The_Community_Playbook_by_Vanilla_Forums

A customer community encompasses all open brand-to-
customer and customer interactions. A customer community can
span many websites, technology platforms and company
objectives. This playbook focuses primarily on the part of your
customer community that is built on your website.

The Community Playbook

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Contact us: 1-866-845-0815 sales@vanillaforums.com VanillaForums.com
Table of Contents
Why a customer community…………………………………………. 2
Designing the community……………………………………………. 6
Creating a business case for your community……………………… 11
Technology considerations………………………………………….. 13
Community management……………………………………………. 21
Launching the community…………………………………………… 28
Attracting & engaging members……………………………………... 34
Measuring success………………………………………………….. 41
About us……………………………………………………………… 44

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Why a Customer Community?
It’s no secret that doing business online is the way of the future. Internet adoption is
accelerating globally, creating huge new markets, new customers and new
opportunities for growth and profit. For savvy businesses, these changes are creating
huge opportunities. The Internet allows for instant, unlimited communication and
unparalleled social networking, giving customers and businesses a chance to build
stronger relationships than they could have imagined before the Internet. Businesses
that invest in this communication by building engaged communities are going to
dominate the market in coming decades, as their customers keep coming back.
As with any emerging field there are a lot of questions about the best practices and
strategies to use. This guide is designed to give you all the information you need to get
your community started and keep it engaged.
Build Strong, Long-Lasting Relationships with Customers
Customer communities allow you to give your customers a place to build bonds and
share experiences. Give your brand advocates a place to hang out, to talk about their
experiences with your product and other interests. They’ll form connections within the
community organically, and strengthen their connection with your brand. Customers
that feel valued come back, buying more and more often than from brands with which
they have no affinity. Everything hinges on the social aspect; it’s what gives customers
a reason to return, to give support and to sing your praises to their friends.
Reduced Support Costs Through Crowd-Sourced Support

Traditional support is expensive in terms of
cash cost and staff resources, and
customers hate it. No one wants to spend
hours in a queue for telephone support or
further hours sifting through pages and pages
of documentation. Conversely, you don’t
want your staff to be sitting on phone lines or
staring at a Twitter page hoping vainly to be
there when someone needs them. Brand
advocacy requires that when something goes
wrong, customers can fix it, fast. They want
self-serve tools that they can access online.
“ The ideal support
workflow is for a
customer to Google
a question and find
a quick answer.”

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Over time, a customer community becomes a constantly evolving and SEO-friendly
knowledge base. Your existing brand advocates can add their own opinions, queries
and solutions, and the great standards of support create new ones. Crowd sourced
support requires minimal intervention and deflects support tickets before they’re even
made.
Generate New Sales and Leads
Your prospective customers no longer buy products blind. They want to know
everything about their purchases before they put money down, and they don’t want to
get that information from your marketing materials. They need a place to read about
the experiences of other customers, and to hear the details of the product that aren’t
covered by marketing. They want a place where they can get excited about their
prospective ownership. Post-sale, they want a place to enthuse about their purchase,
talk about possible upgrades and upsells and continue the cycle for incoming
customers.
With the right community strategy, brand enthusiasts will create an environment where
your products are constantly receiving cheap, reliable marketing. Better still, it’s
content that will be trusted by customers because it isn’t explicitly a part of your
message, or paid advertising.
Get Fast, Honest Feedback on Your Products
You might be tempted to stop me on this point and mention that Twitter and Facebook
are notorious for their ability to garner honest “feedback”. That’s certainly true, but the
signal to noise ratio on those channels is extremely unfavourable. Instead of the
constant fire-hose of feedback that you can receive from traditional social media, a
customer community allows for a more nuanced approach.
Social media feedback is largely either mono-directional (your customer talks to you,
you listen) or bi-directional (you talk back). Customer communities allow for an omni-
directional approach, where you can see your customers interact with each other and
join in the conversation as you see fit. The social bonds that you can build with your
customers using a customer community also allow you to temper that feedback with
knowledge and experience. You know that customer better than a random Twitter
username, you can judge better whether their feedback is useful and valid.

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Find New Product and Marketing Ideas
The best people to ask about your product are the customers themselves. That is,
after all, the primary thinking behind focus groups. How can a customer community
improve on that? By
allowing you to see
how customers talk
about the product to
each other, without
the pressure of a
focus group situation.
You have a longer
time frame to look out
for product problems
and improve user
experience. Are the
problems that a user
has with your product
the same in the 3rd month of ownership as they were in the first week?
Your customer community is also a great place to find inspiration for your marketing.
You might think you know what the best features of your product are, but a few
months of watching how your customers talk about the way they use your products
might open your eyes. When you have thousands of customers talking about your
products, they’re going to come up with angles that even the best marketers could
never think of on their own.
“Social media feedback is largely either
mono-directional (your customers talk
to you, you listen) or bi-directional (you talk
back). Customer communities allow for an
omni-directional approach, where you can
see your customers interact with each other
and join in the conversation as you see fit.”

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Improve Your Brand’s Reputation
Sooner or later, every brand takes a knock. A thoughtless tweet, a product recall or an
HR problem that goes viral can lead to a nightmare PR scenario. In these situations, a
customer community gives you a place to give your side to the community, a place for
them to make their frustrations known to you directly and a place for your biggest
brand advocates to speak in your defense. While these situations are always a
nightmare to deal with, you’re in a much better position to tackle any PR knocks if
you’ve put in the time over the years, building strong relationships with your customers.
Quick Takeaways
What can a customer community do for your business?
ü Build strong relationships with your customers
ü Drive repeat business
ü Deflect support tickets
ü Generate more sales leads
ü Receive feedback from your users
ü Inspire new marketing content

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Designing the Community
Ownership

One of the trickiest elements of an emerging field like community is deciding who the
community initiative belongs to. Community can serve a lot of roles, and there can be
a sense of paralysis in some teams as everyone watched to see which department will
take charge. Is it the responsibility of support to implement a forum community to
deflect tickets? Is it marketing’s job to implement one as a way to generate more
sales? How about operations, or PR?
In truth, most businesses would be best served by implementing a dedicated
community team, due to the cross-functional nature of most community initiatives. A
community team can work with marketing to find new ways to present products to
customers, with support to put measures in place to lighten their workload, and public
relations to ensure a united front in customer facing communication. A good
community team needs to be fully integrated into the business that it’s a part of to
achieve the best results. An isolated community team won’t ever be able to fulfil the
promise that community initiatives can provide.
Finding the Right Community Platform

A good community initiative will span a number of platforms. There’s no one right
approach, because your customers will always want to interact with your brand on
their own terms. Not every platform is right for every business, but it’s important to be
aware of the different options available to you.
On-Domain Community
Your customer community includes all channels where you and your customers
converse. This includes parts of your website (on-domain) and other 3rd party
platforms (off-domain) such as social networks like Twitter or media sharing sites like
YouTube.

