How to Become a Community Manager

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Nicou   No comments   Career, Community 20 February 2023

How to Become a Community Manager

A good question: How to Become a Community Manager?
And why would you want to become one, exactly?
What is Community Management in the end? … Why am I one of them?! Oh gosh, what have I done?!!

 

Summary:

Base meme from Extra Fabulous Comics

 

Introduction

So what it is you do? 😀
I’m a Community Manager. 😇
Oh, so… hm you take care of elderly people? 😊
Uh no, why? Well, almost, I’m in the Gaming Industry. 😅
So… you play video games all day then right? 🥸
UGH 🫠

▲ There are a lot of definitions for Community Management on the interwebz, and most of them I feel are incorrect.

In the history of Humanity, we have always known people managing groups of folks, organising their activities, protecting their peers, speaking up for others.
For the Gaming Industry, the role of meat shield — or rather Forums Moderator — started in circa ~2001 as MMO games were played by more and more geeks around the globe. These Massively Multiplayer Online games were first coined with Ultima Online in 1997 as they featured a massive amount of players enjoying the same universe and living everything that was happening in the community at the same time.
Players love to live stories, they discuss and raise feedback, and sometimes they wage wars among each others which could lead to decency rules being broken. It could be a bit of a chaos reading the forums, and so leaders naturally emerged, people who could calm down others thanks to their people skills, while also escalating what was going well or unwell to the developers.

With the second generation of MMOs — Such as Ultima Online 2, Dark Age of Camelot, RuneScape, EverQuest, and also Eve Online, World of Warcraft, or Guild Wars which are to me three important pillars in the development of our story here — the companies developing these games understood the importance of having dedicated & paid “Forums Moderators”. These employees could also be known as Game Masters prior to 2006, before the term Community Manager started to appear more as the role diversified itself.
The root of Community Management comes from the need for developers to apply Moderation within the community, while assessing the community Sentiment toward given comms/features, and Raising the players Concerns to improve the game upon Feedback. At the time, these proto CMs were also heavily versed in Tech Support & Quality Assurance which were major tasks to unstuck players and escalate feedback; But the creation of events & gazettes were also an important part of their journeys to communicate & engage with players.
It was still a very personal approach, with Game Masters being the players’ friends; Someone able of making good relations online and solving players issues.

 

As social Media platforms continued to grow from the first forums, to the IRC live chat, to Facebook, MySpace, Reddit, Twitter… The role of Community Manager branched to many other careers around 2009 to help the companies establish their brands on a whole new level:

  • Community Management / Coordinator – Listen, engage, and analyse the players response. Developers don’t have time to read hundreds or even thousands of messages daily and they need you to keep track of everything, quantify, qualify and produce a Report that will make it digestible for the development teams. Day to day moderation and operations between the company and the community. The oldest branch in its purest form.
  • Social Media Management – It is community management, but dedicated only to the presence on social Media, with the creation of content for the day to day operations, while following the marketing plan.
  • Community Management / Developer – Establish plans in order to grow the community and tap into untouched reservoirs of players while also keeping the current fans in the loop. Policy & Guidelines, Roadmaps, Benchmarking… They support the company’s Marketing plans thanks to content creation, events, promotions, programs in order to promote the game and its community; My favourite path. It’s one of the rather newest branch of community management as a more strategic path.
  • Influencers Management – Even newer that ComDev, this path focusses on nurturing a pool of Influencers that will help the company uuuuh evangelise the brand by touching the players hearts & mind with their preferred content creators… Said like this, it sounds like an evil plan to make more money. But it’s ok, because it is, and everyone likes it.
  • Press Relations – Magazines are becoming rarer and rarer… and so are good gaming websites… but don’t let yourself down, Press is still a very important part of a marketing strategy and connecting with the great authors from PCGamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, Gamespot, PCGamesN, CanardPC (FR), JVLeMag (FR), GameStar (GER), … will be instrumental.
  • Live & Content – Writing, Narrative development, Event Planning, Taxonomy, SEO and even Graphics & Designs here for the artists.
  • Tech Support – With Tiers 0, Tiers 1, 2, 3, 4 of skilled and specialised tech people that will analyse your request and provide you with the most appropriate answer; From a copy paste of a Knowledge Base article to the thorough examination of your players files and PC to pin down the exact error, communicate with QA & devs to log and fix the issue, and of course communicate back with the players. Unsung heroes.
  • Knowledge Base – Sometimes merged with Tech Support, KB people are here to deflect incoming players tickets/questions thanks to premade Q&As. It’s a self service that is instrumental to keep the tech support costs down.
  • Business – The part I dislike the most with a lot of Finance and Brand Management. It is more focussed on “how can I make money” and has forgotten its Community roots. Avoid at all cost! I’m only jealous because they make more money than us ;p

Every careers in the industry (not only Gaming) are interconnected and they all lead to one thing: How can Community Management impact positively the Marketing efforts.
In the end it only comes down to one thing: money. Personally I’m trying to make this as painless as possible so everyone is here for the fun, for games, and for great interactions/communications between every parts. But we all need food in our plate in the end heh?

