Quote:
Against my better judgment, we?ve just published ?A Day in the Life? Micah Whipple? on our 20th Anniversary website, chronicling a single day in the life of our most-senior community manager. In this unauthorized autobiography, Micah gives you an inside look at what it?s like to be Bashiok, what it?s like to not be Bashiok, and what it?s like to write an essay that is almost entirely devoid of facts.
You can, if you really have nothing better to do, read the full article here
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/interviews.html#thirdInterview
Micah Whipple
A Day In The Life - Micah Whipple
Community Manager / Editor
8:00am
I hit the snooze button.
8:10am
I hit the snooze button.
8:20am
Normally I?d hit the snooze button a few more times, but I manage to roll out of bed, abandoning the soft warmth of my sheets for the cold, bitter world. I?m not a morning person. Some mornings I?m also not a shower person. This is one of those mornings.
I tend to get into work, most days, at around 9:00 a.m. I?m a community manager, which isn?t my actual title (that?d be editor), but it refers to the work I do. These days I go by my super-secret name ?Bashiok,? and at some point I was also ?Drysc,? but whichever name I go by, my goal is always to ensure the work we?re producing is of ?Blizzard Quality.? (Imagine a "ting" sound and a lens flare effect reflecting off that term.)
Most people don?t quite understand what a Community Manager does. Some think we just sit in the forums all day. Not true! It's an understandable misconception as this role is still a fairly new thing. It's not a position most companies have, a lot of the work isn?t seen externally, and from company to company the responsibilities can vary wildly. In some cases, a Community Manager will also do PR and marketing for an entire company. Being as large as we are (our North America Community Development and eSports team numbers over 35 people) we're able to specialize.
Any time I'm asked to sum up community management, I refer to that scene in Office Space where the guy being fired feebly tries to explain how he acts as a courier between the customer and the programmers, and ends up screaming about how he has people skills. It's a fairly apt comparison, as that?s a big part of who we are, only we?re (hopefully) more useful in reality than in the reference.
As players can't be present in internal meetings or take part in the decision-making process, our job is to ensure that their voices are represented -- so naturally we complain a lot (kidding!). We also act as a buffer for any external communication, ideally mitigating any issues once news hits the site. As players ourselves, we can help inform company decisions and communication to best serve the game communities. That's the overarching idea of what community management is about, but our department does a whole lot more, including run eSports tournaments and programs, social media outreach, promotional projects like the ?Join the Dominion!? and ?Your Fortune Awaits? promotional campaigns, as well as daily content creation. I?m a manager of the content team.
9:00am
First thing in the morning for me is really to catch up on email, the internet, and my tasks. Being a global company, we receive emails around the clock, and while most don?t require my direct intervention, I read, on average, four hundred emails a day. I like to try to stay informed of everything going on, so it's a lot of reading.
I got one reply from Greg (Ghostcrawler) to a talent-related concern I sent him last night while leveling a new hunter. He assuages my fears and tells me that Mists of Pandaria and the talent revamp will fix everything. He promises. It's awesome being able to just email a lead designer about a game I enjoy playing, and I like to take advantage of it whenever I can. Any time I can gain more insight into design, it?s done with my primary job responsibility in mind ? being ready and able to discuss the game with our players.
Being on the west coast (left side is the best side!) we?re obviously a few hours behind when a bunch of industry news or info could drop that would affect our day. A major world event, some big community issue, or even celebrity news could dominate the internet, our forums, and our lives for the rest of the day if not week or weeks. It?s important to keep up on current events as well as fansites and community trends.
9:30am
General web surfing/twittering/forum perusing now out of the way, I?ll hit my tasks. We use an internal proprietary tool to create and track personal tasks, which could be anything from cropping some Tier 13 images for use in one of the set reveals, editing and approving the FAQ for a new game service we're introducing, or writing a feature article on a game system. In a perfect world I'd have time to complete these tasks, but it's nearing 10 a.m.
