DECODING 20 YEARS OF
COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT A
By James Gallagher, Studio Head of Waste Creative, a Keywords Studio & Community Management, at Keywords Studios
community role didn’t seem sustainable in 2006, but someone hired me to write
blog posts and manage chat forums. The industry emerged, and social media swallowed the world. Brands took building fandoms seriously, and agencies sharpened the craft. Community Manager became a job title you no longer had to explain. Twenty years on, I’ve had a front-
row seat to most of it, from opening the EU PlayStation Blog at Sony to the Grand Theft Auto V launch at Rockstar Games and now running community and social at Keywords Studios. A major learning is that cultivating a sense of community gets
harder the bigger the brand gets. A solo developer with 200 fans has a tighter community than a publisher with 200 million customers. It takes a talented team and a lot of care to preserve that at scale. I can only attempt my 20 years through phases. How I think about
community today is the distillation of the below, which are parts that still serve us and brand well. The Sub-Culture Phase (2006–2008): The Internet was still a frontier. Fans set the tone long before brands, with the explosion of gaming forums and guilds. Brands got on board to support players and reduce reliance on expensive call centres. The Fellow Kids Phase (2008–2012): The age of social began, and brands sought to appropriate how customers used these new
platforms. To quote a former colleague back then: “We need to learn how to talk to customers like they’re friends.” Facebook launched, meaning everyone had a presence, but no clue what to do with it. The dream was an audience of millions loving you back. The Big Data Phase (2012–2018): Analytics advanced, and numbers were important. Followers, Reach,
and Engagement Rate became the language of every marketing deck. Community finally hit the boardroom, but we measured what was easy, not what was real, and drifted toward a content shop with vanity metrics. Social as Entertainment (2018–2024): We broke from the idea that social exists to broadcast factual information. Scrolling is the new channel surfing. Anyone doing 2014-era social at 2026 production values is behind, and audiences notice. Entertaining people isn’t being in community with them. Plenty of brands still muddle those two. The Fandom Ecosystem (2024 - Present): Community doesn’t only live on owned channels, and earned spaces matter. The Discords you didn’t make, the subreddits you don’t moderate, the group chats you’ll never see. Most brands find this challenging as it asks them to invest in conversations they can’t control. The solution is to treat the communities not as isolated channels,
but as a network of spaces that serve the fan experience in a specific way. TikTok and YouTube create awareness, X connects people to the brand, and Discord and Reddit allow fans to connect with each other through their love of your brand. Focusing on participation rather than
reach makes commercial sense, too. Generative search increasingly answers buyer questions by summarising public discourse, so what fans say about you in earned spaces feeds straight into demand.
James Gallagher has been managing online communities professionally for 20 years, formerly in-house at Sony, Rockstar Games, and Techland. His parents still think he works in IT.
May/June 2026 MCV/DEVELOP | 43
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