 

▲ My first two Mentors in Community Management, Quentin Chappet (Q) & Michaël Servotte (MK). Both worked as Game Masters / Community Managers on Dark Age of Camelot in 2005-2008. Q later worked in the early League of Legends teams at Riot Games, while MK joined the forces at Trion Worlds to support Rift. We have worked together at ZeniMax Online on The Elder Scrolls Online.
I’m really happy to have learned the ropes from them; They have inspired me in my career. Enjoy their wise words below 😎

What were your tasks on Dark Age of Camelot during that time?

→ MK: My first job was much more “Support” than “CM”: helping players by answering their technical questions, or game questions, or even helping them solve problems (community issue, or a bug they experienced). The community aspect was very much on its own. This is thanks to a much smaller scale of games (pre-WoW). We were not talking about hundreds of thousands or millions of players, but a few thousand players. It was basically a big family and everyone knew each other on some level.
The actions as a “CM” were decided when we thought that a public communication could help a maximum of players with a clear communication, targeted on a particular subject. A kind of quick-win to avoid having to answer 40,000 tickets on the same topic the next day 😄.
The tasks for me were to make sure that everything was going well in a macro sense, and to identify when a communication was needed because communications, publications, release notes, required an overlay from us.

→ Q: The title was “Community Manager”, except that the tasks were very different from what a Community Manager would do nowadays. The tasks were ~75% Customer Support by ticket and in-game channels, 10% Quality Assurance, and 10% events preparation in-game. The remaining 5% was going to trade shows to support the Marketing efforts.

 

What changes have you seen in the CM field, up to 2015 with your role at ZeniMax?

→ MK: The scale of games has changed greatly. Between 2006 and 2015 everyone got a better internet broadband/speed, people were using internet naturally and games were becoming more prevalent. And as the scale changed, budgets, team sizes, expectations and sales targets exploded, meaning expectations were set much higher.
Alongside this, social Media had gone from being a geeky quirk to a much more normal thing, and accepted this new way of sharing and communicating. People went there more easily and learned to receive answers and information more directly.
The CM function had to structure itself to meet these new needs, to help respond when players contacted their game’s “devs” and also to participate in the marketing/communication effort to spread the word and help achieve sales or retention goals.

→ Q: In the beginning at Riot Games, since there weren’t many of us, the CMs did a bit of everything: Customer Support, Community Management, Quality Assurance, Localisation, and even some Marketing. As more people were hired over time, we were taken away some responsibilities until we only had “Community” as main tasks: Communications with players via the forums, emails, news, events, shows… Then Riot changed our title from CM to CC (Community Coordinator) and CMs were hired (in charge of the global strategy for each languages). Basically that’s when I realised that the CM job was divided into two levels). At ZeniMax CMs were mostly Marketing & Strategy for the community, while a dedicated Social Engagement team was in charge of the operational day to day communications and engagements with the players.

 

Was community management ‘better back then’?

→ MK: It wasn’t better before to me, it was a different job. It was improvisation with manual work most of the time or tools that had to be diverted from their original use to meet the needs of a ‘small’ group of enthusiasts who mainly consumed a single game for years. In some cases – which could be described as extreme – a recognised CM could be an important argument to go and test a game (Sanya Weathers 4TW!) because you trusted the person, not the function, and you could tell yourself that this person was not going to go and work for a meaningless project or for people interested only in money.
Now it’s an important aspect of the industry, I think, which is not as a whole, solitary field of activity, but as a cross-functional team that has to help a multitude of other teams to achieve their goals.
But this will most certainly evolve. It has probably already evolved since I left The Elder Scrolls Online at ZeniMax Online.

→ Q: Of course! It was cool to see the many aspects of a video game’s operations as the role evolved over the years. I feel like back then we were were a bit more in the middle of everything which is much better for knowing the product well.

 

For you, what are the three most important key skills for a CM?

