Dear Social Media

10/28/2014 10:40 AMPosted by Ghettobear

You stink! Twitter sucks and facebook sucks.. Why use those and register it's just so much waste of time.. Why not stay on the forums like a real company instead of re-directing people to another website that they don't wanna do?? Twitter sucks! Stay on the forums.. Downvote me thanks I could use the dislikes

I'm not sure why this point of contention always comes up. People drastically embellish this as though we have an either/or choice between social media and our forums. It's not either/or. It's about reaching people through as many channels as possible.

In terms of service announcements, it's also a lot easier and more direct in our messaging to tell people to check @BlizzardCS, than provide a URL for our Service Status forum, which in places like the game client breaking news section won't show as a hyperlink.

Edit to add: Note also that we often refer people to @BlizzardCS when our website is in maintenance mode, so hopefully the reason for doing that instead of linking you to a forum on our website is obvious.

We're not asking you to join a cult when we suggest that you simply look at https://twitter.com/BlizzardCS. There are updates there on service, and if you'd like to read them you don't need to join Twitter for that.

To learn more about this post follow me on Twitter @CM_Zarhym...

10/28/2014 12:58 PMPosted by Fairaday

https://twitter.com/Warcraft/status/527187237423689728

World of Warcraft ‏@Warcraft 20s20 seconds ago

[NA] We've extended realm maintenance to 4:00 p.m. PDT as we work to implement a new build of patch 6.0.3. Thanks for your patience.

;) I'm sure that tweet will rile some people up.

Also posted on the Realm Status forum.

10/28/2014 12:58 PMPosted by Neekliam

Maintenance has been extended and we expect realms to be playable again at 4:00 PM PDT.

10/28/2014 12:44 PMPosted by Shadow

...
I'm not sure why this point of contention always comes up. People drastically embellish this as though we have an either/or choice between social media and our forums. It's not either/or. It's about reaching people through as many channels as possible.

In terms of service announcements, it's also a lot easier and more direct in our messaging to tell people to check @BlizzardCS, than provide a URL for our Service Status forum, which in places like the game client breaking news section won't show as a hyperlink.

Edit to add: Note also that we often refer people to @BlizzardCS when our website is in maintenance mode, so hopefully the reason for doing that instead of linking you to a forum on our website is obvious.

We're not asking you to join a cult when we suggest that you simply look at https://twitter.com/BlizzardCS. There are updates there on service, and if you'd like to read them you don't need to join Twitter for that.

To learn more about this post follow me on Twitter @CM_Zarhym...

Just followed your link and get a giant message that says:

"Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!"

Yeah, twitter sucks and communication needs to be here on the forums.

For the record, that was a bug with our forums that caused the hyperlink to incorporate the period at the end of the sentence, not an issue with Twitter.

10/28/2014 12:46 PMPosted by Wudie

10/28/2014 12:38 PMPosted by Zarhym

We're not asking you to join a cult when we suggest that you simply look at https://twitter.com/BlizzardCS.

Lies; when I looked at that page I immediately donned robes, grabbed a tambourine and headed out to the nearest airport.

The tambourine is working as intended.

10/28/2014 12:48 PMPosted by Jazrozi

Your developers don't use one single twitter feed, they use their personal ones, and when this is the case it takes a few days for it to finally show up in the official Blizzard blogs. Props to your CS team for using a single feed. Now your developers need to follow suit. And there really should be one Blizzard feed for all, to be quite honest.

For the most part the forums are used and operated solely by the CM & CS teams. We've had a couple devs post on the forums in the past and several of them still do on PTR/Beta forums, but otherwise historically devs largely had no direct online communication with players. That is, until Twitter became more of a thing. Now employees have a little more flexibility to create personal, unofficial accounts through which they can communicate with the public.

This has objectively increased our level of online communication with the public in recent years, not the other way around.

If you want official WoW information from Blizzard, that's what this website is for. That's what @Warcraft and @BlizzardCS are for. If you want to get info more directly from individuals within the company, it's up to you to decide whether it's worth following those individuals on social media.

Our goal remains to release pertinent info we think all of our players should know through our official channels, and not on personal, individual channels.

10/28/2014 12:48 PMPosted by Jazrozi

The way your developers use twitter colors our perception of how Blizzard as a whole uses twitter. As I've said in this post, props to your CS team for keeping things consolidated, but it would be much nicer to have a one-for-all feed that automatically posts from all of your developers and representatives so that we don't have to go google-searching for all of our information.

I know you're asking for more, but if you want to see a single feed of tweets from individuals on the Warcraft team you can check this list: https://twitter.com/CM_Zarhym/lists/world-of-warcraft-team.

