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best practices (51)

How To Optimize An Online Community Platform

Posted by Richard Millington on May 16, 2014 at 5:40am in best practices
Optimizing the platform (the user experience) is part of the community manager's role which tends to get overlooked. Once it's developed, most people leave it. It should be an ongoing process. The goal is to increase the number of interactions which take place in the platform. This is a process which can be continually refined.
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Guest Post: How Threadless, The Huffington Post and Fitocracy understand the business value of community

Posted by Sarah Judd Welch on April 23, 2014 at 2:00pm in best practices
Over the past few years, I’ve seen and felt first hand the skepticism of business leaders and traditional marketing folks around the financial return on investing in community initiatives. While it used to be that most of the evidence was anecdotal, today there are quite a few examples of community efforts moving the bottom line among the biggest and smallest of brands.
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Getting Started with a Community Roadmap for the Entire Team

Posted by Sarah Judd Welch on April 3, 2014 at 4:45pm in best practices
As community managers rise in the ranks, we're often tasked with strategic planning for our entire team. This is our opportunity to align the greater organization around community goals while demonstrating how community initiatives reinforce business goals. Where to start?
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Guest Post: The Art of Gathering Feedback from Your Community (and putting it to good use)

Posted by Shannon Byrne on April 3, 2014 at 4:20pm in best practices
At Loyal, feedback from our community — clients, colleagues, partners, friends, and even sometimes family — is invaluable. In fact, feedback is one of the leading benefits of having a community. It leads to product and service improvements, open channels of communication, customer insight, and sometimes, new product ideas.
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The Problem With Community Platforms (and asking the right questions)

Posted by Richard Millington on March 27, 2014 at 8:00am in best practices
Switching community platforms is one of the riskiest things you can do. The benefits are usually minimal and the dangers are colossal. Unless you picked a terrible platform initially, changing a platform won't help you much. If you want a better community, it's rarely a new platform you need, it's a new and better approach to community management.
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White Paper: 5 Questions for Selecting an Online Community Platform

Posted by Crystal on February 21, 2014 at 2:00pm in best practices
Today, we're proud to announce a project that's been in the works for a while. A collaboration with Community Pioneer F. Randall Farmer to produce this white paper: "Five Questions for Selecting an Online Community Platform."
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CMX Summit 2014: Trust, Collaboration, and Community

Posted by Crystal on February 14, 2014 at 9:52am in best practices
Last week, David Spinks and the team at TheCommunityManager.com gathered together over 300 community professionals for a first year conference that proved to be highly polished and extremely informative - CMX Summit. Here are our takeaways:
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Organizing an Unruly Community: Share Stories

Posted by Carrie Melissa Jones on November 12, 2013 at 9:00am in best practices
By now, you've opened up lines of communication, written and shared solid guidelines, and established benchmarks. You're bound to have made a few in-depth connections with community members. Now is the time to harness these connections, get to know people more deeply, and share their stories.
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Organizing an Unruly Community: Establish Benchmarks with a Quick Survey

Posted by Carrie Melissa Jones on November 5, 2013 at 10:03am in best practices
Now that you've opened up clear lines of communication and set up guidelines for your community, it's time to synthesize some community feedback. This allows you to establish benchmarks for your community's current sentiment and makeup. This is something many community managers skip as they dive into a new community. Don't skip this. It's non-optional. If you don't know what people want, how are you going to create a forward-thinking strategy?
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3 Hallmarks of an Excellent Modern Community Manager

Posted by Alethe Denis on November 1, 2013 at 9:00am in best practices
Managing a few different types of communities, all at various stages of development, has taught me a great deal about people. Through my trials and tribulations I have discovered that three key elements are paramount to any community’s success. While they can be described simply as “work” for you, I believe that incorporating these three attributes into any community management strategy will result in marked improvement in engagement.
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How To Persuade Employees To Join Your Company's Online Community

Posted by Richard Millington on October 30, 2013 at 10:00am in best practices
Your employees probably aren’t keen to help you build a community. It’s more work for them. It’s not even in their job description. If you force them to get involved, you’re going to get the minimum effort. So don’t force them, addict them. Here’s a few ideas to get your employees involved in building your community.
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Organizing an Unruly Community: Lay Down the Law With Some Simple Guidelines

Posted by Carrie Melissa Jones on October 29, 2013 at 9:50am in best practices
After you've had a chance to establish yourself as a trusty and reliable manager to your community, the next step is to lay down the law. Many products have terms of use, but those terms of use are very different than community guidelines. They're also not all that visible and people find them to be insulting and not the least bit user-friendly (who reads all that legal talk?).
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