→ MK: 1) A good ability to synthesise, to be able to identify trends. These trends allow you to detect problems to be addressed, but also to identify opportunities for your team or another team in the studio.
2) Excellent communication. Always, everywhere. Whether it’s for your own team, for colleagues in other teams – who don’t necessarily speak the language of the players – and above all to communicate well with the players; to be as clear as possible, the first time, and to avoid the ‘traps’ and trolls that can be present in your community.
3) A cool head. Always keep a cool head, never give in to panic. Whether it’s in a rush because you have to do a server shutdown, when you have to announce a general rollback, when you get hit by an army of live trolls, you have to keep a cool head, or even be the calm conscience of the team to make sure that rushing won’t make the situation worse.
Now probably not in the top three, but I think it’s still an extremely important one, which can be very difficult to control, and sometimes even to identify: projection towards other players.
Being a Community Manager, the primary role of the position is to be the interface between the players and the studio teams (interface in bold, size 40 and caps lock). You have to be the interface for ALL the players. Not your own interface.
If, for example, I’m a big PvP fan in the game, but I have 80% of the players in my game who are so into PvE, it’s my role, my job, my function to understand these players who, in my personal opinion, could be complete aliens (but WHO likes to hit mobs of enemies over and over again!?!), to understand them and therefore to understand their desires, ideas, problems, and to forward everything to the right people.
Always keep in mind that our role is to be at the intersection of two different worlds, but that our role can be totally different from who we can be as a player in our free time.

→ Q: Three is difficult because a CM, to me, is a multi-tasker and there are a lot of skills that are important. It’s a Jack of all Trades role overall. But anyway, here’s what’s essential for me: Communication to hook the players, Empathy to understand the players, Analytical skills to better understand the weight of everything.

 

▲ So, what is MY definition of “Community Management”? Plain and simple:

Community Management is about bringing people together toward a shared interest, for everybody’s benefit.

As the people’s champion, you need to understand everyone’s point of view and get the best out of it. Balance between each parties is extremely important. Your role is to create opportunities for everyone to end up with a reward.
It is very important that this group of people has a shared interest, a goal that you all want to achieve. Without any goal, you won’t go far and the community will die.

Community Management is never perfect. It is not a science, and each CMs will have a different approach to it with different results yielded in the end.
As a Community Manager, you need to be immensely empathetic and deeply connected with your community to understand it, beyond what the aggregated data can tell you.
In the end, a great Community Manager is someone that will provide you with the best approach to tackle a Community topic.

 

Quite the intro!
If you identified yourself here, you might have what it takes to become a Community Manager. Let’s press on!

Back to summary

 

Get noticed, the attack plan

Now there is no secret: If you want to be noticed, you have to be noticeable. Don’t thank me, I’ve done my best here, now fly and live your dreams!

Companies recruiting Community Managers are now much more demanding in terms of the qualifications and skills required for their recruits. After your [A Level / High School Graduation / Baccalauréat], you could follow a [Level 5 or BTEC Higher National Diploma / Bachelor / BTS-DUT-DEUG-DEUST] with a specialisation in communications. Today, as the competition is becoming increasingly tough, companies are turning more towards candidates with an even higher diploma, with Multimedia, social Media, Business Development, Digital Marketing, Strategy, Project, and whatnot specialisations thanks to a [Master’s Degree / Master]…

What do I say to that? Heeeee, I’m conflicted:

  1. I don’t like to sit in a class, listen to someone all day long, do exercises, perform during tests, or even be bothered by other students who could be distracting… I prefer to learn things on my own terms, exactly the things I want to learn about, and train to reach my objectives. Nowadays you can find almost anything on Internet: free courses, written guides, YouTube videos, and you can get access to a lot of tools that will allow you to be a self-taught Community Manager thanks to your own projects and motivation. This path is my own experience, but you might be like me: create your own projects, train the skills you want to train, work in the meantime for money and do not get distracted too much. It can be tempting after work to just play games on the sofa until bed time. It requires discipline and routine, much like those training to get in shape.
  2. If you love classes, you could pay thousands in courses to get your diploma. The experience in the end could be quite shallow, nothing really hands-on, no proper experience of what professionals are actually doing in real life, and you would most likely not go very far unless you have projects that you run at the same time to forge your own experience. Note that while these students are “building a network of professionals”, most of the time it ends up only with other students which ends in an echo chamber. Stay open to the many industries styles, connect with different professionals thanks to your personal projects, and watch what are your preferred products/games doing to analyse their work and get the best out of it.

