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I don’t think I’ve met anyone that hasn’t got a complaint about their community platform.
You don’t have the data you need, integrations you need, features you need, layout or design you want etc…etc…
Over time, these frustrations tend to rise until they prompt a great migration.
Work from home all you like, but don’t be surprised when your requests for more resources and attention are ignored.
Whether you like it or not, you’re playing the relationship game.
Your success depends entirely on you being able to build powerful internal relationships.
A recent question asked: “What are the best giveaways to promote a customer community? (must be under $5)”
This is a crazy question to ask.
Giveaways neither drive people to a site or keep people participating. At best, they can work as a variable reward for really great contributions, but they’re far more likely to be a silly distraction for everyone.
One of TripAdvisor’s great innovations is building up a network of 26,000 destination experts sourced entirely from the community.
Every single member of the 11-strong team is trained to spot the kind of people making unique, special, contributions and give them a specific role within the community.
If you have a customer database, segment the long-term, loyal, customers from new customers when you invite people to join the community.
The newcomers (especially the people that signed up this month) are going to have a lot of beginner-level questions. In any email campaign or within the product/help center, link to relevant discussions where they can get help from others who have encountered the problem.
I’m recruiting a few allies to help with my next book.
If you want to be involved, you can let me know here.
I’ll remove this post when we have enough.
Have you found yourself sucked into The Engagement Trap?
The Engagement Trap is the exhausting race to drive higher engagement metrics.
If you’re reporting the number of active members or posts, you’re in the trap. It’s a trap because you’re setting expectations you can’t sustain. It’s also damaging for everybody.
Many older communities are hosted on fading forum platforms and suffering a slow, downward, decline.
What should you do?
Option 1 – Optimize Everything
This is the low risk, low reward option. Here you optimize as much as possible (search, automation, management processes, create some good content). You try to get engagement up in the short term to sell it to someone else.
Following on from yesterday, try innovation with just one thing in the community.
Share one problem your company faces, open up one project to the community, share one process, set a small bounty (ideally $200 to $500) and challenge members to come up with a better solution.
