Month: September 2013

People use anonymity to do bad things. It allows trolls and bullies to maliciously attack other people. It allows people to engage in illegal activities

There are a lot of people that can reactively manage communities, but few who can repeatedly grow and develop them. Few community professionals fully understand

For the Proven Path eBook, we researched the difference between the communities that fail and those that succeed. Two things stood out. The first is

Not everyone in the community will agree who the expert is. Calling one member an expert on a topic will provoke a backlash from members

TripAdvisor has cultivated a number of destination experts. These are hundreds (possibly thousands) of people each responsible for specific destinations. Cultivating experts is a good

Freedom of expression leads to greater community identification. If you restrict what members can say in the community, it hurts. Members identify less with the

In a recent audience analysis, a client’s target member mentioned they felt overwhelmed by the barrage of e-mails demanding actions from different departments. We persuaded

Another approach to the newsletter is to highlight the single best piece of advice generated by the community this week. Keep it short and useful,

The role of the welcome e-mail is to get members into the notification cycle. This means you need to solicit an immediate interaction from these