Me? Oh, I have a Baccalaureat (A Level or BTEC Level 3) in Chemistry… Then three years of failed (but it was very interesting) studies in Physics, Electronics, Musicology where I was mostly honing my skills for my objective… then I have worked as a waiter while doing my own projects for two years… and then I got hired in the Gaming Industry… so the length of training is quite the same classes/self-taught here.
In the end, after my A Level / Baccalauréat, it took me 5 years of self-taught training to be hired in a Social/Community team in the gaming industry. So basically, you could have your Master in Communications, and several projects realised, in your backpack by that time. All you need is… PA$$ION, and DISCIPLINE, and a lot of MOTIVATION.

 

▲ First, your fingerprint on the internet must be as clean as possible.
Delete or hide everything that is connected to you in a weird or personal way: Type your full name on Google, and dissecate the results. Parameters your personal and teenage photos on Facebook to be shown only to family & friends for example.
Master what you say from now on, always be balanced, kind, and don’t let negative comments hit you. Don’t be a dick, it’s that simple. Internet always remembers.
Some Community Managers never mix personal & professional life. I find it respectable, but if you want to give your all in this field it can be really tricky as the voice of the community. You should be recognisable / held accountable. It will be more or less easy, depending on if you are in the foreground with public speaking responsibilities, or more in the background doing strategy. I personally go full in with my name, but keep in mind that it can be dangerous if you provoke the ire of a very nasty community member who can DM you your personal address and the name of your partner… Scared you enough? ^-^ It can happen, that’s why you need to protect yourself, and have a clean fingerprint on the internet.

 

▲ Choose your Interest, and connects with the people here.
It can be any topic, but let’s talk about games. You like games, right? Choose ONE that has the potential for you to grow, preferably one with an active userbase such as an MMO, an upcoming RPG from a known franchise, or a multiplayer game in general.
Read everything you can read about that game, the recent events and news, the important content creators and what are they doing, the community managers and how do they communicate, the best social platforms to interact with other fans, …
You have to know the field, if you don’t, you won’t go far. Be a specialist.

 

▲ Decide on a project, something that will benefit everyone with this common interest.
Don’t settle yourself with a basic project. Go full passion, full time, full content, and aim to be the best. I don’t want to be rude, but if you’re not one of the best, you won’t be noticed by companies. Give your all.

  • You could create tools to automate some things for players such as a gear simulation for their characters, talents builder, a market place, …
  • Be the greatest at sharing news & guides in a website/blog,
  • Be the best at creating challenging & fun events for the community,
  • Be an excellent livestreamer producing very regular content in diverse format to feature & highlight the game to others, …
  • Be a YouTuber producing awesome content, …

You want to be a guide, the people’s champion. But again: don’t be a dick : Collaborate with other champions, listen to the players, create a great atmosphere for everyone and don’t hate on others even if they have the same project than you.
If it happens, be smart, produce something better, be kind with your counterparts. It can also be good to do collabs with them from time to time.

 

▲ Once you have something very solid, try and connect with the development / community team.
Don’t ask for keys, don’t ask for retweets, don’t ask for anything.
Introduce yourself — via a mail to the community mail distribution list, or in the forums, or via a Direct Message to the brand/company; Avoid contacting CMs personally — and your project. Present how it support the community and the company, and what you want to do with your future programs about that project. If the CMs are good, they will already know you and your project, and they could provide you with some keys or any kind of support without you asking for it. If they don’t, it’s ok, don’t beg and go produce your content.
Keep in mind that you are not trying to apply to be a Community Manager in their company! The only thing you want to do is hone your skills, improve upon feedback, find good programs to work on, and please the community while trying to connect with people.

I will repeat myself again: Don’t be a dick. The aim here is to get your name known by key people without pushing too much for it, it must come naturally from the sheer impact of your work & project.
Employees will change companies, you might change the direction of your project, you could swap game if it doesn’t work at all, … but your name will stay. People will recognise it, and will attribute hopefully good keywords to it. You want these keywords to be great so you can earn a place in their hearts.

 

▲ Keep it up in the long run.
Don’t die! It’s a very time consuming process. Allow yourself some free time not only to breath a little but also to have a look around. Working non-stop head down could damage the output of your work.
I’m “thankful” to have the ability to focus deeply for hours and hours on, but it can be a curse for my health. (Un)Fortunately for me, I don’t care too much about my health and I’m lucky to have a strong resistance to burn-out! It allows me to produce (hopefully) the greatest work in the shortest amount of time, where no one else could do what I do. Of course, I wouldn’t advise you to do that ^^. You must keep it up in the long run! Find the right balance for you to work and run. It is better to do 1 hour of focussed work rather than 10 hours of mediocre work. Focus.