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Community Forum
A forum community can act as the town square for your community. It’s where your
customers come together to discuss your products, reinforce their buying decision
and form social bonds with other fans. It can also be the focal point for community
product support, and a way for your business to communicate with customers in a
long-form way. There are many benefits to community forums, which we’ll go into in
more detail throughout the book. Suffice it to say that a forum offers a great central
point around which to build your community.
Blogs and Comments

Blogs can be a great way of communicating with your fan base, and letting them know
what’s going on with your products and future releases. The related comments let your
customers communicate back, but they tend to be a short form, less engaging way to
interact. They’re great for customers who just want a quick way to show their
enthusiasm or ire, but they tend to be less effective at omni-directional communication,
and don’t build the kind of strong social bonds as forum communities. Some
communities (Penny Arcade, for example) use a hybrid approach, offering inline
comments that are also posted into the forum community.
Off-Domain Community
This playbook is focused primarily on on-domain communities. As you design your
community, you should consider the benefits of interacting with your customers on 3rd
party sites:
- Social networks (Facebook, Twitter)
- Review sites (Yelp, G2App)
- Media sharing (YouTube, Pinterest)
- 3rd party forums (CruiseCritic.com, Golfwrx.com) & blogs (Gizmodo, CNet)
Many high value customers and influencers can be found on 3rd party sites. Consider
interacting in these places to:
- Provide accurate and valuable information
- Recruit on-domain community members
- Seek out candid feedback in an environment that is not under corporate control

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Be cautious about relying too much on off-domain services to build your community.
Not being able to control your own platform and data can cause problems for your
community in the future.
Social Media vs Community Forums

It’s easy to forget just how long the forum format has been kicking around. When I first
started posting on forums, I don’t think the term “social media” had even been
invented, and there certainly didn’t seem to be much of a sign that it was going to take
over the world in a few years. The social media menu now contains Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and a dozen other imitators and innovators that my tiny
bear mind doesn’t have room to store.
In light of this glut of competing mediums, a lot of people might be asking why they
should go to the extra trouble of starting a forum. Why not just interact on Twitter, start
a Facebook group or Pinterest. The crux of the matter is this: what does the humble
forum offer that its competitors don’t?
One of the first things that spring to mind is age. Forums have existed for so long that
the mechanics are now down to a fine art. There’s a moderation tool for every problem
that’s likely to arrive, knowledge of BBCode is widespread and there’s no longer an
excuse to use the clunky, slow software that we were stuck with back in the day. It’s a
format that people recognise, that’s been hammered out and refined to the point
where the unique culture and cadence of forums are familiar and easy to grasp. Unlike
say, Facebook, we can rely on the fact that forums aren’t going to reinvent themselves
every six months. While forums are far from the hippest and most edgy thing out there,
that very fact sets them apart from the rest of the achingly hip social media market.
Forums aren’t cool, they don’t need to be cool and that coolness can never be taken
away from them.
The second is verbosity. Social media is largely associated with short, sharp thoughts
and phrases. Twitter is, of course, the pinnacle of this idea. There’s a lot to be said for
having a fast way to share those one-liners and brief thoughts, but we’ve all seen
things spiral out of control when anyone attempts to use Twitter for anything that
approaches an in depth discussion. Forums remain the best way for people to
exchange more complicated ideas online. Not just for overbearing political nonsense
either. Whether it’s superheroes, video games, music, knitting, hedgehog
husbandry… whatever you can think of, there’s a forum that provides real, in-depth
discussion of it.

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Comparison of Social Media versus Community Forums
Social Media Community Forums
Ownership &
Control
No cost or setup but you don’t
control the domain or data.
You own the data and control the
medium, with the responsibilities
that go with that.
Awareness &
Virality
Have billions of users and are a
great place to recruit into your
community on your domain. You
compete with everyone on that
domain.
You must recruit the audience
yourself, but have complete control
over the community on your
domain.
Knowledge
Exchange
Often favors short form and
ephemeral content. Great for in
the moment exchanges.
Better for back and forth, long
term content and building a
knowledge base.
Organic Reach Organic reach is declining fast.
Great ad targeting but
expensive to interact people
who you have already
interacted with.
Great SEO for attracting new
users, reach is in your control.

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Real Community: a Real Home
The last, and perhaps most important, is community. Not in the boring, technical
sense by which we refer to all forums. People from all over the world coming together
to talk about things, blow off some steam. I’ve seen countless friendships form on
forums, dozens of relationships and even marriages. Is this possible on other forms of
social media? Sure, I’m betting it happens all the time. The nature of social media
dictates that all forms of said media share the benefits of all the others. Community is
where forums really shine though. Facebook and Twitter can be your private Oasis in a
sea of private Oases, but a forum puts you together in a shared environment with
dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of other people. You all follow the same rules
(hopefully), read the same threads, love and hate the same personalities.
Other forms of social media allow you to share content better than ever before, but
forums allow you to share a culture, a dialogue, a community. They require work,
expertise and curation in the way that short-form social media don’t (or at least don’t
admit to), but nothing compares to the rewards you’ll see from them. Those rewards
are greater than ever.
Quick Takeaways
ü Social media formats are great, but they can’t fully replace a forum
community.
ü You own the format, and it’s a format that’s passed the test of time.
ü Invest time in your forum community provides better ROI and stronger
customer relationships.
ü Forum communities have more continuity for your customers, they’ll
spend more time and be more loyal long-term.