10:00am
Being one of a handful of seniors in the department, my day is full of meetings. Beginning at 10 a.m. and then fairly consistently throughout the day I?ll be away from my desk deciding the fate of the world? of Warcraft (or Diablo or StarCraft). We?ve completed most of our high level strategy meetings for 2012, and now a lot of our time is focused on executions of individual projects, tracking metrics and successes of various programs and department efforts, and sharing progress on tackling future goals.
This meeting is specifically to go over metrics for social media and our blogs to see what?s popular, what isn?t, what people are saying about our games, and how we can use all of these things to try to focus future efforts to do more of what people like and less of what they don?t. It's not rocket science.
This meeting we're covering post-BlizzCon forum activity drop-off, and a return to statistical normalcy after the huge influx of activity that surrounded the event. Using the info we can go into a meeting later in the day to help determine some of the content we're going to be generating over the next few months.
12:30pm
After a few meetings out of the way it's probably time for lunch, but I tend to forget to eat or think about how I will procure myself sustenance. While I was in meetings I've racked up 75 or so emails, which I go through pretty quickly, responding when necessary to offer my sage advice.
Managing to peek at the forums I'm able to knock a few replies out. I dearly enjoy interacting with people on the forums, and I get so little time to do so. I've found recently that I can get some of that same sense of enjoyment from Twitter (you can follow me @Bashiok if you?ll forgive the shameless plug), and being easily accessible from a phone or tablet, it's far easier to work into my schedule.
1:30pm
I tricked someone into getting me lunch. Most of the team rarely eats lunch away from their desks. I feel like it's an awful habit and one I should try to break from more often, but there's a lot to get done. I'm sure there's some study I can reference about how spending a lunch break away from work increases productivity when you return, but nevertheless there I sit, working while I eat. It also offers me some privacy as I'm convinced I constantly have food smeared throughout my beard.
1:45pm
I get an instant message from Greg asking about the upcoming Mists of Pandaria talent calculators and how we may want to handle feedback. We go back and forth on concerns over how relevant the feedback will be (and the work that goes into collecting it) when they are likely to change so much before release. We ultimately decide it's probably worth the effort to make class-specific talent feedback threads, but it all hinges on when those threads make it to the website.
We also begin collecting questions for the Diablo III design meeting tomorrow. While we're constantly emailing and chatting with the developers, we also have dedicated weekly meeting time set aside to go through community-submitted questions and to get a sense of how the players are feeling. Answers are great, but getting the devs? candid take on design and the game allows us to actually converse with the community, and not just copy and paste answers.
3:00pm
The latest Dev Watercooler returns from its editorial review and is ready to go. As I said earlier, a big part of our time these days is spent generating content for the website. This isn't one of those times. Greg does a great job writing these up and they undergo minimal edits. Also, because we already have the image assets set, there's not much left to do at this point but coordinate a global posting time with our international community manager counterparts, and then prepare the article for publishing.
Global coordination is a big point we strive to hit with all of our information releases. That means localizing and simultaneously posting as many articles on our sites in each region and in each language as possible. With 12 languages to support it's no small feat.
We draft the articles using an internal content management system (CMS) that helps make publishing to the website, game launcher, and even in-game news for StarCraft II, super easy. This is good because, being writers and community managers, most of us only have basic knowledge of HTML. It's the web team that makes the entire site, updates the individual site sections, and creates awesome features like talent calculators or item databases, as well as the CMS and its upkeep. To us it's just a few big shiny buttons, which is about all we're able to handle.
5:00pm
There was another meeting in that time gap somewhere, but it was boring. Now is our Content Team meeting, and today we're specifically brainstorming article ideas for Diablo III and Blizzard DOTA. Normally this meeting would also encompass going over individual tasks as well as forum posts each person has made in the last week, or articles we've published. We really need to focus on getting out content for these two games because our players are excited about what we unveiled at BlizzCon. After jamming on some ideas, we take cell phone shots of the white board, someone types up the notes, and what we came up with will be assigned out as tasks by our project management team, who help keep us crazy creative types on track. Joking aside, we would be utterly lost without them.