10/28/2014 12:54 PMPosted by Twidger

You should have enough sense to realize that your own website should be the primary means of communicating with your customers, and I'm sure you have at least one person over there capable of setting up a feed from your Twitter accounts to a forum post. Seriously, would it kill you to devote a couple hours of time to having a web person set up a feed to the forums? Just set up an Announcements forum with a bunch of locked subforums for each Blizz twitter account. Anyone that wants to respond to the feeds can simply click a link over to twitter, but the rest of us can at least read any information put out that way. Or any other implementation your web guys can think of. I'm sure they can come up with something even better.

It is inexcusable to EVER put information out on social media and not ALSO put it out on the company website.

It's not that simple. Not everyone working here who is capable of creating a social media account is considered an official Blizzard spokesperson. If you follow a Blizzard employee on Twitter you may get updates about their work that you consider relevant to your interests as a gamer, but you may also get info on what their favorite beer is, or what they had for dinner on a Saturday night. Employees shouldn't feel discouraged from engaging with the community, and being open about who they are and where they work.

That said, one of our goals is to better educate employees on what kinds of info they shouldn't be sharing on personal feeds. If it's important and/or new information that we think needs to be communicated to the playerbase at-large, we want to share that through official channels.

10/28/2014 01:02 PMPosted by Rygarius

10/28/2014 12:58 PMPosted by Fairaday

https://twitter.com/Warcraft/status/527187237423689728

World of Warcraft ‏@Warcraft 20s20 seconds ago

[NA] We've extended realm maintenance to 4:00 p.m. PDT as we work to implement a new build of patch 6.0.3. Thanks for your patience.

;) I'm sure that tweet will rile some people up.

Also posted on the Realm Status forum.

10/28/2014 12:58 PMPosted by Neekliam

Maintenance has been extended and we expect realms to be playable again at 4:00 PM PDT.

(Also the in-game and in-Battle.net desktop app Breaking News were updated with a new time before the tweet went out.)

10/28/2014 01:33 PMPosted by Cyndilou

10/28/2014 01:29 PMPosted by Zarhym

For the most part the forums are used and operated solely by the CM & CS teams. We've had a couple devs post on the forums in the past and several of them still do on PTR/Beta forums, but otherwise historically devs largely had no direct online communication with players. That is, until Twitter became more of a thing. Now employees have a little more flexibility to create personal, unofficial accounts through which they can communicate with the public.

"And the results of this is.....The Devs only get feedback from PART of the player base. No wonder they keep getting stuff wrong."

That is true regardless of the communication platform. What you describe isn't a symptom isolated to Twitter. We're virtually never communicating to, or hearing from, everyone. That's why we use a multitude of communication mediums and other methods to reach our audience and gather feedback.

10/28/2014 01:46 PMPosted by Enkki

1. Would you like to guess how far down I had to scroll to find some "meat" in the mish-mash that is contained in that feed? It's like searching for an oasis in the Gobi Desert without a map or prior knowledge.

It depends on what info you find relevant. That's going to be different for each individual in the community, of which there are quite a few.

10/28/2014 01:46 PMPosted by Enkki

2. So, you guys' PERSONAL twit accounts are the OFFICIAL communication channel for Blizzard Entertainment to stay in touch with its customers?

No. Personal feeds are not official company channels.

10/28/2014 01:46 PMPosted by Cresintin

=/ Your body! Why is it so hard to find?!

Have you checked Twitter?

Ugh... I know! I'm sorry! My post is so insulting.

10/28/2014 02:56 PMPosted by Nymph

10/28/2014 02:51 PMPosted by Zarhym

No. Personal feeds are not official company channels.

Maaaan... that would make me super nervous.

To be an employee aware of super secret stuff that millions of fans would love to be privy to - knowing that if I said too much I'd be in hot water with the company - maybe even fired.

I work in clinical development (testing of new pharmaceuticals) and I've had to sign papers stating I won't even tell my spouse what I'm working on.

Last thing my company would do is say "yeah, go ahead and tweet in your own name"

Thats really tempting fate if you ask me.

One tipsy tweet after a hard day at work and there goes the career.

I hear ya and I've had that concern myself as an employee. But the company approach to this topic isn't as cynical as you've implied in your posts in this thread. It's really about trying to come up with common sense solutions and policies for emergent technologies and communications platforms, so employees feel educated on proper usage.

10/28/2014 04:52 PMPosted by Snowfox

However I don't see blues really engaging the playerbase in threads either. I'll see some posts, sure. Maybe a reply or two.. but nothing actually engaging. If it gets a little hot, the thread gets pruned or locked.

I post when I can, and as a counterargument to the cynics, look for a forum thread with a known issue to post in first before posting it to Twitter. Forum posts outside of immediate Q&A on patch note/game functionality inevitably tends to deteriorate into a logical fallacy of there's a bigger problem that exists or why did I respond to X when there's another thread Y with 101 questions that I don't have answers for.