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Creating a Business Case for Your Community
Community has a lot of benefits, to several departments of your company, but your
community initiative has to compete with other budget requests. If you’re going to get
what you need from the resource gatekeepers, you’ll need to build a strong business
case for why a community is vital. Here are a few points you can hit to make sure your
business case is killer:
Tie Objectives to Company KPIs
A common mistake is to use some of the softer benefits of a community to sell them
to decision makers. Elements like improved customer relationships may be a great
boon to your brand, but your managers are likely to be looking at the bottom line. The
two major driving factors are going to be increasing revenue and decreasing
expenses, so focus your case on these. It will vary from business to business, but
generating more sales and freeing support resources are common benefits to
concentrate on.
Build Out an ROI Model Focused on Quantifiable Metrics
Once you know what elements you need to concentrate on, you can come up with an
estimate for the ROI that you expect to see from the community. Some elements to
focus on could be:
Ø Ticket deflection: What’s your cost to handle a ticket? This will vary depending
on the complexity of both your product and the case in hand, but is often
somewhere between $1- and $100
Ø New leads: Consider your community as a marketing asset to help prospects,
to upsell and to cross sell. Include the added SEO value provided by your
community forum
Ø Lead conversion rate: Your community can be a place where your prospects
validate their decision to buy your products. They can see what kind of
community support is available to them, and how much other customers are
enjoying your product. Community allows for a strong secondary benefit to a
purchase. Not just your product, but the community that comes along with it.
Ø Reducing churn: Every business needs repeat custom, so give your users a
reason to stay with your product. When customers have strong bonds in the

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community, they aren’t just leaving your product. They’re leaving a social group,
and the relationships they’ve built there.
Ø Customer Advocacy: Brand advocates are a powerful force in marketing, and
the best way to recruit them is a strong community. Getting these heavy-hitting
customers in your corner is a way to ensure that everyone they know will hear
about your products, without a penny of extra spending from you.
Justifying a Community is Simple

The business case for your community initiative doesn't need to be complicated.
Community is a tried and tested strategy that offers real and measurable benefits to
any business. If the business case for your community initiative is tied to these benefits
and has simple measures in place to chart its success, the approval of the fiscal
gatekeepers is a foregone conclusion.
Quick Takeaways
Ø Don’t be fuzzy with your community strategy, tie everything to
concrete KPIs.
Ø Be certain what you want to achieve with a community. If you don’t
know where you’re going, you won’t know how to get there.
Ø Community has huge benefits. Don’t be shy about your proposal,
it’s going to provide huge ROI for your business.

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Technology
Technology is, of course, the backbone of community management. Without the
technology behind the Internet, community on the kind of scale we’re all used to
wouldn’t exist. In this chapter, we’re going to go over some of the technological
building blocks that you can use to build your on-domain community.
Discussion Forums
Discussions forums (also known as message boards, community forums, etc.) have
been around in some form since the dawn of the Internet. The technology behind
them has developed considerably during that time of course, but the basic form of the
medium has remained similar. A user posts a discussion, and other users reply to
them. The multidirectional nature of these conversations is what allows for so much
flexibility in the medium.
There are discussion forums for a huge variety of subjects, with a huge variety of
approaches that result in a huge variety of different communities. Plugins and
refinements allow for a great deal of customisation, but the familiarity and solidity of the
underlying structure are powerful tools in themselves.
Forum technology has improved a lot in recent years, and a modern solution has a lot
of useful benefits for business communities. Some features to look out for include:
Ø Single Sign-On, allowing users to sing up with your existing login system, or
their logins from social media
Ø Theme control, allowing you to perfectly match your website and branding with
your community
Ø Customer community specific features like CRM integration, Q&A plugins and
data at rest encryption

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Comment Systems
Comment systems have grown into ubiquity over the years, from the most basic blog
comments to integration with large ecosystems like Facebook and Instagram. They’re
a much simpler and direct form of communication than a full discussion forum, and
this has pros and cons. It’s much easier to engage a user into leaving a brief comment
than to invest more into a forum discussion, but this is a double-edged sword. “Don’t
read the comments” is a common Internet meme, because the quick nature of
comment systems often appeals to users who don’t want to contribute much more
than noise.
Quality communities based solely on comment systems do exist, but they require
care, moderation and work. Simply adding comments to your content and forgetting
about it will lead to problems down the line.
A Hybrid Approach
Vanilla comments provide an interesting halfway point between these formats. They
can be embedded into any page, just as with standard comments, but the content
goes to a specific forum category. This forum can be public or private depending on
your needs, but it’s possible for this hybrid system to appear as a simple comments
system to the users who prefer that, whilst also existing in your forum community. The
forum interface allows for a lot of flexibility with regards to moderation, and can make it
easier to form a lasting community than would normally be possible with blog
comments.
Customer Reviews
Many people don’t consider review communities (à la Amazon, TripAdvisor) when
they’re thinking about community management, but they have enormous uptake and a
large effect on e-commerce. People enjoy sharing their experiences with products,
whether positive or negative, and their interactions are in many ways similar to those of
comment threads.
Customer reviews range from the short and sweet (or not so sweet) to detailed
breakdowns by experienced enthusiasts. This will almost always take plays off-
domain, and a community manager’s role is purely reactive. They can reach out to

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happy customers in an attempt to recruit them as brand advocates. Some heavy-
hitting reviewers even receive free merchandise from businesses hoping for an
extensive (and positive) review. For negative reviews, a community manager can only
try to mitigate problems, replying to reviewers where possible with explanations or
reaching out with support. Even simply the appearance of attentiveness from a
business can be a PR boon, by showing your prospective customers that if they have
a bad experience they will receive fast attention and support.
Social Listening
Social listening for your customer community is easy enough, but off-domain work will
require different tools. There are a lot of different options in this space, and some tools
you might want to try include:
Ø Brandwatch
Ø Mention
Ø BuzzSumo
Ø TalkWalker Alerts
Ø SocialMention.com
Ø ifttt.com

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Integrating With Other Systems
Your customer community doesn’t have to fulfil a specific niche. Integration can allow
you to use your community as a hub, feeding into various other technologies to
improve your workflow, support and user experience. There are a few different
integrations that you should consider:
CRM
Communities can be a great way of generating leads and cases, but only if you have
systems in place to properly escalate them. Software such as Salesforce or
SugarCRM help you to manage the leads your community produces. By integrating
with these services, you can simply escalate forum content directly into the CRM.
Analytics
Analytics tools are extremely useful to see what content in your community is providing
you with the best results. Which days of the week drive the most traffic, and where are
you weak? Use analytics to find out what you’re doing well, how you can improve and
what community resources you can mobilise to do so.
Ticket Systems
There are a number of ways in which a customer community can help with support,
but it might be preferable for your business to handle support through an external
service such as Zendesk. If that’s the case, integration will allow you to escalate forum
comments directly into your ticket system, allowing you to include your forum
community into your existing support workflow
Code Repository
Services like Github are a huge boon for software developers. If your software is in a
repo, integrate your forum community into it and allow your community members to
contribute to your software by instantly creating tickets.

