Vanilla Forums Community Blog

The key components of your community’s foundation are its vision and mission. Those sound simple enough, right? You’ve likely seen vision and mission statements plastered to the walls of offices, in libraries and museums, and even on the entrances to shopping malls.

Customers have always expected a reasonable standard of customer service, however ironically in an era where technology has made it possible to not only meet but exceed standards, it seems good customer service is increasingly hard to find.

Many of us here are huge fans of a particular gaming studio who recently perpetrated, in my view, one of the worst forum migrations in recent memory. They went from one vendor to another, not Vanilla (unfortunately), and we just watched with horror. They broke all the fundamental rules of  migration best practices, so I felt I had to share what happened and how they could have avoided it.

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.