 

Now this is my story below, and the time it took me to be noticed.
I count myself lucky, but I have done everything I could to reach my goal.

  • I started to play World of Warcraft in 2006~, at 16, and joined a guild to have fun. I quickly realised I wanted to do more so I started to write mini-guides for my friends here to show how to progress and how to clean content, I created events & puzzles, and also kept the guild members in the loop with interesting information about the game. First baby steps at doing content for others, with something that ressembled Community Management without knowing it.
  • I was studying Physical Measurements while working on content in 2008. It unfortunately didn’t work well for me as the course was too difficult for my mathematical skills at the time + parents splitting up. So I failed Physical Measurements in 2009 to go to Electrical Engineering. It was a nightmare, so I failed too and went to Musicology in 2010… which I also failed because all I wanted to do was to work in the Gaming Industry. Nothing in my studies would lead me to that goal, so I took care of it myself and went all days in the cafeteria feeding on sandwiches and grape juice! I don’t recount how many translations, articles/guides, live translations, and things I’ve done to improve my skills, it was insane haha!
  • In 2011, playing the browser game The Settlers Online, the devs were looking for volunteers who could support the moderation efforts in the chat. A little experience here with moderation then, interacting with players and creating quizzes for fun.
  • In 2012, I’ve helped shape swtor-guide.fr for the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic with its original creator. A very important experience for me as it helped me hone my skills in writing guides & news, finding information for others, interacting with development teams as a content creator, and simply speaking English. The website was very successful within the swtor community, and it pushed us to create more of these website such as gw2-guide for Guild Wars 2 which I managed while doing collabs with other content creators. Other subdomains were created like wow-guide for World of Warcraft, and many other games. We quickly realised we wanted to do more so game-guide.fr was created to encompass all these subdomains. We received Press access to a lot of events both public or private, and joined many gaming trade fair such as the gamescom or Paris Games Week and such. It helped me continue to grow my skills while starting to create key contacts until 2016.
  • I started to apply to gaming companies in 2012 without any interesting results for years. I was working as a waiter in the meantime… until I got sick of it and decided to not work at all until I found the perfect job for me. You would think “yeah, he must have had his parents’ money to keep it up in the meantime!”… Well no, I lived with between -€50 to +€50 on my bank account, rent paid by my girlfriend in our single room cage-appartment… It was very difficult, and I was giving my all every day to get noticed by a gaming company.  I woke up at 2pm every day because I was creating content non-stop, improving my skills until very early in the morning, every single day, no break. When I think about it now… it was really crazy, and my girlfriend was very understanding/helping ^^ One day I received a phone call! A phone call… oh gosh I hate phone calls. The person on the other side had a heavy English accent… I mimicked a lot of cars bassing by, not being able to hear the recruiter clearly, and well, I hung up because I couldn’t understand well… Facepalm. That’s it, I would never be able to work in the gaming industry! … But eventually I quickly got back at it, I really wanted to work as a Community Manager. This is my destinyyyyy! And then, it happened… 8am in the morning in late 2013… I received a call from ZeniMax Online’s HR to work on The Elder Scrolls Online. I didn’t want to answer the phone at first. Remember, I hate phone calls. And come on, 8am? It was too early for my routine haha! … but I still answered the call: “Yes…? – Am I talking to Lénaïc? – Hm yeees, it’s me… – Hello, <name here> from ZeniMax Online Ireland, […] we would like to offer you a position in Galway to work on The Elder Scrolls Online – … Me? In Ireland? I… – Yes!”. OH… MY… GOD… IT’S HAPPENING!
  • 2014, Ireland, ZeniMax Online working on The Elder Scrolls Online. I’ve continued to improve and to give everything I had as a Social Agent with Communications, Reports, being a good colleague and supporting others, doing Tech Support, some KB articles, and discussing with the Community Managers to better understand how they were working, and the skills I needed to match them one day. A job in the gaming industry is wonderful, but what if I would fail here without being able to prove myself?! Fortunately for me, it went very smoothly and my work was really appreciated so I got promoted to Social Analyst.
  • Sadly, the office closed in Galway in 2015, but I was able to secure a job on the other side of the emerald island in Dublin, at Tableau Software. It’s not a gaming company indeed, but I do love numbers & data and I have learned a lot about metrics, reporting, and analysis here which are key skills for a Community Manager.
  • 2014 & 2015 also led me to continue my work with Game-Guide so I created content with a few companies such as ArenaNet for Guild Wars 2, and Ubisoft, Blizzard, Carbine Studios, Electronic Arts; Making key contacts and producing quality content.
  • In 2016, I stopped working with Game-Guide to focus on my own website called Remlok Industries, another news & guides project focussed on Elite: Dangerous. I’ve developed my own community for that game and got known as content creator producing content for the game and its company Frontier Developments. With all the love, time, and passion I poured into this project, it has worked very well leading me to be recognised by the company and given a good share of place under the spotlights.
  • As I stopped working for Tableau Software in 2018, I then started my own Freelance Community Management career in 2019, with Paradox Interactive. I have also worked for Wolcen Studio, Tin Can Studio, Massive Miniteam. A great experience as well, I have had the chance to be a teacher (Community Management) for a group of French students who came here in Dublin for a few months.
  • Freelance until 2022, I then came back to a in-house job with Larian Studios as a Senior Community Manager for 2022-2023.
  • In 2023 I have also now passed the torch to new Elite: Dangerous champions within my Remlok Industries community, but I’m still developing the project as a whole, every day, to support the content creators here and interact with my community. I will surely create the new chapter of this Remlok project later, maybe when we learn more about Riot Games’s next MMO!
  • As of Feb-March 2023, my contract will be over at Larian Studios, and I will be looking for a new adventure within the Gaming Industry! If you are looking for a Senior or Lead Community Manager, let me know on LinkedIn 😉