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Suites vs Best-In-Class
When you set out to buy some new software, community forum software for example,
you may be faced with the choice of going out and buying a product that best suits
your needs versus using something that is offered by an existing vendor. Many
software vendors offer a suite of products or features, usually anchored to a primary
offering that your company has already purchased. It might tempting to think that going
with an existing vendor will be easier and cheaper, but that’s not always the case.
Before making a decision, ask yourself the following questions:
• How important is my community initiative? If community is strategic for you, a
best of breed vendor (a vendor whose primary offering is community) will likely
offer you more and better community functionality and services. The vendor will
have deeper, more focused expertise in what makes a community successful.
• Am I buying a product that is a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none? By
spreading themselves too thin, suites may be suitable, but they are far from
best in class. Their road maps are strained by too many products, and “must-
have” features may be lacking or fall to the back burner as they are not primary
components of the suite.
• Have you considered TCO (Total Cost Of Ownership)? While the list price to
add the community feature to a suite might look appealing, what is the cost of
services or customizations if it comes with inferior functionality? What is the cost
if the product in the suite does not give your company the desired value over
time?
Is the Vendor Prioritizing Your Needs or the Needs of Your IT
Department?
The suites tend to focus their R & D on things that will make the CIO happy, often at
the expense of end users. Best of breed generally focuses on building for those that
will use your community day-to-day, with the primary objective of making it enjoyable
and easy to use.
Does the solution support integration to other services? Best of breed products can
work with a wide variety of third-party products via APIs or out of the box integrations.
Suites vendors often instead focus on integration with the rest of the suite.

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This is not to say choosing a community forum in a suite does not make sense.
Sometimes there actually is a synergy when a community platform is part of a broader
offering. Suite versus best of breed can be a tough choice. In the end what matters is
selecting a solution that will deliver the desired value. Today, cloud-based delivery and
APIs mean that best of breed applications can provide better functionality at a
competitive cost and with full integration.
Vendor Services
No project is blessed with infinite time or resources, and you’re like to have a shortfall
somewhere. It might be that your existing staff are overtasked, or there are gaps in the
skillset of your team somewhere. Many software vendors offer services to help you fill
these gaps. Examples include:
Community Management & Moderation
Your vendor can supply you with an experienced community manager to help get your
community off the ground. They can advise on setup and best practises, and put
together a game plan for getting your community off the ground. Moderation, the tricky
business of day-to-day forum maintenance, can also be outsourced to great effect.
Letting your vendor take care of cleaning up spam and your team can focus other
endeavours.
Community Management Training
It may be that there are members of your staff who are prepared to take charge of your
community, but don’t have any experience with managing one. Moderation and
community management training is a valuable service in this scenarios, as they can
give your staff a chance to hit the ground running with solid best practises to put in
place. Nothing can substitute for years of experience, but the right training can ensure
that your community team is ready for whatever the community throws at them.

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Community Software Customisation
Some businesses have specific needs that off-the-shelf community software can’t
fulfil. Your vendor should offer customisation services, providing coding time to tailor
the software to your individual needs. Your vendor’s teams can take a lot of heat off of
your own coders, and allow the best parts of custom software with the peace-of-mind
that comes with SAAS.
Data Migration Between Platforms
There are many reasons why you might want to upgrade from an out-dated
community platform, but this often raises concerns for the existing community. No one
likes the idea of losing their accounts, posts and the accumulated history of their
community. Your vendor can ensure that all of your data is present and correct on the
new software, to ensure a smooth transition for your users.
Theming
It’s not enough for your community to look like your website, it needs to be
indistinguishable from it. That needs theming work, and theming work is time and
resource expensive. If your design teams are already tied up, you can ask your vendor
to build a theme to your specifications. They’ll have experience building hundreds of
themes for clients, and it can take a lot of pressure from your launch when you know
that things are in hand.

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Quick Takeaways
Ø There are a variety of different technologies in the community space.
Figure out what you want, and what the best way to get there is.
Ø Leave yourself room to expand. Pick a versatile solution, but focus on
building up one aspect at a time.
Ø Consider freeing up human resources by outsourcing services to your
vendor. They know how to get the most out of their software.
Ø Consider how your community software will integrate with your existing
systems. Choose software that complements your existing structure
and fits into your workflow.

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Community Management
What is Community Management?
Community management is how you get things done in your community. It’s a
complicated and varied field, and different community managers could likely answer
this question in dozens of different ways. Many different actions fall under the umbrella
of “community management, including:
Ø Long-term strategy: Deciding what the goal of the forum is, and how those
goals are going to be reached.
Ø Culture: Deciding what kind of community should be created, and putting
mechanisms in place to get it there.
Ø Reaction: Dealing with the occasional crisis or unforeseen problem that arises.
Ø Communication: Talking to the community, staff and other stakeholders about
problems, ideas, and anything else that might come up in a community’s
lifetime.
Ø Setting and Enforcing Policy: Deciding the rules that should be followed by
users, and how moderators will enforce those rules.

