Collaborate or Die

There may be times when you should consider looking to your brand ambassadors for help with a time-consuming aspect of your company’s operations. One effective model: recruiting your user base as moderators for a forum. Not only is it good business; it can also be a great user experience for participants as well as observers.

Of course, Slashdot is the pioneer in involving its user base on a meaningful level, enhancing its credibility to a demanding audience. In that spirit, a video game company, Riot Games, recently took a novel approach to the users-as-moderators concept. The company’s primary game, League of Legends, unveiled a plan that looks to its player base to help resolve a particularly troublesome public-facing area: player disputes.

Riot Games is calling this plan ‘The Tribunal’ and will offer the highest-level players a chance to mediate player disputes. You can visit the League of Legends forum to read the specific details of the plan.

To summarize ‘The Tribunal’ specifics, League of Legends follows basic concepts for involving your user base with a public-facing aspect of your company:

• Offer contributing players a reward. (With The Tribunal, in-game currency is awarded to judging players).

• Be transparent (player judges are given all information related to a dispute: full chat transcript in the reported game, and other statistics on the reported player). Click on the image below to see the intuitive layout of the information judges receive when reviewing a case. (If only some US corporations were run this well!)

• Be unbiased (cases are assigned randomly, the reported player will not know who is judging the case, and one judge will not know the other judges of a case)

Riot Games has shown that recruiting your user base to help company operations can enhance your brand. We recommend looking to your brand ambassadors or more active members of your online presence community to help mediate public-facing areas.