Influencer Management
Streamers, moderators, & drops... oh my!
Building Long-Lasting Stream Teams
Back in 2018, I was charged with the monumental task of building out a stream team for the official SmiteGame Twitch channel that was capable of producing content every day of the week, 18 to 24 hours a day. I'd never run an influencer team before -- but there's a first time for everything, so I got to work.
Over time, I recruited a team of about 10 streamers and created pipelines for scheduling, shift switching, invoicing, and technical assistance that allowed the team to operate 24 hours a day with very little hands-on involvement. Over time, the team grew to over 20 people and included streamers from all backgrounds -- POC, LGBTQ+, V-tubers, and more! Soon enough, I had more than just a stream team on my hands. I had an incredibly valuable marketing vehicle that ensured we always had a trove of influencers at our disposal for any major promotional campaigns.
The program also allowed smaller, brand-friendly streamers to become front-and-center advocates for the community. They were able to use our stream team program to build their personal brands. So while we kept our main channel active with engaging content and generated ad revenue from those streams, we were also building up the next generation of streaming superstars for our game -- ensuring that the Twitch directory for SMITE would always have some familiar faces.
Here are some Q&D metrics on how the SMITE stream team performed:
21.7 million hours watched from 2019-2022
1,451 average viewers per stream
~$275,000 in ad revenue generated from 2019-2022
Eventually, I also took on influencer team management for other titles at our studio, including Paladins and Rogue Company, and implemented similar policies that helped build up a new wave of talent while generating a fresh content & revenue for our studio.
Stream Drops
Most folks don't know this, but SMITE was the driving force behind the creation of the stream drops system on Mixer. After we signed an exclusivity contract with the Mixer team, our first major engagement initiative was to get drops working on the platform so we could better incentivize our users to make the switch from Twitch. And I was the stubborn CM charged with pushing that difficult project over the finish line with the Mixer team.
Following about 9 months of extensive work with our development team, our operations team, and Mixer's engineering team, we finally launched a fully functional drops campaign. In the immediate weeks following that release, our viewership went up about 300%.
After our Mixer contract ended and we transitioned back over to Twitch, I also worked with our game team to oversee the implementation of the Viewer Points store -- a Twitch drop ecosystem that awarded users with Viewer Points currency based on how much time they spent watching our channel. They were then able to spend that currency on an in-game store with unique items and stretch goals that incentivized long-term viewership. Thanks in part to these Viewer Point drops and the consistent presence of our stream team, our main channel stayed consistently at the top of the SMITE directory on Twitch. Later, when we rolled these drops out to all creators in our category, we saw a pleasing boost in viewership for content creators across the board.
In addition to our VP economy, I also helped design drop campaigns to engage users around many of our major marketing beats, including multi-day campaigns and quest-style campaigns that encouraged users to tune in over extended periods of time to earn all available drops. In one of our most successful drop campaigns to date, over 99k unique users claimed more than 123k drops over the course of a single week.
Managing Moderation Teams
Mods are the vanguard of stream chats. Twitch would be an absolute dumpster fire without them.
When I began managing the SMITE esports community in 2017, we had no dedicated moderators to help us with our stream -- only a few staff and some miscellaneous streamers who were granted a sword. Building a proper mod team was one of the first things I did to start turning the tide of community sentiment.
After recruiting a few dedicated community members to moderate for us, I identified an excellent lead moderator to serve as my right hand. Together, we recruited more moderators until we had a team of 16 people who were capable of moderating in multiple languages. As time went on, we slowly evolved our chat rules in hopes of making our streams a more friendly, welcoming, and inclusive place. It didn't happen overnight, but eventually we started to see a major culture shift in our stream chats. Toxicity became less tolerated, fans could have actual conversations, and only quality pasta got reposted in the chat.
This moderation team was also an integral part of our crisis management pipeline. When an issue arose that required immediate community messaging, I would draft messaging that moderators could use in response to fans, and they would be our boots-on-the-ground respondents in Twitch chat while our community managers handled other channels.
