Keynote: Empowering Your Community to Evangelize For You
The Community Manager Conference is an event, unrivalled worldwide: By Community Managers, for Community Managers! This event will be taking place for the first time this year, offering you the unique opportunity to get into direct contact and exchange with leading figures of your own profession.
Community members can be a valuable asset in word-of-mouth marketing - be it within their peer groups, as members of guilds or clans. Their judgement can make or break a community and the game.
This session explores reward systems to motivate your community, and uses examples from popular MMO games to illustrate the success of this strategy. It also presents real world feedback on what hasn't worked in the past.
Some of the lessons learned from working on more than 20 MMOGs will be presented here. The keynote will discuss different ways of motivating players to participate in communities through special (forum) rewards, organizing exclusive player- and community events, exclusive items or other in-game motivators.
Lecture with open discussion: Legal Urban Legends - Working with the Community
Community Managers are often confronted with self declared legal experts in their communities. Heated discussions about copyright issues, EULAs, bans, item selling, free shards, internet liability or freedom of speech should be well known to most Community Managers. But what are the facts? What is the truth? Is a Game Publisher bound by the principles of freedom of speech? Are EULAs always void? Is it ok to run a free shard if it just is not done commercially? The workshop shall cover the most popular legal topics Community Managers are confronted with in their daily line of work. Most of those topics will be discussed under German Law and where possible under European provisions.
Speech: Psychology in Community Management
The daily work in Community Management is largely based on the art of using words to convince others. Every communication involves much more than just an objective passing on of information – even small changes in the manner of expression can, whether intended or not, have a big impact in any given direction. Over a longer period of time, even the ostensibly easy choice for a salutation can have a big impact on the mood of a community, regardless of the communication’s actual content.
Community Managers develop a feeling for these contexts and the right words, often without being aware of it. “Psychology in Community Management” focuses on this feeling and its backgrounds, while aiming to give suggestions and food for thought for practical work in Community Management.
Open Forum/Panel Discussion: Grooming your Community for Greatness
How to identify your community members who can make great community leaders, volunteers and staff.
Panel Discussion: Guilds as the Bearing Part of the Community
Guilds and clans are mainstays of MMORPG communities. They consist of players who, in the course of their playtime, join up with likeminded people to master the tasks and challenges of virtual worlds together.
Especially big and established guilds have a lot of influence, which can reach way beyond the boundaries of their own guild. Their commitment for a specific game can have far-reaching consequences for the game world.
Within the scope of this panel discussion and in collaboration with members and leaders of well-known German and international guilds and clans, we would like to work out how operators and players can benefit from supporting these well-organized players. Together, we would like to find out what the requirements and expectations on the part of the players are, and how to conform to them as good as possible.
These are just a few questions not only concerning Community Management, but that can also serve as a way to better understand and communicate with each other within communities and guilds.
Speech: To explore how experience in Community Management can be applied to other areas within the industry
Community Management is a rather new field in this industry and as such it contains a lot of untapped potential. This speech will thoroughly explore the benefits, gained from bringing exactly this potential, into other areas within the industry.
Speech: Leads to get the most out of social media - convert buzz strategy into long term ROI
This speech does not only depict the general assumptions towards social media, but furthermore describes a potential winning strategy for a better use of social media in marketing operation. Based on a real successful social experiment and facts, this speech shares best practices and a global approach to the social media trend with the audience. At the same time it also tends to warn about the risk of limited long term ROI in case of a lack of long term strategy and buzz-only approach.
Speech: Media isn't social - people are! How to use social technologies to build stronger relationships.
The panel will focus on the cultural and behavioural changes of customers sparked by social media. The discussion will be based on the thesis, that companies should not just try to be on one or two social media platforms but recognize that communities and their connections became social. With their knowledge about customer behaviour, Community Managers can play an important part in integrating a social culture company-wide and build stronger relationships with this new kind of 'social customer'.
Speech: Community Management and Credibility: How to Make Users not Only Hear, but Believe What You Say
How to be a trustworthy, reliable and efficient Community Manager? How to manage your private life, beliefs and yourself as a person to be better in both professional and private life? This speech shall try to answer these questions and explain why ideologies like “Don’t make me think” ruin communication. Furthermore, the speech will develop how to find balance between the realities of company and community to make thousands of people hear and believe what a Community Manager wants to tell them.
Speech: Community Driven Development
The Electronic Sports League (ESL) is with over 2.5 million registered members the most popular league for electronic sports (eSports) in Europe. This great community has their own ideas of how their hobby and therefore eSports should be like. The Community Manager has to identify these needs and try to realize their implementation. On the other hand he is also in charge to promote new developments in the community.
Speech: Community Management vs. Support: Fight!
There they are, narrowing their eyes, having to share one small boxing ring: Support and Community Management of “new” browser and social game companies often are thrown together although they have to handle millions of people. This talk will specify the attributes and tasks of the two departments to show why this current twin job is a bad idea and wasted potential of good customer service. Further it will detail some of the necessary “referees”, processes and tools needed to organize the departments efficiently and how to use this as a leverage to grow your customer base without in-house fights.