All of this to say…

► It took me 7-8 years to hone my skills in Community Management: writing, communications, English, content, analysis, … // 2006-2013.
► 2 years to be noticed 2012-2014, and hired as a Social Agent – Community // 2014-2015.
► Then 2 years as a Community Manager // 2015-2018
► 5 years as an Experienced toward Senior Community Manager // 2018-2022
► 2 more years to be recognised as a senior Community Manager // 2022-2023.
►►► It took me 17 years from the start of my project “I want to be a Community Manager” as a teenage of 16, to where I am today working as a Senior Community Manager at age 32. Phew… now that I think about it!! I’m getting old… let me lie here for a moment… I will use the Force to heal my broken body…. …… wow, that was a lot of hard work 😭

 

So why are you still here?! GO! Find your project, and make it the best one in the world… and let me know! I want to see it 😃

 

▲ Oh, and before you go, you will need a good CV.
I have seen too many terrible CVs. Terrible not by the lack of skills, but by the document itself!
Recruiters want to see these information, in that order: Your Skills via keywords → the Tools/Software your use → your Past Experiences → Languages you speak → Education → Interests

Here are a few tips:

  • Make it simple, no need for fancy colours everywhere, stars to gauge skills, or anything that could disturb the reader’s eyes
  • Your document must be readable by machines, so get a hold of your best keywords by matching your skills with the skills required in the job opportunity announcement
  • At the very top must figure your SURNAME and Name, with the job’s name your are applying for.
  • At the top must figure your name, surname, email, phone number, country/city and possibly your age. Never add your full address!
  • Then you can add a few lines explaining your motivations, why you apply to that job if you want. Keep it short and to the point and don’t overdo it.
  • First category is for your Professional Skills. For Community Management explain what skills you have in Development, Engagement, Content, Strategic, Technical, Business. Use the video below to find your Community Skills Framework™:
  • Then if you want you can add a small category with your Platform Experience. The tools & software you master, only if you really know how to use them.
  • The Professional Experience as high as possible in the categories list where you list the Role – Company – Country with the beginning and end date. Don’t forget to mention in a few lines what you have done here, the milestones.
  • If you have Personal Experience, with the projects you have built such as Game-Guide or Remlok Industries for me: share the details to show the recruiter you have done things that have a relation with the job you applied to.
  • Languages. Do you speak French natively? Are you fluent in English? Notions of German? Do you know some Klingon? Put it there, it’s fun.
  • Then your Education. To be frank no one cares, but if you live in France it could be important to show from which school you come from.
  • Finish with your Interests. Tennis, Singing (Metal), Kayak, Painting minis, study of fictional languages, a list of games that are related to the company you are applying to, …

Contact me if you want to review your CV, I’d be happy to help 🙂

Back to summary

 

Landed the job, what now?