6:00pm
Once that meeting is over, I take a trip to pick up some games from the campus library. We have a really awesome employee library, staffed by our own librarian (!). It's full of game development books, work and performance guidance, manuals, and video tutorials, but more importantly, it?s also well stocked with movies and games. I've just checked out Dark Souls, which is going to severely conflict with my upcoming Skyrim play time.
6:30pm
Back to my tasks! It's time to bust out a post or two. I have a few easy ones assigned to me, including a reminder for the community to enter our Facebook Diablo III beta key drawing and a quick update to last year's "PvP Season 9 is Ending" announcement to make it applicable to 4.3. I get those drafts out for approvals and update my tasks list.
7:30pm
We like to play music in our little area and recently have been hooked on music from the 1930s, as well as something called "Exotica" (check it out). Tonight, I've decided to load up an Anita Baker station on Pandora. After grooving to the smooth and sultry sounds of "Sweet Love," I look at the clock and grumble. It's all good, though, and I get to go through the Diableards inbox. It?s one of my great pleasures to look through community submissions like these, and a gift that keeps on giving because I never seem to be able to make a dent in it. I look through emails and their attached images and copy those I approve (edited photos and goatees don't count!) into a folder. Later they'll be uploaded to Facebook in a gallery, and a few entries I've personally selected will be published individually over the next week or so. Publishing some pictures individually like this helps spotlight those I find particularly hilarious or awesome.
8:00pm
I grumble at how late it is, but manage to get myself caught up in some twittering and forum posting for a few minutes before heading out for the night. The rest of my night is inevitably spent sneaking looks at my inbox, checking the forums, or otherwise staying attached to a job career I've had for eight years. I do this not because I have to, but because I care where the company is going, how we're making the games we're making, being a part of the process. Because I care what our players think. I find that to be true of everyone at Blizzard, and it?s why I'm happy to have this opportunity to provide a brief (and poorly written) glimpse into one of my days. I hope you enjoyed it.
Against my better judgment, we?ve just published ?A Day in the Life? Micah Whipple? on our 20th Anniversary website, chronicling a single day in the life of our most-senior community manager. In this unauthorized autobiography, Micah gives you an inside look at what it?s like to be Bashiok, what it?s like to not be Bashiok, and what it?s like to write an essay that is almost entirely devoid of facts.
You can, if you really have nothing better to do, read the full article here
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/interviews.html#thirdInterview
Micah Whipple
A Day In The Life - Micah Whipple
Community Manager / Editor
8:00am
I hit the snooze button.
8:10am
I hit the snooze button.
8:20am
Normally I?d hit the snooze button a few more times, but I manage to roll out of bed, abandoning the soft warmth of my sheets for the cold, bitter world. I?m not a morning person. Some mornings I?m also not a shower person. This is one of those mornings.
I tend to get into work, most days, at around 9:00 a.m. I?m a community manager, which isn?t my actual title (that?d be editor), but it refers to the work I do. These days I go by my super-secret name ?Bashiok,? and at some point I was also ?Drysc,? but whichever name I go by, my goal is always to ensure the work we?re producing is of ?Blizzard Quality.? (Imagine a "ting" sound and a lens flare effect reflecting off that term.)
Most people don?t quite understand what a Community Manager does. Some think we just sit in the forums all day. Not true! It's an understandable misconception as this role is still a fairly new thing. It's not a position most companies have, a lot of the work isn?t seen externally, and from company to company the responsibilities can vary wildly. In some cases, a Community Manager will also do PR and marketing for an entire company. Being as large as we are (our North America Community Development and eSports team numbers over 35 people) we're able to specialize.
Any time I'm asked to sum up community management, I refer to that scene in Office Space where the guy being fired feebly tries to explain how he acts as a courier between the customer and the programmers, and ends up screaming about how he has people skills. It's a fairly apt comparison, as that?s a big part of who we are, only we?re (hopefully) more useful in reality than in the reference.