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Community Management Profiles
Community Manager
The community manager is an oversight position. They should know everything there is to
know about the community, its problems and how to solve them. For product communities,
they should have metrics to hit, whether that’s to improve customer support, generate sales
or any number of things. For a social community, they should have a clear vision of where
they want the community to head, and know how to get there. A community manager is
responsible for setting policy, for figuring out how to move the community to a desired
outcome and keep it there. There are a number of tools that a CM has at their disposal, but
they should primarily be good communicators and strategists.
Moderator
Moderators are in the trenches. They’re reading posts, answering reports and solving
problems day-in and day-out. The importance and difficulty of this shouldn’t be understated.
There is absolutely such a thing as a good or bad moderator. Anyone can clean up spam, but
a great moderator needs to know when to have a light touch and when to wade into the
breach. They need to know how and when to use moderation tools, but more importantly
how and when to not use them. A great mod sees problem situations before they arise, and
brooks the stream to move problematic conversations to a healthier place. When trouble does
arise, a moderator is the one to enforce the rules, protect the user base and occasionally
seem like the bad guy.
Social Media Manager
A social media manager is in charge of more specific duties regarding a company’s social
media profiles. They’re the person manning the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts for
a given brand. This role requires great communication skills, and the ability to determine what
kind of content will engage your readers. They’re going to be in the trenches a lot, dealing with
potentially difficult clients and fans, and need to be very conscious of what they say and how
their words come across. Many a social media manager has been sunk by a poorly thought
out joke.

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Finding the Best Moderators for Your Forum
Moderation is a tricky business. Firstly because doing it well requires excellent
judgment and social intuition; secondly because being a moderator appeals hugely to
people who lack either of those traits. Pick a bad forum anywhere on the Internet and
somewhere along the line you’re likely to find moderators who are either apathetic,
incompetent, bullies or all of the above.
It might seem like the relatively small number of moderators in a given community
would limit their influence over the overall culture, but this isn’t the case. While the
quality of your user base is notoriously difficult to effect in the short term, over the long
term it will be almost entirely determined by the kind of users that continue posting.
That factor in turn will be decided by what your rules are and how they are enforced.
Smart, socially capable people have better things to do than hang around a
community that’s full of trolls they know will never be turfed out. Unless you’re dealing
with a community small enough that you can moderate it entirely on your own, these
decisions are going to largely be made by your moderating team.
The problem, of course, is who to pick. Moderating is frequently a thankless task.
Volunteering to be The Man puts a user into a position where they will be frequently
attacked or insulted by the trolls in the community and can quickly turn a fun hobby
into an unpaid customer service position. The upsides to the position are the ability to
take a hand in shaping the community that they care about. An uglier way of
expressing that upside is the ability to exert power in that same space. The
moderators you want are the ones who are interested in the first upside. The trick is
separating them from those that are interested in the second.
The best moderators I’ve known were often the ones that needed the most persuading
to take the job. Conversely, I have a standing policy that any user who openly
expresses a desire to be a moderator should be blacklisted from it. In truth, a more
nuanced view is probably wiser. There are a few standard qualities that you should
look for. It goes without saying that you should look for active members of the
community, as an absentee moderator is at best ineffective and at worst will cause
harm as users become frustrated as their questions go unanswered.
However, if you have a few outlier users who post far more than other users I would
caution against putting them in moderating positions. Users who are spending all day
on your forums are likely to lack the kind of social skills required of a moderator and are
also likely to quickly burn out and leave the forum. Another commonly looked for trait

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that can be misleading is metamodding (also known as backseat modding). It’s
tempting to look at a user who is showing a keen knowledge of the rules and a
willingness to contribute and think they’d make a great mod. In my experience, this
keenness can quickly become the kind of overzealousness that bad moderators are
made of.
So, after all the warnings are dealt with, what should you look for in a moderator?
Obviously this will vary depending on the specific needs of your community, but here’s
a checklist of good questions to ask yourself when looking at candidates:
Ø Have they shown that they understand the rules and appropriate behaviour on a
personal level? While reformed trolls can make good mods, it’s a riskier
undertaking.
Ø Are they already bringing value to the forums? Do they make people laugh, help
people out and make people feel welcome?
Ø Have they demonstrated a separation from the various cliques and feuds that
inevitably erupt in any community?
Ø Do you think they’ll work well as part of your existing team? While debate in the
mod forum is healthy, personality clashes can cause unfortunate gridlocks and
prevent you from getting anything done.
Keeping Resource Overhead Low
One of the biggest worries for any business starting a community forum is time. They
know the benefits of a customer community, but they simply don’t think they have the
staff bandwidth to accommodate one. It’s an understandable worry, but it relies on the
false assumption that a customer forum requires new, dedicated staff to run. If you
have the right processes in place, your existing staff can easily manage your customer
community without extra costs. In the event that your forum grows large enough that
further staff are required, additional staff can be justified as the ROI of ticket deflection
and lead generation make themselves manifest.

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Being a great community manager isn’t about the amount of hours you put in behind
the keyboard. It’s about putting the proper systems in place to allow the forum to run
smoothly without mindless busywork. Look for community managers who improve up
front development in order to enhance efficiency down the line. Crucially, they can
then use the time they’ve freed up to concentrate on improving your community in
other ways. Here are a few ways a great CM can improve your forum community:
Encourage Peer-to-Peer Activity
One of the most important things in a support community is ensuring that your users
are talking to each other. Another big advantage of these communities is the potential
for customers to help solve problems for each other, rather than waiting for your
support staff to step in. A great community manager will foster this environment and
ensure that users feel valued and rewarded for helping out.
They can also ensure that users are able to solve intra-forum problems (such as
troublesome or disruptive users) quickly, by bringing problem posts to the attention of
staff. Report systems are hugely efficient for this. Rather than having to read every
thread and hunt down trolls, CMs and moderators can give users a way to bring
troublesome threads to their attention. Not only is this a labour-saver for your staff, it
also allows your members to feel like they have a say in how the community is run.
Your community manager is key to getting these elements to work effectively. They
should ensure that your users are properly onboarded, with well-written and clear
guidelines on what does and does not constitute acceptable behaviour. They should
set up systems (e.g, gamification) that give users positive feedback for lending a hand.
With the right preparation, a CM doesn’t need to spend all their time in the trenches
and neither do your support staff.
Make it a Team Effort

Having the right staff on board is hands down the most crucial aspect of an effective
support community. While the CM should always be ready to take the lead, having
other staff share the load helps everybody. Each question that is answered on the
community has an amplification effect. Rather than simply answering an email or call,

