Play With Your Audience: Enhancing Your Social Strategy Through Theater

[Music] thank you welcome to uh play with your audience enhancing your social strategy through theater um to get things started hi I'm Catherine so I'm uh the community I'm a community manager with five years experience currently the communications manager at Armor game studios so we've worked on games like beer and breakfast which I will talk about a bit later and then stars and time and lots of other really cool indie games um I've previously worked for tilting point and Paradox interactive at a bunch of other companies and stuff working on games and I'm just excited to be here so as a quick overview of what this talk is about so we're going to be talking about brand voice a lot and how it kind of relates to theater and acting techniques uh just some acting Basics to kind of help frame what we're talking about for the rest of the talk um breaking down what makes a character and examples of these principles in

practice so this also includes like a very brief fresh perspective again on how we approach this on Berry breakfast so I I refer I regret to inform you that I'm a theater kid so um let me see so if you look at this bottom the bottom left one that's me playing a talking wall in a High School production of A Midsummer Night's Dream that's right you get a rare high school photo of me and then this one which is single-handedly the best photo anyone's ever taken of me is me playing as the player with fire in a community theater production of Pippin back in 2019 uh that character is really fun they they they're just a thespian who runs around on stage with a torch that they're supposed to bring out during the show's finale except they keep bringing it out at the wrong time um and this one at the right is actually a much more recent photo of me so at the end of 2022 I ended up joining an improv group through mofco improv theater in Upstate New York um so this is a photo of me from um a

Showcase of a class that I was taking there right before I actually auditioned for my current group um I had never done improv before doing mopco but I played a lot of d d during the pandemic which is basically improv with numbers so I mean it was a pretty natural fit for me um and needless to say theater's always been a very big part of my life in some way acting brings me the joy of getting to explore the world through another person's eyes constantly showing me new and exciting ways to express myself it's also brought me a lot of skills that have been very useful in my career which is the reason that I'm here talking to you today see the more theater I do the more I realize that social media management is more than just a tool to spread the word about your game at the end of the day a brand voice is really just a character where writing in a voice crafted to resonate with our audience using particular writing Forks to convey personality and engage with our players in a much more approachable way especially as seen in how many Indie

developers run their own accounts players generally respond well when they feel like they're being talked to by a real person rather than some vague corporate entity playing a character accomplishes that same mental satisfaction for our followers since injecting personality into an account kind of reads as more personable and less sterile you can kind of see like the overlap here with a you got brand voice on the the left side and uh character performed by an actor and a piece of media on the the right side and that big intersection right there is just it's an engaging personality that has the potential to really connect with an audience so naturally games with a focus on characters really Excel with this kind of technique especially if they have a mascot character like again in the case of bear and breakfast you could also apply this to a more General Studio account so like aggro crab is a really good example because they use this very fittingly bold and Brash brand voice um but I think this approach is more

appropriate for the types of titles that I've listed here since these kinds of games already give you subjects to build your brand voice around so on that note the strategy does really work well with account uh work best with accounts for specific games or franchises so unless you have a studio mascot again in the case of aggro crab whose mascot is a crab with a knife it can be difficult to find one Universal Character voice that appeals to many different types of audiences that you're trying to cater to when you focus on one game or franchise you have more control over who you are trying to appeal to so picking a brand voice to build your following around is a bit easier and it's more effective so we at Armor like to let our games have separate accounts since um it gives each game and Dev team more of that individual focus and care that they just uh they all deserve so naturally this is a bit easier for a company like ours to work into our strategies foreign

I'm not an actor what makes you think I can do this too wow I'm glad you asked funny cartoon sewer rat there's something I learned not too long ago that might make this method seem a bit more approachable everyone has a thousand characters inside of them I took a character improv class back in December and one of the first things our instructor Michael Burns taught us is that we play characters every single day we're a different character when we talk to friends uh order food at a restaurant hell I'm playing a character right now talking to you uh by approaching acting with this perspective in mind suddenly character driven social media management doesn't seem as intimidating right so let me try to break this down step by step when playing a character there's a few things you want to keep in mind so a really big one what are the core pillars of their personality are they funny are

they serious are they annoyed starting with these traits can help you understand what's going on in their head at any given time so that then brings me to the second point which is how do they present themselves to others are they loud do they ramble would they come off the people as obnoxious or in your face reference those personality pillars I just mentioned as you consider these things and then the third one what kind of audience is this character speaking to this is a great time to reference your marketing plan for the game if you have one so this can help you understand better how a character might speak to its audience but I'll get into that a bit more as I talk about uh bearing breakfast again later this is honestly a process you might even want to consult your devs or narrative team on if you're able they'll probably be able to give more pointed insights into all of these points and even more points than that so once you've zeroed in on who this

