Play With Your Audience: Enhancing Your Social Strategy Through Theater
What is a brand voice if not a character created to market your game? Believe it or not, social media management and acting have more in common than one would think. In this talk, attendees will learn how to incorporate techniques used by performers to better connect with their communities and organically improve brand awareness for the accounts they work on. This more playful approach to communications aims to provide a perspective that makes content as fun for players to enjoy as it is for social media managers to create.
This talk was presented in the Community Management Summit at GDC 2023 and is currently free to watch on the GDC Vault.
Everything I Learned About Community Management I Learned From Neopets
In this GDC 2022 Main Conference talk, I spoke about the many ways Neopets’ community strategy influenced me as a professional years before I even know what community management was and how you can adapt their tactics to fit your game’s strategy.
This talk is currently paywalled on the GDC Vault, but if you have a subscription, you can watch it on the site.
GOOD NIGHT mr.coconut: The Rise and Fall of Neopets
As many of my industry colleagues already know, I am strangely obsessed with popular early 2000’s web game Neopets. When I first presented this talk at Genericon 2019, I had to do tons of independently-guided research into the history of the website itself, how it correlates with events in the game itself, and how everything evolved over time.
On September 12, 2020, I ran an updated version of this talk for PAX Online, where it was the first panel aired on twitch.tv/pax3 for the event. Attendees responded to “GOOD NIGHT mr.coconut” with overwhelming praise, and at its peak, the talk had over 500 concurrent viewers when it aired.
(NOTE: Skip ahead to 0:18 for the start of my talk!)
It Takes a Village: How to Build a Community Following for Your Game
For Play NYC 2020, I was invited to sit on a community management panel with some fellow indie game colleagues. We discussed strategies for other small studios trying to build up their fan bases, learnings from our past successes and failures, and more. “It Takes a Village” was moderated by Jenny Windom, and the other panelists were Victoria Tran and Emily Grimaldi.
Keeping it Together: Self-Care in the Age of the Internet
Keeping it Together was a PAX East 2020 panel of community managers talking about their experiences taking care of their mental health on the internet. I pitched, organized, and moderated this panel myself and was joined by my awesome industry colleagues Rim Abou-Jawde, Bianca Ciotti, Caitlin Sales, and Caroline Liddick.
From Glitter Graphics to Game Dev
Right before PAX East 2020, I was invited by my then-coworker Justine Raymond to moderate another panel at the event. From Glitter Graphics to Game Dev involved women in the games industry discussing how influential early 2000’s gaming sites like Neopets and Gaia Online were to eventually pursuing their careers. In addition to Justine, I was joined by Victoria Tran, Anya Combs, Ashley Alicea, and Kells Tate.