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your staff can add to the growing knowledge base of the community and deflect
inbound support. Users would always prefer to be able to find an answer to a thorny
problem with a Google search rather than a phone call.
Your community manager should take the lead in encouraging your staff to pitch in,
rather than adding new headcount. You may, of course, want to add dedicated staff in
time. Once the community is established, the ROI from deflected support tickets
combined with the marketing benefits of a community forum will make extra hires easy
to justify.
Control Your Community From The Outset

Your community manager should be a steady hand on the tiller in the early days of the
community. Without an effective plan, a community forum will meander aimlessly. Is
your community dedicated to support, best practises, brand evangelism or all/none of
the above? Whatever your goals, they need to be clearly outlined before launch.
A great community manager will have put the work in before the starting gun goes off,
to ensure that new users know exactly what to expect (and what is expected of them
in turn). They’ll ensure that your users are properly on boarded, that the role of the
community is well defined and that it doesn’t shift to something else over time. They’ll
know how to take your internal mission statement and project that to your customers.
Whatever your goals are, they’re responsible for ensuring that the community is
working towards them from day one.

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Quick Takeaways
Ø Community managers handle strategy, while moderators handle the
day-to-day operations.
Ø Picking moderators is a crucial task, and should be taken seriously.
Have a list of criteria based on your community’s needs and recruit
based on that.
Ø Treat your moderators well. They have a difficult job, and replacing
a great moderator is extremely difficult.
Ø The most enthusiastic volunteers are often poor choices. Stay away
from people who are looking for a power trip.
Ø Managing your community doesn’t have to be time-intensive. Use the
most effective plugins and train your staff well do minimise your time
commitment.

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Launching the Community
One of the most nerve-wracking parts of launching a community is the moment where
it actually goes online. All your preparations are finally tested, your plans go into action
and your users step, blinking, into the glorious light of your new community. A lot can
go wrong. Your moderators could become befuddled by the interface, your categories
may turn out to be confusing or redundant, your theme might aggravate the eyeballs of
your user base. The list of potential hiccups is endless. In this section, we’re going to
go over some of the strategies you can put in place to mitigate this.
Setting Community Guidelines
The first thing I do when I enter a new community is check out their community
guidelines. It’s not because I’m worried about breaking rules (I’m well behaved at least
65% of the time), but because what those rules are and how they’re laid out will tell me
most of what I need to know about the community itself. I can tell what the community
manager thinks about the users, how much effort they put in to the basics of setup,
and what kind of community I can expect to see when I start posting. It’s also part of
the community that rarely sees any real effort or thought, which I’ve always found
strange. It’s the template for how your community acts and behaves, and it should be
a high priority for any community manager.
The community guidelines of your forum aren’t just boilerplate, simple terms and
conditions that you have to have for legal protection. They’re the constitution of your
forum. They’re something that, ideally, everyone should read. The vast majority of
users actually want to contribute to your community, and they need a way of knowing
what’s up. What they absolutely won’t do is read an awful, legalese-style text block.
This causes problems for you, because you have to spend more time and resources
moderating the community when users don’t know what’s expected of them. Your
community guidelines can be many things, but they can’t be boring to read. The less
they look like legal terminology, the better.
Putting in Effort Upfront Lets Your Community Guidelines Pay Off
Long-Term
Rather than seeing your community guidelines as a quick piece of writing that you
need to get done, see it as an opportunity to let new users what kind of community
they can expect. They could be serious, quick and to the point. They could be funny, if

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you’re good at that. I manage a community for a comedy website, and my community
guidelines are hopefully at least amusing enough to get people to keep reading them.
There are other issues that come up when writing your guidelines. How are your
moderators going to be interacting with the populace? If you encourage a more
irreverent, sociable style, that should be reflected in the tone of your guidelines. let
your users know what to expect by not only onboarding them to the procedures of
your forum, but the atmosphere.
Don’t worry about covering every possible option. You can’t. In my second decade of
managing communities I’m still constantly amazed by the amount of different ways
users find to wiggle around rules and mess up in ways I couldn’t have dreamed of.
Trying to cover every possibility also leads you to the aforementioned “legalese”
problem. That more you act like a lawyer, the more users will expect you to act like
one in your moderation. Instead, figure out the effect you want from a rule, and draft it
to cover that effect. Concentrate on the spirit of your rules, rather than detailing every
possible scenario.
Which Rules Does Your Community Need?
Different communities require different community guidelines, and there’s no one-size-
fits-all approach. There are a few rules, however, that I think most communities could
benefit from:
Ø Rules restricting the type of images that a user can post are a great idea. For
most communities this will at a minimum include content restrictions. If you want
your users to be able to post from work, this is vital. I also recommend
restricting the size of images that users can post. In a free-for-all, mobile users
are going to avoid your community for the sake of their data plans.
Ø Be specific about what kind of tone users should have with each other.
Irreverent? Serious? Respectful? Simply saying “no flamewars!” leaves users
with a lot of wiggle room to be passive-aggressive to each other. My personal
guideline to users is “don’t say anything to someone here that you wouldn’t say
to them in a bar if they were much, much bigger than you”.
Ø Make it clear to your users what they should do if they have a complaint about a
moderator. Leaving them a clear pressure valve prevents that drama from
spilling out into the forums. No user should be confused about what to do if
they have a problem.

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Ø Outlaw rules lawyering. “But technically…” is something no moderator should
ever have to listen to. Users should be more interested in upholding the spirit of
the rules than quibbling over the technicalities.
Ø “Don’t be a jerk”. This rule doesn’t work on its own, or its the only one you
would need. Nevertheless, it should be there. Users should be reminded that
above all, they should be treating each other with respect and courtesy.
Ø Don’t allow gender, racial or sexuality-based discrimination in your community.
Insular, laddish communities are dying fast. The Internet is an open platform,
and it’s for everyone. Communities that ignore this rising tide don’t have long to
live.
Soft Launching Your Community
Given how hard it can be to rescue a community once it starts going south, it’s
understandable to look for a way to manage that risk. Soft launching can be a good
way to do this. In the simplest terms, a soft launch is opening your community to a
limited number of users to test and perfect before opening them to the larger
community. In software terms, it’s similar to a closed beta.
There are a number of advantages to this approach. You could, for instance:
Ø Mobilise the most dedicated members of your community in order to find bugs
or hiccups in your setup.
Ø Test your moderation workflow and ensure that your moderators know their way
around the tools in a live setting.
Ø Ensure that all your theming is bug free and pleasing to the populace.
Another advantage is inherent to this kind of launch: the selection process. Being
selected as the first to enter the gates of your forum will provide those dedicated users
with the warm fuzzy feeling of being part of an elite group. It’s a great way to kick off
the engagement of those users by awarding them a coveted veteran status.