character is figure out how that reflects in the way that they write do they write like a teenager texting their friend with Emojis and modern day slang are they a traditional and overly dramatic creative type who speaks in Shakespearean English personality and writing quirks need to coexist with each other in order to push the character that you are playing further spend time workshopping this with your team write your own examples or pull dialogue from the game to help guide your writing and this brings me to our long-awaited first example bear and breakfast we're going to talk about my good friend Hank here he's the he's the the little the bear over here he's doing a great job so when I started to work on bear and breakfast in April 2021 after I joined Armor Games the brand Voice Direction I listed on this slide was given to me by Rara santessa uh the game director from gummy cat who's actually sitting over here one of the big things that rarish mentioned to me was that the account was Loosely run in the voice of Hank the

bear so this made a lot of sense given that he was the titular bear on Fair and breakfast and on top of that he has this very warm and lacks personality that comes across as very Charming in the game itself Hank is a casual bear and talking in a voice like his made that account much more approachable to the audience the game was trying to Target people who love goofy cozy games like bear and breakfast this is also part of why that we made sure to make sure we didn't go too unhinged with the content that we posted so ship posting is fun and engaging in moderation but it felt off-brand to make that Hank's entire identity he's a cuddly bear they needed to be a balance you know between the curse and the wholesome uh to complement his personality better so if you're coming from the publishing side of things like I am it's really courteous to involve the developers in the brand voice development process in some way I mean they know their characters more than better than anybody else really so if

you're role-playing as someone from their game ask them some of those character breakdown questions that I had mentioned before Oh and uh don't be afraid to reach out to them if you need answers to more specific questions like do they have a favorite breakfast Hanks is eggs florentine by the way so if there's anything you need to know about acting it's these two things right here they're some of the first things that you learned when you get into any kind of performance really and they're arguably the most important tools of The Craft so when you uh the first one would be commit to the bit when you commit to the bit you Embrace what you've established you don't chicken out on it you don't break character whatever gag you start with you see till the very end that being said it's both okay and encouraged to break character when you need to communicate situations that involve more serious topics anything from a game sun setting to a global tragedy we don't want to diminish the severity of events like those and really should communicate those with care

and then the second rule which you've probably heard of before yes and yes and requires you to listen to your scene partner so in this case your followers if someone establishes something finds an appropriate way to respond that furthers that narrative in improv we call these establishing points gifts so something another performer offers you that you can build off of this rule is very particularly applicable to reactive posting so let me give you an example if you're running the account from the perspective of a cat here we go we got a real actual cat up here and someone makes a joke about how you must like yarn you don't respond with something like no I wouldn't do that you build off of that response in a way that's appropriate for the setup that you've been given and the character that you are playing the first example sounds very harsh and flat it shuts down the discussion pretty immediately and uh as a result it's not

very engaging but in the second example which you will see here with another rat uh in the second example the cat took that opportunity to respond in a more natural and conversational way yes and so here's kind of how we did this on the baron breakfast account I I think one of the most fun things I did in my time working on this game was when I decided to host a small AMA on our Twitter as Hank the bear so going back to some of those improv and acting tips I gave before I let my players offer me little gifts in the form of questions and I responded to some of them uh as a little gift to our players in return rourish even gave me some guidance to uh for answering certain questions like again with the breakfast question on the slide here as I mentioned before uh Hank really likes eggs florentine uh this additionally gave you the chance to drop some bite-sized Hank the barrel lore you could only get by finding uh following us on Twitter and this AMA also let me give more

playful answers that honor the personality traits that I had mentioned previously I still left thinking back on the Wi-Fi question I honestly hadn't considered that if Hank's running this account uh Silver Valley where the the game takes place despite being relatively human-less at the start of the game also probably at least had cell service and another fun note I want to make while I'm at it interestingly enough you could actually tell when it was virus tweeting versus when I was tweeting based on little quirks in our writing styles while approaching uh this content so for example um if you look here uh rarish used capitalization of certain keywords where I tended to stick to more hardcore all lowercase in most cases because we approached the account with the same understanding of Hank and mine though people generally didn't notice the discrepancies having conversations with your social media team and documenting

your strategy help a lot with keeping things as consistent as possible and this goes back to that commit the bit rule that I had mentioned before or commit to the bit rule I mentioned before so when posting remember all those personality pillars that you identified When developing your social media plan if multiple people are going to be running the same one account make sure everybody is on the same page before anybody starts posting and you know what while we're at it I'm going to use one of these examples to segue in to help Ram play like this can be difficult in cases where it's push more serious comes as I had mentioned earlier originally to fit the tone of this account I had made the announcement sound a bit goofier so kind of like Hank was relaying advice to him given by a sleazy possum Named Gus um and after some feedback from rarish the goofiness of the copy was pulled back just a bit so that the message wouldn't accidentally come across as a joke in the process while I love this method the the whole like character-driven social media management method that I'm talking about today this

