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.

 
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.

When Vanilla Forums was created, one the core ideas was that you would get a small, lightweight forum that you could then build upon. While customizing the look and feel of Vanilla has always been one of the hallmarks of our platform, we wanted to offer even a better solution for designers who wanted to get their hands dirty while future proofing their design.

Recently I sat down with Isis Graziatto, our lead theme developer, who has spearheaded a new project to make it even easier to create beautiful, functional and responsive looking forums. The result is a new theme called Boilerplate. It’s a new way for our team to allow people to take their designs even further, while allowing us to have a bit more control as we release new features.

It’s that time again, another CMX Summit is coming! It’s a yearly gathering of community builders and professionals of all levels that meet to connect and learn from each other. To me, it’s one the can’t miss events of the year and certainly most of you must agree, as the tickets are sold out. We are also sponsors once again for what is surely to be an amazing get together in Portland next week (October 1st until October 3rd).

This will be my third CMX Summit and I'm a seasoned conference veteran. With this in mind, I thought I would share my best tips to ensure you get the most out of CMX Summit. Of course, I work at a vendor, but like you, I manage a community as well -- and that is how I attend the event. So without further ado, here are my best tips to ensure you have an amazing experience:

We recently did a release which included some very nifty features, like our new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, and an exciting change for those of you using groups. Yes that’s right SECRET GROUPS ARE HERE! Before we delve into the details, let us do a quick review of the Group feature for those who don’t know about it.