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Parkinson’s Triviality Theory
While there’s nothing wrong with a carefully measured dose of elitism, this system is
not without its downsides. Notably, you’re likely to run into Parkinson’s Triviality Theory.
Put simply, your users will be keen to show themselves as valuable by giving as much
feedback as possible. This is all well and good, but it may cause problems when you
need to sift through dozens of suggestions to get to the most valuable feedback. In
the event that you end up disregarding some (or indeed, most) of their suggestions,
you may run into resentment. “Why did you even ask if you weren’t going to take our
advice?”. User feedback can be capricious and contradictory, so this approach
requires you to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff and do so without
angering the users providing it.
You may also run into some problems once your community is fully launched. Once
the gates are open, how will this Veterans group react to new users? Will they be
friendly and welcoming, or feel like their private clubhouse has been invaded? Be very
careful about the nature of reward you give to these early users. While giving them a
badge, or some special decorative status is all well and good, too much special
treatment will leave new users feeling alienated. To the users who most enjoy this kind
of gamification, feeling like a status is unachievable for them is a huge turnoff. You
should monitor your user base in these early stages to ensure that these groups are
rubbing along well together, and that excessive resentment or elitism are not building
up.
Beware of Perfection Paralysis
You should also beware the dreaded Perfection Paralysis. This is a condition that rises
when the desire for your community to be perfect before it launches causes you to
continually postpone the launch in favour of constantly reiterating and tweaking. An apt
analogy would be a musician who works on their song for years in an attempt to make
it sound precisely like the music they imagine; the audience will prefer the imperfect
version that they can hear to a theoretical piece that only exists in the creator’s head.

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A soft launch is a great testing tool, and can allow you to feel out the response of your
target audience. However, you should have a clear game plan before you go in. Ask
yourself the following questions:
Ø Who do I want in this early access group?
Ø What problems do I want this beta stage to solve?
Ø What will the transition to the live community entail?
Ø What is my hard deadline for launching the community?
Launch Checklist
Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed the birth of many great new communities.
Some have flourished, some have not. There are a few things that need to get done if
you want to give your new community a fighting chance. These things might sound
obvious, but we’ve seen companies that had money, resources and traffic fail
because they didn’t do them.
Getting a community off the ground is all about achieving critical mass. Critical mass
occurs when you have a certain threshold of members and more importantly
interactions. Here are three things to do to get there:
1. Promote it. You don’t have to hire a PR firm or spend money on ads but you do
need to let people know that you’ve launched. Staggering the announcement to your
list over several days is often a better strategy than doing a big bang. This gives you
time to experiment with content and interact with more members. Also, it’s better to
have a trickle of new members into an already active community than a tidal wave of
members into an empty community.
2. Be present. If you’re not spending a ton of time in the community, you’re going to
see a lot of your early traffic bouncing. Until you hit critical mass, make sure every new
members is personally welcomed and that all questions are answers. No discussion
should have zero replies. If you’re too busy to do this, hire a part-time community
manager or make sure you enlist help from colleagues.

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3. Link it. One of your top sources of new members and traffic will eventually be
search engines. A link from your home page or blog will ensure that the community
gets crawled by search engines. Good community SEO gives you that positive
feedback loop where more content gets you more members and more members gets
you more content.
Quick Takeaways
Ø Having a plan for your launch saves you time and effort in the long run.
Ø Community guidelines are important! Put in the effort to ensure your
community is on the right track and that members are well on-boarded.
Ø Consider whether soft launching suits the needs of your community. It
can be a great way to iterate before the public get their hands on things.
Ø Have a launch checklist and stick to it to achieve critical mass.

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Attracting and Engaging Members
The most nerve-wracking element of any community is the idea that once you’ve built
it, no one will show up. The Internet is full of communities that never really took off, and
no one wants their project to add to them. How do you guard against it? The key is to
create attraction and engagement
Attraction
Attraction is the reason that someone first visits your community. It doesn’t matter how
great your community looks and how great your feature are if no one ever sees them.
The type of community that you want to run will make all the difference in terms of how
you engage users, but there are a lot of tried and tested strategies that successful
communities have used to attract views. These are rarely exclusive, and many
communities will use a combination of methods to attract the highest possible user
base.
Content Attraction
These communities use front page content to draw readers into their community. This
content then links to the community to invite comment. Once users are signed up, the
process of engagement takes over. Examples of communities that use this approach
include:
Ø Penny Arcade, which uses its hugely popular comic to attract people into its
community to comment on the content, discuss forthcoming events and
integrate into the larger lifestyle community.
Ø T-Nation, which posts instructional articles on bodybuilding to attract users into
its forum community, where they can swap advice and experiences. T-Nation
then uses this community to advertise their range of bodybuilding supplements.

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Expertise Attraction
These communities attract users who are performing searches for specific queries and
seeking advice. They take advantage of the excellent SEO of community forums to act
as a growing knowledge base. Users then join in the community with their own
comments, questions and advice. Examples include:
Ø TheBump, a maternity and childcare community with an enormous user base
that provide support to each other.
Ø Reddit communities often work this way. Their enthusiast sub-communities
attract questions from new users, and more experienced users are happy to
lend their expertise to build their reputation in the community.
Support Attraction
These communities are based around products, and they attract users through links
from product support pages. These can cross over to a certain degree with expertise
communities as the community grows, as the volume of answered questions allows
the community to work as a knowledge base. Many brands are integrating this kind of
support community, but some examples you might want to check out include:
Ø Agilebits, developers of the 1password security software.
Ø Pebble, the makers of the Pebble Smartwatch.
Ø The Elder Scrolls Online is a popular MMORPG that uses a community forum to
provide effective support for a large user base.
Engagement
Introducing users to your forum is only the beginning. The name of the game is
keeping those users engaged. Engagement is all about giving your members a reason
to stay involved with the forum. Members are almost always starting from scratch in
your community, and need a significant push to stay engaged until they build the
social habits and bonds that will keep them in your community. There isn’t any voodoo
to user engagement; it’s all about making sure that new users are able to get involved
and start having a positive experience in your community as soon as possible. Before