is one really big downside of it that you have to keep in mind to emphasize messages like the one above you need to change how you communicate or break character entirety so that the levity of the or the seriousness of the situation is conveyed appropriately so now we get into the all-important question is this working so you would go about testing this strategy similarly to how you test any social media campaign are you seeing Improvement in your engagement rate and follower counts is your growth consistent for example uh is your performance across the board improving rather than just one or two posts going viral data is the most reliable way to measure progress here if you're not seeing the results that you want consider experimenting with a different character's voice Hank's probably worked really well for us on bearing breakfast likely because he is friendly and he's approachable plus being a small bearersness owner he's also by Nature hospitable and helpful both of which are valuable qualities for someone posting as the face of a brand

uh so if Hank were more obnoxious or greeting our audience might not have received them as warmly there's definitely a case to be made for running accounts in the voice of secondary characters though which I'll get into a little bit later with one of my examples now we got some cool bear stats tmtmtm um to uh show that our strategy actually paid off in the end I took a look at our Agora pulse data and wanted to share some numbers with you to illustrate how this worked for us so on August 1st which was roughly a year before we launched bearing breakfast the Twitter had about 11 000 followers we launched on August 28 2022 and that number had grown to 25k and by the end of the month we were at 27k followers which is a total of like 143 increase and not only that people started engaging more with their content over time leading to an almost 327 increasing of engagements on the baron breakfast Twitter some of our best engaged tweets were the ones where

Waris and I used our brand voice to keep things fresh and keep things fun as you can see with the stats on the tweets for the slide when you play with your players they play with you back and I'd love to Pivot a little bit to another example I'd like to spend some time discussing some accounts that have also handled this approach well and to do that we need to start talking about Toby Fox for this example so Toby fox really understood this kind of approach to its core when writing the script for undertale in deltarune many of the game's characters talk with very specific quirks that reflect their backgrounds and personality the first screenshot features the uh deltarune antagonist Queen over here so she's a chaotic being of the internet who naturally speaks in a robotic manner to reflect this she speaks every word as if it were capitalized and none of her sentences are properly punctuated the second one over here features Sans the skeleton who's a laid-back guy who likes cracking jokes and making his brother happy therefore it made perfect

sense to write all of his dialogue in all lowercase and with minimal exclamation points to drive these Vibes home and the third one down here is Sans brother the exciting and lovable Papyrus he's a beacon of Joy who cares deeply about his passions and his friends and isn't afraid to show it naturally he speaks in all caps and unlike his brother he's much more likely to use exclamation points to emphasize how he's feeling Toby fox really committed to their writing quirks and knew his characters well enough to understand how they would interact with the world and the characters around them which helped breed life into the worlds of these games so why do I bring this up let's talk about uh a fun example here we're going to talk about the spampton sweepstakes in 2022 fangamer brought us the spampton sweepstakes and off the walls charity event in honor of undertale 7th anniversary if you haven't played uh chapter 2 of The Game's successor deltarune spampton is a funny little guy you meet in this strange cybernetic

world he pops out of a dumpster and he screams a strange business at you before he engages you in combat Spanton gives off The Vibes of a late 90s early 2000s pop-up ad his energy is completely unhinged and suspicious he's a virus on a mission to make you a big shot with with his life-changing offer and to hammer this home Toby had him speak in all caps with a lot of exclamation points when he does speak in normal writing it's bookended with brackets and presented as if it were lifted from another advertisement or web page his dialogue even sometimes inserts symbols and numbers into regular words as if he's glitching out this guy oozes personality and very quickly became a fan favorite so when it came time to celebrate undertale's seventh anniversary fangamer had an idea what if we made an entire sweepstakes around this weirdo the spamfton sweepstakes charity campaign ran in September 2022 and put spamped in front and center featuring spampton themed giveaway items an ongoing donation battle to see if uh spam can could earn

his freedom uh a whole live stream and yes uh spampton social media take over so for two days the fan gamer account spoke almost exclusively in spampton's signature voice emulating his dialogue quirks to a t it was bold it was exciting it was hyperlink blocked and it worked according to socialblade fandom uh fan Gamer's Twitter account grew by over 11 000 followers between September 16th which was the days before the sweepstakes happened and September 24th which is a pretty notable Spike uh compared to their typical growth if you look into it so the larger marketing campaign also raised like 322 thousand dollars for Child's Play which kind of rocks and to get into a more serious example in case you want to try this out for like a horror game or something um the first thing that comes to mind to me in this case is the account of the faceless protagonist Daisy Brown so see Daisy's not a real person but she was

