one of the blogs that i really enjoy reading is sanya weathers‘ eating bees blog about community management. i’ll say right off the bat that she’s been at this much longer than i have, and she uses more colorful language than i might , but i almost always agree 100% with her opinions on community management. her most recent post about 5 things you can do to “mess” up your community got me thinking a bit about whether it was possible to give 5 guidelines for not messing up your community. i’m not really sure, but i thought these would be a good 5 to start with:

1. be as honest and open as you can be. honesty is about telling the truth; openness is about disclosing what you can disclose. when you work for a company, things like confidentiality agreements, internal policies and also the fear of putting a bad message out and offending customers or scaring investors sometimes limit what you can say. but anything that you can say that will answer a question, help a customer or generally improve the situation, you should.
2. over-communicate. you’ll always make changes to your world or game for various reasons, like adding new features, balancing the game dynamics or whatever. whenever you do, someone will be upset. but more than people being upset, people will be uncertain about its impact on them. it might change their inventory, or affect their score or who knows what. any side-effects that you know (e.g. documented and proven through testing) you should post. you’ll answer a bunch of questions right off the bat and if it’s bad, you’ll get all the anger out right away rather than be ambushed by it later.
3. avoid talking like a politician. sanya weathers talks about the danger of talking like a marketing person, where you use buzzwords and build hype, regardless of what the actual situation is. talking like a politician is trying to get everyone to like you. you make promises and empty statements. this doesn’t help. again, back to point 1: as honest and open as possible.
4. stop and think before hitting send or submit. ask yourself if what you’re about to write (and yes, any email, posting, etc is public) will help. will it help clear up a question? will it help make a customer happy? if not, re-work it until it does, or find a different message.
5. be among them, but not of them. a lot of people talk about the importance of developers playing games, and for the fun aspects, it makes a lot of sense. for community managers, who generally have to deal with upset customers, when you share their pain, you can represent them much better internally. after all, as a community manager, you represent the community to the developers and business interests. you can’t fight blindly for what would make you the player more successful in-game or in-world, but you can explain rationally what will help the majority of the community to be happier or more successful.