit in the middle of a marketing team and soak up information from PR, from your brand team, from your digital team, from your CRM guys and your product marketing teams as well and pool all that together and make it relevant for a community. Then also do the reverse job and get stuff back in from the community and make it relevant to those teams internally. It’s an interesting role in terms of being quite a generalist and being able to understand a lot of the things that are happening across your organisation. As a very personal example, 3 years ago I went and did an evening course with the IDM in marketing and very little had any relevance to my day job of community management but actually just by doing that and understanding more about the wider marketing mix did really benefit me.
So if someone was saying to me I’m leaving school and wanting to know what to do at University I think getting a rounded experience in marketing and maybe specialising in things like English or communications are definitely good ways to go.
SH: Do you see the position as staying as a specialist position or do you think it will integrate with others?
I think it should ideally be integrated with other positions already, just to the point I was making a second ago, I think community management works best when it is really keyed into the wider marketing mix. It should remain and deserves to be a specialist position, but again social media is muddying the waters a bit in terms of what is that community manager job, that tag of community manager is expanding a lot now and social media has been a real driving force there. So yeah it should definitely remain a specialist position but marketing directors and PR directors, because a lot of organisations for some reason still have that division between marketing and PR, they really need to think very very carefully about making sure they have a community manager first of all, that they have a community management team and making sure that's very aligned with the other parts of the marketing team as well. Ideally in the right organisation when you’ve got PR and marketing very aligned, that community manager should be sitting nicely between those two disciplines and being an effective go between there.
SH: Well finally, what are your top 5 rules of keeping your audience engaged and active with you and your company?
GB: Oh no... ummm [laughs]
Ok being accessible is the first one. Setting an expectation with your community that you are listening and can be reached and will respond as well, that's the first thing.
Being open and honest and transparent, that's all one rule! Having that honesty even when it’s not good news, that's really important and not going quiet when things aren’t necessarily going very well.
Good content, that goes back to what I was saying about having a good editorial background. Increasingly it’s good to have a knowledge of video and audio and to be comfortable being a more visible public face of a brand as well. You look at the online video statistics and they are going through the roof! Even things like the way brands are using YouTube now, not just to get out official videos but also to get out community engagement pieces, that's really important. Creating good content that works with your community, that means working very closely with your marketing and PR teams, then also being able to get that content across whether that is video or audio or written content.
To be really embedded in your marketing and PR teams. Knowing everything that's going on and definitely not to be isolated from them, to have that two way dialogue internally as well as with the community.
Finally working very closely with your PR team and crisis management and having those crisis plans in place before something goes wrong. Have that crisis plan in place and be ready for the Euro Star moment or the Kit Kat moment or the BP moment. Often community managers or social media managers bear the brunt of that and are at the forefront of it because that’s where it kicks off really quickly. Definitely have those plans in place and be prepared.
So there you have it, hope you found my interview with Graeme useful. He certainly has some great insights with his experience of community management and I think all his advice should be taken on board. Feel free to leave comments below and I’ll make sure to answer any questions that I can.
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