Vanilla Forums Community Blog

Business leaders aren’t just accountable for determining the processes that add real value to an organization; they must also communicate that value to their internal and external stakeholders. There are only a few people in your company, or among your partners, who care about things like the ROI of your community; most people are more interested in your ability to demonstrate its value as a tool to improve business performance.

A business’ community is one of its greatest strengths. Yet community managers still find themselves struggling to articulate its value in the empirical terms demanded by the C-suite.

There are a number of reasons for this. The traditional ROI formula (as a %) is: (Profit/Total Investment)*100 = ROI. Easy enough. But understanding how to define ‘profit’ and ‘total investment’ is more difficult than it seems.

For starters, a community manager’s work is focused on creating human connections. This  places the realm of community management entirely outside the realm of empirical measurement. The web of individuals, tools and individual communications that CMs create would seem to be so complicated and emotional as to defy any useful data-driven classification.

As an API provider, you need to ask yourself: what’s the most important thing to your customers – or more accurately – your technical partners? Chances are you’re thinking along the lines of product benefits and features or ease of use. While these factors are indeed extremely important, the number one priority for most developers is the availability of support.

It’s unfortunate that we have to revisit this once again. However, this topic needs to be addressed properly. Facebook is indisputably a powerful platform for building your community.

In a world where it’s increasingly difficult to get — much less hold — the attention of customers, Facebook stands out as one of the few place that can be counted on to keep people coming back. It's no wonder that the vast majority of community managers have come to rely on the platform’s interactive space as an indispensable tool.

That’s all great, except for one  thing — Facebook isn't the best place to start a community.

Long before the advent of modern inbound marketing, word-of-mouth has been an important motivator for determining where people are willing to put their money. Whereas people used to look to  friends for advice on which was the best brand to buy from, however, it’s now more common for people to turn to the internet for advice. That’s why price comparison and consumer review websites quickly rose to prominence back in the late 90s.