In our recent Breaking Ground webinar, our team sat down with
Eric manages the community for Dead by Daylight, a game with 60 million players. His success in building this community came from becoming a neighbor in a channel his brand didn’t own.
Here is his blueprint for how to scale authenticity without losing your mind—or your brand reputation—in the process.
Scaling trust in unowned spaces: Why Behaviour Interactive stopped trying to own their community, and what they did instead.
Presence > ownership
Behaviour Interactive knows that its audience values human interaction over marketing scripts and corporate jargon. Eric Pope, at the helm of Behaviour Interactive’s community strategy, views the brand's presence on Reddit not as an owner of the space, but as a helpful neighbor. By shifting the social strategy in this channel from distant broadcast to active participation, the team has turned Reddit into a high-stakes, high-reward feedback loop.
The how
Eric’s team uses a specific, four-step process to bridge the gap:
- Lurk and learn protocol: Every individual subreddit is its own community with its own norms and rules. Before posting a comment or thread for the first time on a new subreddit, the team spends weeks observing. They map out the unwritten rules and shared expectations of the community to ensure they do not disrupt the existing vibe. Know that Redditors are very corpo-phobic by nature, so finding the proper human approach is absolutely key in those initial posts.
- Shared developer account: While striking the right human tone is key, the privacy and safety of your team are hugely important. You want to be able to address the hard topics and difficult conversations, and doing that with a personal account can easily go south, leading to targeted “dogpiling”, toxicity and hate. Eric’s team uses a single shared account for official responses. This creates a consistent voice while protecting individual employees from being singled out.
- Partnering with the gatekeepers: Subreddits are generally run by independent, completely volunteer moderators, not the brand. Instead of trying to take control from them, Eric’s team dedicates time and energy to meaningfully support these mods. They do so with assets, access and privileged information. This makes the mods' lives easier and fosters a sense of camaraderie and partnership between the moderators and the brand.
Remember that your moderators have goals of their own (officially written or not) for their subreddit, much like you do for your owned channels, so understanding your brand’s role as a means to better help them achieve their goals and grow their sub will open a lot of doors.
- Zero-click content: While Eric’s team does content planning for the Dead by Daylight subreddit, they do not try to drive traffic away from the platform by linking out to their own site. Redditors want to stay on Reddit. Understanding this, the team tailors their content (ex. blogs and patch notes) directly for the Reddit feed, allowing users to get the value they need without ever leaving the app. This also helps with the previously mentioned corpo-phobia and authenticity, by not shuttling them to a fully branded web domain you’re allowing them to be part of the community without sacrificing any of their values.
By prioritizing relationships over return, Eric has turned an unowned online space into one of Behaviour Interactive's most valuable assets; a space where honest, constructive conversations happen with customers just a click away. In relinquishing attempts to control the platform, Eric and his team unlocked a connection to their brand that players can finally trust.
“Standard corporate speak is the fastest way to get downvoted into oblivion on Reddit.”
Eric Pope
Senior Director of Community Management
Behaviour Interactive
How are you handling spaces you do not own? Are you lurking on Reddit, or does the idea of an official brand account feel like a safety net you’d struggle to release? Drop your thoughts in the thread—we want to hear how you are balancing brand safety with real human connection.