the main character of a surreal horror web series of the same name her channel is a series of Vlogs highlighting her everyday life living alone in her father's house with a strange science experiment named Alan because her father isolated her from the outside world she was awkward and struggles with understanding people and her choppy writing Cadence reflected that she interacted with her followers with curiosity and kindness in spite of the horrors that she was dealing with in her day-to-day life as the Channel's narrative expanded Daisy wasn't afraid to update her fans on how she was doing her Twitter became an extension of the channel itself and kept viewers engaged in between releases at times it was jarring to watch her go from I just painted Alan's nails to Alan ripped all my hair out as Alan Gruen became more dangerous her fear became tangible and those juxtaposed moments just became all the more unsettling it was a masterfully handled compliment to the source material and even updated

alongside it all the way until the project scripping finale so as you can see above the account garnered a lot of followers over the years that the project ran for and some of the last tweets the account made had very high engagement rates like I was estimating 10 to 18 percent High uh for comparison according to what 2021 report on statista the median engagement rate for a brand account across Industries is somewhere around 0.04 per tweet and this tactic can also be applied to other platforms as well so for example the team at extremely okay games ran an account entirely from the perspective of Theo from their hit platformer Celeste so since Instagram is much more image forward all of Theo's posts were kind of original illustrations made just for the account as like day-to-day photos that he took this account allowed the team to engage their players by adding A New Perspective to celeste's narrative

before during and after the events of the game plus the way they handled this allowed them to make an immersive experience which played to the uh platform's strength which is highlighting engaging visual content and engaging it was for example using current publicly available data for this account I found that this specific post over here uh had a an estimated engagement rate of about 12 percent and again for comparison the average engagement rate on Instagram in 2022 according to sprout social was just under one percent foreign things up what earned today so we learned that character-driven brand voices Can Be an Effective tool for engaging with your players in an approachable and fun way acting is not scary we do it all the time in our day-to-day life and you can do it too on your brand accounts understand what breeds life into your character and find ways to reflect that in the way you craft your copy commit to the bit whatever you decide

for your brand voice honor it and lastly yes and to create fun opportunities for interacting with your followers thank you all does anyone have any questions [Applause] uh there's a mic up there if anyone wants to ask anything yeah you just walk up to the mic so my question is and you actually got around to it at the end of your talk because you started talking about what um this looks like on other platforms do you have any examples of what you would do on say let's maybe Tick Tock or Facebook as an example that's a great question I mean the good thing about Tick Tock is because it's a video

platform you can actually do more acting so whether that's like you have someone from your team for example dressing up as a character and like running the account from their perspective or you work with your art team and you put some kind of like visual content together that kind of fits into that I think there's definitely ways you can play into that just takes a little bit of creative thinking and more practical applications of acting yeah so um is that why you went uh with Twitter rather is it because it's easier to do based on like your team or bandwidth or why Twitter compared to tick tock also um I mean Tick Tock something that we talked about but like uh Twitter it's a much easier platform to produce content for obviously uh it's a little bit more focused on organic engagement so it's a little bit easier to kind of reach the people that you're trying to reach um personally I feel like the thank you five uh I feel like the um the tech like the the limits on how long

tweets can be also lead to some pretty interesting creative risk uh restrictions that make you think a little bit more outside the box about how you post stuff there's a lot of benefits to different things though um really it's just about figuring out what works best for your game at the end of the day okay thank you yeah of course hi thank you so much for the talk um my question is specifically about what how do you handle needing to break character occasionally for example if there's like a more serious brand announcement or something that isn't necessarily you know playful in nature in the way the rest of the in character work would be like how do you recommend navigating that because that could be jarring for an audience as well yeah I mean the first thing you have to do is admit the severity of the situation to yourself because once you identify that then you know like I have to really be careful with how I talk about this um and then you just have to sit there and make sure that the way you're it's kind of like the same as communicating

any kind of serious Communications it's like sitting there making sure am I Can Am I communicating this effectively am I um honoring the situation as it is um is this respectful to the audience that we're conveying this to and stuff so it kind of the way you would handle it I guess normally but I think at the end of the day it's making sure you personally before you go and start writing the Tweet understand why this needs to be handled differently that makes sense thank you so much yeah no problem I appreciate the approach um thank you I make puzzle games so they're very non-character based I'm wondering if you've ever worked on a project where the the game is much less narrative but you're trying to present the face of whatever it is with a personality and what kind of perspective you might have on them yeah I mean I don't have much experience with that kind of uh working

on those kinds of projects from the social media side of stuff but I mean something you could do is like you could always make up a character if you wanted to and be like this is like someone who represents the game if there's some like element of like you know some like vague Overseer in the game is like presiding over the puzzle game that you're playing and stuff you could always like frame it from that perspective I guess thank you yeah of course do you have any other questions all right thank you all so much please remember to fill out your evaluations at the end of the stock [Applause] [Music]