Whelp, great work! Don’t mess it up now 😁

Remember: there is no ceiling to learning. Continue to improve, stay open to feedback, think outside the box and check what other companies are doing. Get in contact with other professionals, join groups for example Discord servers with other Community Managers or simply professional in your field whether it’s fashion, cars, gaming, … Don’t eat at every tables though, chose your places wisely.

Also, don’t go ahead of yourself. You will make friends. You will make enemies like every other jobs. The Gaming industry is much like everywhere else: you will find great people, skilled folks, employees that are really bad, those who will copy your work to get your credits, excellent and down to earth managers, awful managers, … in the end you are forging your own path so be mindful, respect everyone, do your best and… And don’t be a dick, but I might have made my point already ^-^

With the experience stacking, you might want to learn new skills and even find a similar job down the path like Community Development, or even Project Manager, Brand Manager…
Learn. Check with yourself every week: What have I learnt? What is my next objective? Let’s learn Adobe Premiere Pro, let’s build a template for social Media on Adobe Photoshop, let’s do a photo montage, what are other brands doing, can I create something that no one has done yet? Take some risk, die, improve, and retry.

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Community Management, the skills

Nothing beats the Community Skills Framework™ so here we are. It includes five skill families with ten skills in each family, prioritised by importance.

First, when your Aunt Betty asks you what community management is you can say, “It’s a mix of engagement, content, technical, business and strategy responsibilities.” This may or may not mean anything to her but it adds enough detail about your job without being verbose – and in plain language. Second, and more importantly, it frames the conversation with your stakeholders about the scope of your role, its priorities, what is reasonable for one person to do and where your strengths and weaknesses are… incredibly helpful as you look to navigate your career and where you want to head next.

 

▲ Content

Community Managers place the highest relative value on content skills, although all three key roles give writing and communication high marks.
Content skills are focused on the development and production of community content and programs. At higher levels, those skills are less utilised, while being able to develop narratives and take a higher-level approach to how content fits.
the overall story of the community becomes more relevant.

If you don’t know how to communicate properly, your future in Community is seriously jeopardised.
Skills such as being able to create images or videos assets production, graphics, improving SEO while writing will make you very valuable.
Growing into a director role can mean not just understanding how to tell stories, but how to weave those stories together into a compelling narrative that demonstrates the value of and need to invest in a community program.

 

▲ Technical

Developing a technical specialty is a great way to increase your value within a community team — and add to your paycheck. Not everyone needs technical skills in data analysis, API development or UX and design, but team members that have them provide great value. Community teams and those who lead them do need to understand where their technical strengths lie and what individual skills can do to strengthen the community if they are to reap the maximum benefits from them.

ROI and engagement metrics are critical, and your Community’s value is heavily based on demonstrating behaviour change and measuring community value, so it’s not surprising that the ability to collect and analyse data is seen as a valued skill.
You have to demonstrate analytical skills to be a great value in any Community team. Too often have I seen Community Managers escalating an issue that only one player experienced, or simple a CM that is not careful with the meanings of numbers. It wastes the limited time that developers have when reading our reports.
Being able to code software and APIs is also a very strong value. At least, you could have skilled friends in this area. You are never alone, good contacts are important.
Of course it is SUPER important for you to be proficient with the tools & software needed in your field!

 

▲ Business

While every role places value on community advocacy and promotion, Directors of Community value those skills in conjunction with hiring, program management, and budget management. As a result, Directors of Community placed the highest value scores on 9 of 10 skills in this skill family. The tenth: training development and delivery, makes perfect sense for a strategist who works across a number of communities.
While managers placed a high priority on community advocacy and promotion, strategists and directors were far more interested in training on developing effective business models. Managers also wanted more training on budget management, while strategists and directors expressed interest in training on selling and evangelizing for their community programs.

Something that you will need to care only if you aim for high level roles such as Director of Community. Directors want to see clear results because their boss is also asking for clear results. You can’t drive a company if you are not 100% sure the results are positive for your business.

 

▲ Engagement

Engagement skills are likely what comes to mind when one pictures the life of “typical” community manager, and these daily skills are indeed what helps communities form and grow. Engagement skills are a core community management skills family for all community roles — without engagement fundamentals, it is impossible to understand or influence communities.

You must be an excellent communicator as you will be engaging with fans & coworkers from different backgrounds, giving news and coordinating plans & comms. It is of the utmost importance for a CM to be clear, concise, kind, and to be able to adapt your voice depending on who you’re talking to. A great CM must be able to stand their ground when criticised (the product mostly, not you), in order to look competent and calm, so be confident and work on looking good/pro.
A Community Manager must be able to recognise the key members of their community. Engagement skills allow CMs to leverage motivators to engage, influence, and change behaviour in their community. It’s all a mind game! 😛
Moderation, Content Creation, conflicts management, day to day discussions are key for you yo succeed in any Community role.
Listen, analyse, respond, escalate, keep in the loop, and facilitate connections.

