Vanilla Forums Community Blog

The key to success in any endeavor is measurement.

I mean that quite literally. Without a quantifiable sense of where you are vs. where you were, you can’t know (in any meaningful way) whether you’ve succeeded or not.

When it comes to digital marketing, this truism barely needs stating. No marketer in his or her right mind would walk into the CMO's office without a set of precise measures indicating the success (or failure!) of last month's new campaign.

Great communities exist because of the amazing people involved. I don’t think anyone would dispute that. Nonetheless, as departments and companies plan communities or they make decisions related to their online spaces, they tend to forget it's about people. I think part of the problem is we replace the word people when we talk about community, and use terms like members, users, or even super users. By using this terminology, it can be easy to forget the people factor. It’s very similar how in some corners project managers talk about “a resource”, when they really mean a person.

Sometimes within a company you have these really great examples of how people are using your product, and somehow you only share it amongst yourselves. Sales people know the examples to share with prospects and our SuccessTeam™ who helped extend Vanilla certainly know them as well. However, somewhere along the line, we forget to show people publicly how our customers extend our platform. Well guess what?! Today we change that by sharing 5 customers extending the Vanilla platform. This is certainly not an exhaustive list, but a nice way to get your own creativity going.

With the holiday season upon us, we're looking back at everything community management related and taking stock of all the knowledge shared from experts from blogs, to webinars and ebooks.

You'll find here my favorite blogs that we published over the last year. The topics range from what to measure, to marketing techniques for communities, and frameworks you can apply to your community for increased engagement.

As we look onto on the edge of a new year of technological innovation and constantly evolving consumer habits, now’s a great time for online community builders to rethink their strategies and get up to speed.

Recent years have seen these communities move beyond being simple customer support portals into communities of practice and purpose. People are coming together to share their passions and ideas to push innovation and have a real influence on the products and services they love. In addition, the increasingly conversational nature of modern marketing has seen communities become invaluable marketing tools where lasting relationships are formed.