Teut Weidemann was the head of community development for panzer elite and for the entire jowood community. He started in the games business in 1987, but worked on computers since 1981. Several months ago, while I was working on GameFace magazine, I had the opportunity to interview him, about community building and management. Although the topic was mostly video game communities, he suggested that his ’strategies’ …”can be used for all communities, from games to fans of tv series to bookkeepers”.

I found the article yesterday, and I wonder if his suggestions can also be applied to blogging communities? Judge for yourself:

What do you actually mean with community management? What is it basically about?

Community management is the task to manage and support your community members. If you don’t support or manage them your community will fall apart. So you have to have someone who cares about them and knows how a community works. That’s one part of community management. The other part is how to plan the information flow to your community. How do you plan it, manage it, and control it all for the benefit of your community. After all your community is your customer right in from of your doors. Don’t shy him away.

Do companies that create communites mainly for marketing reasons, handle them differently as developers that create them for fun?

Yes, the firtst ones will fail, the second will succeed (strangely to any observer). Building up communities just for marketing won’t work. The community only grows if they gain something, something they can’t get elsewhere. That’s why developers have a build in talent to manage communities right: they love to talk about their game so they share a lot of information with the community.

Communities aren’t stupid, in fact with most communities there are people more talented and smarter than in the complany who manages that community. So don’t try to feed them false info, or worse don’t try to market talk to them. They hate it. Open, uncensored, truthful, straightforward and in time. That’s what your information needs to be.

What is the role of the community manager? Is he supposed to interfere in the whole process of the community?

The community manager is the interface between your community and the people behind the product. He needs to know all about the product and has to have access to all people involved in it. He doesn’t control the community, he supports it. Total control will destroy a community pretty fast. Of course he needs to take control if things get out of hand, but that’s rare and only shows to things if it happens: Your community is getting large (and part of it are troublemakers) or you have done something wrong. A community manager only interferes if there are problems the community can’t solve for themselves. Some problems of the community are made by the owners of the product. Either they released wrong information or no information at all. Leaving the community alone and not giving them something to feed on is a mistake. Not listening to them is a mistake, too. Not intergrating them into your product feedback is a waste of potential.

Is there a principle for the ideal time to post news, where they will be mostly read? If so, how does this principle work and what is it based on?

Yes, most news are read on Mondays as people browse the news during office hours. On weekends it’s bad as most people rather play than browse. But Monday is very crowded as many news from the weekend are being posted. So we picked Tuesdays and Thursdays to post. Sometimes however we used Fridays as the news will stick on the sites for the whole weekend. We got access to the number of news readers and clearly saw when we had most feedback (i.e. visitors from other sites due to our news) which showed exactly when it was optimal to post. That might vary depending on the product. For a TV Show for example, it would be important to post around the air time of the show, for games its different: Gamers bahavior can be measured and you should follow it to maximize your efforts.

What reasons would make a good community fall apart, even though the manager has followed the strategy rules?

Lack of new information, no one to talk to, bad product being released not fulfilling the promises (break of the rule being truthful, remember?), change of site with registering, changing too much on the site too often, not caring. Many things, some little and some big ones you can do wrong.

This is just a part of the whole interview. We also talked about the relation of community management and product value, marketing inside the community and the role and taks of the community manager. If you’re interested in reading the whole thing let me know.