As players can't be present in internal meetings or take part in the decision-making process, our job is to ensure that their voices are represented -- so naturally we complain a lot (kidding!). We also act as a buffer for any external communication, ideally mitigating any issues once news hits the site. As players ourselves, we can help inform company decisions and communication to best serve the game communities. That's the overarching idea of what community management is about, but our department does a whole lot more, including run eSports tournaments and programs, social media outreach, promotional projects like the ?Join the Dominion!? and ?Your Fortune Awaits? promotional campaigns, as well as daily content creation. I?m a manager of the content team.
9:00am
First thing in the morning for me is really to catch up on email, the internet, and my tasks. Being a global company, we receive emails around the clock, and while most don?t require my direct intervention, I read, on average, four hundred emails a day. I like to try to stay informed of everything going on, so it's a lot of reading.
I got one reply from Greg (Ghostcrawler) to a talent-related concern I sent him last night while leveling a new hunter. He assuages my fears and tells me that Mists of Pandaria and the talent revamp will fix everything. He promises. It's awesome being able to just email a lead designer about a game I enjoy playing, and I like to take advantage of it whenever I can. Any time I can gain more insight into design, it?s done with my primary job responsibility in mind ? being ready and able to discuss the game with our players.
Being on the west coast (left side is the best side!) we?re obviously a few hours behind when a bunch of industry news or info could drop that would affect our day. A major world event, some big community issue, or even celebrity news could dominate the internet, our forums, and our lives for the rest of the day if not week or weeks. It?s important to keep up on current events as well as fansites and community trends.
9:30am
General web surfing/twittering/forum perusing now out of the way, I?ll hit my tasks. We use an internal proprietary tool to create and track personal tasks, which could be anything from cropping some Tier 13 images for use in one of the set reveals, editing and approving the FAQ for a new game service we're introducing, or writing a feature article on a game system. In a perfect world I'd have time to complete these tasks, but it's nearing 10 a.m.
10:00am
Being one of a handful of seniors in the department, my day is full of meetings. Beginning at 10 a.m. and then fairly consistently throughout the day I?ll be away from my desk deciding the fate of the world? of Warcraft (or Diablo or StarCraft). We?ve completed most of our high level strategy meetings for 2012, and now a lot of our time is focused on executions of individual projects, tracking metrics and successes of various programs and department efforts, and sharing progress on tackling future goals.
This meeting is specifically to go over metrics for social media and our blogs to see what?s popular, what isn?t, what people are saying about our games, and how we can use all of these things to try to focus future efforts to do more of what people like and less of what they don?t. It's not rocket science.
This meeting we're covering post-BlizzCon forum activity drop-off, and a return to statistical normalcy after the huge influx of activity that surrounded the event. Using the info we can go into a meeting later in the day to help determine some of the content we're going to be generating over the next few months.
12:30pm
After a few meetings out of the way it's probably time for lunch, but I tend to forget to eat or think about how I will procure myself sustenance. While I was in meetings I've racked up 75 or so emails, which I go through pretty quickly, responding when necessary to offer my sage advice.
Managing to peek at the forums I'm able to knock a few replies out. I dearly enjoy interacting with people on the forums, and I get so little time to do so. I've found recently that I can get some of that same sense of enjoyment from Twitter (you can follow me @Bashiok if you?ll forgive the shameless plug), and being easily accessible from a phone or tablet, it's far easier to work into my schedule.
1:30pm
I tricked someone into getting me lunch. Most of the team rarely eats lunch away from their desks. I feel like it's an awful habit and one I should try to break from more often, but there's a lot to get done. I'm sure there's some study I can reference about how spending a lunch break away from work increases productivity when you return, but nevertheless there I sit, working while I eat. It also offers me some privacy as I'm convinced I constantly have food smeared throughout my beard.
1:45pm
I get an instant message from Greg asking about the upcoming Mists of Pandaria talent calculators and how we may want to handle feedback. We go back and forth on concerns over how relevant the feedback will be (and the work that goes into collecting it) when they are likely to change so much before release. We ultimately decide it's probably worth the effort to make class-specific talent feedback threads, but it all hinges on when those threads make it to the website.
