Vanilla Forums Community Blog

One of the great things about being the Head of Community for a maker of online community software is an exposure to 100’s of communities. Another aspect of the role is also synthesizing ways to ensure success for new customers who launch a new community.

Communities are living, breathing, evolving structures. That’s why building communities is both exhilarating and frustrating: communities can never be perfected. There will always be more work to do. Building a community therefore involves controlling chaos - managing disparate expectations, refining our work every step of the way, and listening to and evolving alongside our members.

Yet despite the often-chaotic nature of our roles, there are still ways to make our work more organized and effective. Want to control some of the chaos of building communities? The Community Renovation Model will help you do just that.

It seems that only yesterday we had wrapped up our 2018 community forecast, and yet here we are, looking at 2019 squarely in the eyes. At Vanilla, we observed 2018 as a year of change and maturity for the community space.

Richard Millington's new book The Indispensable Community taught us to throw away the word “lurkers” and to categorize these people as learners. He put into words what online community leaders were urgently trying to articulate: communities cannot exist for community's sake but be an integral part of the organization's goals, or risk peril.

It's no secret that gaming community managers are an elite group of professionals. They have to contend with the most active and demanding audiences of consumers in the market: gamers. From casual games to MMOs, gamers have strong opinions, are vocal and can make or break a game's success.

We approached a dozen of gaming community management leaders across game types, from mobile, casual, AAA and indie studios. We've combined their experience into our first gaming-centric Gaming Predictions ebook which you can download here. 

From their expertise, eight key trends emerged. From bolstering important personal skill sets, strategies, tactics and attitudes, gaming community managers all share the same perspective: communities are vital to the success of their games. 

 
Brand loyalty is important. We all know that it’s true. The question we all ask is, how do we create loyalty around a brand?

There is no one way to create brand loyalty. But suffice it to say that you can’t build loyalty without trust. And a great way to build trust is to build a community of people who love your brand.

That’s exactly what Rinker Boats did, giving owners of their boats the opportunity to become enthusiasts, and further than that, to become ambassadors for the brand.

Let’s take a look at why brand loyalty matters so much, the strategy that Rinker boats used to create a community around their brand, and see the steps that you can take to make it happen for your business.