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.

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. 

As part of our ongoing commitment to delivering best-in-class online community solutions, we’re proud to announce our partnership with Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest content delivery and security service providers, powering more than 10 trillion requests per month, which is nearly 10 percent of all Internet requests for more than 2.5 billion people worldwide. Internet properties protected by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with each new site added.