 

▲ Strategic

For community professionals, this demonstrates the constant need to assess input and activity through a strategic lens — without doing so, community professionals can quickly get consumed by reacting to tactical issues that keep them making significant progress.

A strategy will allow you to know where you are going, how are you going to react if this or that happens, what is the goal of your initiative, and it will help you to better assess everything that you are doing. Is it really important? Should you respond to that player’s message right now? Wouldn’t it be better slightly later once you have more information at hand? Think before acting.
Engagement is nothing without the Strategy. It will allow you to do trendspotting, synthetise topics to better understand them, your Reports will be greater if you explain why A or B happened and how you’re going to solve it and overall even your metrics will have a better impact.

 

Additionally to all these skills, you will need a lot of patience to support the most passionate fans, the ones who can either help you reach new heights… or sink you quickly. If you get bit by your players, good luck turning that around.

While Community Managers have have a constant attention to the various inputs that flood your platforms from fans around the globe, you must not work 24/7. Learn to disconnect and reconnect to preserve yourself. For example I like to check what’s up with my community first thing in the morning “before work” or even at 2am if I’m going to bed late… but don’t force it. If you feel good go for it but if it’s out of work time and you don’t feel like replying to Bob who’s asking something in a DM… don’t! You will get to it tomorrow. When you’re dealing with all the time zones, there will always be someone awake, someone playing your game.
It is not the same if there is an emergency though. I consider Community Managers to be “always on”, unless it’s clear that you are on holidays. It’s common in teams of multiple Community Managers to have someone on duty during week-ends for example. If something goes wrong, you’ve got to be ready to try and help, secure the important information, escalate it to management or if you are Management: to think strategy and how best to tackle the issue.

 

Companies and high levels sometimes don’t recognise that fans are making the game a success in the end. A very devoted fan base can pull anything up, even if it’s not a “great” game. If the devs are super fun, really open to feedback, they communicate and understand their players it’s a huge win. A great and beautiful game with terrible developers or communication strategy would not work well. That is why Community Managers are so important, everything you say will be dissecated and will impact the selling of the game.

The unfortunate thing with Community Management, is that a lot of people see it as a “junior” role. The problem both comes from Leads putting CMs in a position where they have to do everything they’re being told + players thinking that CMs are just that: employees posting on Twitter being told what to do. Community managers are often barred from making anything but pre-approved responses and the style and tone of tweets and posts are often dictated from above.
The power of a Community Manager depends on the culture of the agency or brand they work for. Often, if a CM can’t say anything for weeks, it might not be because they’re bad… it’s just that they are not allowed to say anything and management/leads think it’s ok that way. Hm hm.

A Community Manager must be creative, a strategist with lots of skills. To keep up with the real-time pace of the social web – and to do any type of real-time marketing – community managers have to be empowered to respond to consumers as they see fit in real-time, or at least have a direct line to someone who can quickly approve posts.

 

To finish, some soft skills:

  • Humour: Living in the forums, Community Managers are also often huge trolls. You need to know when best to use it so you can better connect with your community. It also helps you build a thick skin. Don’t take players complaint personally, but don’t be entirely disconnected either. Careful not to be too friendly with your community as well, it could backfire and you would loose authority.
  • Multi-tasking – You will have to do many things at once, lots of tabs & apps opened! If you can have multiple monitors on your PC, it’s great.
  • Organisation – Because you will have so much to do and plan, you really need to be organised. Create ToDos and clean the list as often as possible. Bookmark things!
  • Flexibility – Your community as a whole never sleeps. But you do. You must be flexible to perform well at your job while preserving your health. Find a good balance.
  • Persuasion – To be used with facts, numbers, confidence to make your point. Seriously, it is super important to be able to prove that your plan will work if your boss isn’t sure about something.
  • Openness – Always be open to feedback. You will get feedback. You will give feedback. It’s all part of the job, you will grow with your colleagues in each of your jobs.
  • Is Passion a skill? Heh, no, but you will need a lot of passion to focus all your skills ^-^

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Resources

Some resources that you may find useful:

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If you need more details, feel free to contact me on Discord: Nicou#5838, or directly check out Discord’s guides.