I’m pleased to announce that I have accepted a new position at ArenaNet as the Content Marketing Team Lead.
What does content marketing involve? Content marketing is about creating and curating engaging and relevant content for our fans. This can be achieved through social media channels like Twitter and Tumblr, live broadcasts on Twitch, live events/conventions, the website, and more.
While the title is new, I’ve been in the business of social media and community-focused content marketing at ArenaNet for years. When I started working at ArenaNet in 2008, one of my desires was to bring its fan-facing presence into the modern era of community engagement. I wanted to get ArenaNet involved in the conversations about Guild Wars 2 happening in rapidly growing, emerging social media spaces. I made business cases for and launched ArenaNet’s Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube channels for the studio and for Guild Wars 2. Since then, I have helped drive strategy for the company’s subsequent forays into social media. Our Global Community Team, located both in the US and Europe, has accomplished a lot through hard work and creativity. Through social media, we have reached beyond the core fans that traditional, first-party forum-based, old school community management was concerned with, to include fans further afield. Communities have and will always exist outside official forums, and videogame community management as a profession has been expanding its area of practice and interest to the world outside the first-party forum. From that perspective, social media and content marketing are expansions of the community management discipline.
Among my favorite personal milestones in community-focused content marketing includes building, from the ground up and through daily engagement with fans, the community on the Guild Wars 2 Facebook page. I guided its early growth and developed its cultural atmosphere, and I helped shape one of the most friendly Facebook communities for a videogame out there. Years later, our Facebook community is over 1 million fans strong, with loads of active, engaged, and welcoming members. I fondly remember meeting some of them at conventions, discussing the group and how we could make it better. I introduced them to developers so they could give feedback about the game directly to those working on it. Creating these connections with our community is part of what community management, social media, and community-focused content marketing are all about.
Another favorite milestone is developing the strategy for and spearheading the launch of the Guild Wars 2 Tumblr site, one of the best places to find Guild Wars 2 fan-created works. As a long time Tumblr user (since 2007), I was thrilled to bring Guild Wars 2 to a social platform that has experienced tremendous growth as a home for all sorts of fandom communities, including Guild Wars 2. Launched this year, our Tumblr site is a hub for showcasing the amazing talent and imagination of our fans and it enables them to connect with Guild Wars 2 through a shared passion manifested in creative works. I manage our Tumblr site day-to-day, and I’m constantly amazed at how creative our community is.
Because my new role is more of a strategic one, and one that is focused on social media and our other content marketing channels, I’ll be less active on the official forums. My team will be keeping up the great work we’ve been doing in social media and our livestreams and I look forward to the challenges and projects that lay ahead for us.