We also begin collecting questions for the Diablo III design meeting tomorrow. While we're constantly emailing and chatting with the developers, we also have dedicated weekly meeting time set aside to go through community-submitted questions and to get a sense of how the players are feeling. Answers are great, but getting the devs? candid take on design and the game allows us to actually converse with the community, and not just copy and paste answers.
3:00pm
The latest Dev Watercooler returns from its editorial review and is ready to go. As I said earlier, a big part of our time these days is spent generating content for the website. This isn't one of those times. Greg does a great job writing these up and they undergo minimal edits. Also, because we already have the image assets set, there's not much left to do at this point but coordinate a global posting time with our international community manager counterparts, and then prepare the article for publishing.
Global coordination is a big point we strive to hit with all of our information releases. That means localizing and simultaneously posting as many articles on our sites in each region and in each language as possible. With 12 languages to support it's no small feat.
We draft the articles using an internal content management system (CMS) that helps make publishing to the website, game launcher, and even in-game news for StarCraft II, super easy. This is good because, being writers and community managers, most of us only have basic knowledge of HTML. It's the web team that makes the entire site, updates the individual site sections, and creates awesome features like talent calculators or item databases, as well as the CMS and its upkeep. To us it's just a few big shiny buttons, which is about all we're able to handle.
5:00pm
There was another meeting in that time gap somewhere, but it was boring. Now is our Content Team meeting, and today we're specifically brainstorming article ideas for Diablo III and Blizzard DOTA. Normally this meeting would also encompass going over individual tasks as well as forum posts each person has made in the last week, or articles we've published. We really need to focus on getting out content for these two games because our players are excited about what we unveiled at BlizzCon. After jamming on some ideas, we take cell phone shots of the white board, someone types up the notes, and what we came up with will be assigned out as tasks by our project management team, who help keep us crazy creative types on track. Joking aside, we would be utterly lost without them.
6:00pm
Once that meeting is over, I take a trip to pick up some games from the campus library. We have a really awesome employee library, staffed by our own librarian (!). It's full of game development books, work and performance guidance, manuals, and video tutorials, but more importantly, it?s also well stocked with movies and games. I've just checked out Dark Souls, which is going to severely conflict with my upcoming Skyrim play time.
6:30pm
Back to my tasks! It's time to bust out a post or two. I have a few easy ones assigned to me, including a reminder for the community to enter our Facebook Diablo III beta key drawing and a quick update to last year's "PvP Season 9 is Ending" announcement to make it applicable to 4.3. I get those drafts out for approvals and update my tasks list.
7:30pm
We like to play music in our little area and recently have been hooked on music from the 1930s, as well as something called "Exotica" (check it out). Tonight, I've decided to load up an Anita Baker station on Pandora. After grooving to the smooth and sultry sounds of "Sweet Love," I look at the clock and grumble. It's all good, though, and I get to go through the Diableards inbox. It?s one of my great pleasures to look through community submissions like these, and a gift that keeps on giving because I never seem to be able to make a dent in it. I look through emails and their attached images and copy those I approve (edited photos and goatees don't count!) into a folder. Later they'll be uploaded to Facebook in a gallery, and a few entries I've personally selected will be published individually over the next week or so. Publishing some pictures individually like this helps spotlight those I find particularly hilarious or awesome.
8:00pm
I grumble at how late it is, but manage to get myself caught up in some twittering and forum posting for a few minutes before heading out for the night. The rest of my night is inevitably spent sneaking looks at my inbox, checking the forums, or otherwise staying attached to a job career I've had for eight years. I do this not because I have to, but because I care where the company is going, how we're making the games we're making, being a part of the process. Because I care what our players think. I find that to be true of everyone at Blizzard, and it?s why I'm happy to have this opportunity to provide a brief (and poorly written) glimpse into one of my days. I hope you enjoyed it.
Posted from WoW Vault
R version, Bashiok attempting to feed his ego