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you worry about more intricate strategies, go through an audit of your engagement
practises and ensure that the following points are in place:
Signing Up Should Be Quick and Hassle Free
If a new member is signing up, they likely have a purpose in mind. With every minute
that goes by between deciding on a course of action and carrying it out, their interest
will dwindle. Does your registration require a bunch of tedious and unnecessary form
filling? Is it simple for your user to find the links they need? Depending on your
community, you may want to consider using social sign-up, allowing users to register
quickly and simply using their existing social media accounts. If your main site has its
own login, you should absolutely ensure that you have seamless single sign-on
installed, so that users can immediately continue using the community without the
tedium of registering and signing in again.
Members Should Be Able to Find Content Quickly
The most common issue I see in failing communities is poorly laid out category
structures. Either they have so many categories that I can’t tell where to go for the
content I’m interested in, or the category topics themselves are obtuse and unclear.
Look at the front page of your community, and ask yourself how it feels to a new user.
Pick a purpose and consider how easily you can fulfil that purpose without prior
knowledge of the community. You might be surprised at how poor the user experience
of the average community can be.
Prevent Problem Members From Creating Negative Experiences
Every community manager likes to think that they have a handle on trolls, but does
your community contain other toxic elements that turn users away? If you make a new
account in your community and ask a question (try a dumb one), how do the users
react? Don’t just look for insults and swearing, look for passive-aggression,
condescension and other negative reactions that could cause a user to turn away from
your community.

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Using Gamification
Gamification is precisely what it says on the tin: you are giving something (in this case
your forum) some of the traits of a game. This might sound trendy, but it’s existed in
some form or another in forum communities for years. Consider the ubiquitous “karma”
systems that have been in vogue for some time. For those of you who are unfamiliar,
these systems allow a user to award another user points (karma being a common
name for them) for good posts. Sometimes these systems also allow users to take
said karma away. This principle is still seen in the up/down vote system on sites like
YouTube.
The theory behind these systems is simple. You’re giving your users an extrinsic
reward for posting on your forums. Humans are wired to enjoy such systems, and in
their absence I’ve even seen forumers use post counts as a way of “keeping score” on
the boards. It might sound silly, and in fact it probably is, but accumulating these
points in whatever form clearly presses a button somewhere deep in our lizard brains.
Anything that presses these buttons is going to increase the engagement of a good
number of your users. You only have to look at how obsessed people can be with
their number of “likes” on Facebook to see that.
So why not implement such a feature in your board right now? Well, as I mentioned
there are pitfalls. By extrinsically rewarding behaviour, you put the emphasis on the
reward rather than the behaviour itself. For example: if you give the user a thousand
point bonus for posting 500 times on your board, some might see this as a simple
bonus for contributing. Others will simply spam posts in an attempt to get their bonus.
The goal has changed from participating to simply getting the shiny object. It’s been
my experience that users who are extremely focused on “winning” are rarely great
contributors, and these systems can feed into ugly parts of the human psyche.
How do you deal with this problem? By being very careful what behaviours are
rewarded by your system. Fortunately, the Reactions system that’s built into Vanilla
software is eminently customisable, so you should be able to find a mix of reactions
that create the atmosphere you want; and badges make a great reward system for
good contributors. Try and avoid any actions that can be “farmed”, or repeated over

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and over again to grind out points. For this reason, at Penny Arcade I’ve disabled
common badge rewards like post counts.
Since turning on and off reactions is trivial, think of what kind of actions you want your
users to repeat and then build specific reactions to encourage them. For example, of
the stock reactions available in our Vanilla install, the two I chose to leave active were
the Awesome and Agree buttons. My reasoning (which I’ll admit was largely
retroactive) was that it takes a decent amount of effort to craft a post that people will
find awesome, and that having a simple way for users to show agreement with a post
without posting in the thread would cut down on clutter. It largely worked out well, and
the system has been sufficiently popular that we rarely hear complaints from our
notoriously picky user base. Once you’ve figured out what kind of stuff you want your
users to post, adding a reaction for it is a great way to reward them for doing so.
A final word of caution: be wary of negative reactions in the hands of your users.
Having simple, one click access to negativity appeals to some of the least pleasant
forum dwellers around. You’ll quickly find grudges forming, or users simply downvoting
anyone who disagrees with them or goes against the forum consensus. Next to the
humble report button, I’ve found this kind of user feedback to be shaky at best, and I
eventually won the fight to have the downvote button turned off the Penny Arcade.
Simple access to positivity is great. Simple access to passive-aggressive meanness
leads to the dark side. And by the dark side, I mean YouTube comments…
Identifying and Harnessing Community Evangelists
One of the first concerns in the mind of any community manager is activity. The
Internet is full of articles on increasing the size of your user base, but an often-ignored
part of management is what to do with your users once you’ve got them. Newbies
over time become regulars, and eventually develop into the much whispered about
“veterans”. Everyone knows these guys. They’ve been around forever, have a lot of
posts and a reputation either good or ill. Your community is a part of their life, and if
you have meetups or other events they’re going to be there.
Sounds pretty good huh? I guess that it is. Having veterans around is a sign that your
community is on the right track. You have users sticking around and contributing

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regularly, and people aren’t getting bored and trundling off to the next forum that
catches their eye. These users come with their own set of drawbacks however, and
can represent a different set of management challenges.
One of the first is the issue of Entitlement. Entitlement (with a capital letter) is a huge
problem across the whole of the Internet, and your community is unlikely to be immune
to its horrors. As the Internet has offered people more and more free content, an
inevitable side effect is that people have stopped being grateful for it and started
feeling Entitled (with a capital letter) to it. It’s unavoidable, and exists in all walks of life.
You can’t avoid it completely any more than Vanilla can completely resist my attempts
to gradually turn this into a book about Breaking Bad. Community veterans are likely to
be the vanguard of Entitlement on your boards. After all, they’ve been around for a long
time, they know how stuff is done, why shouldn’t they get some special treatment?
The problem is that special treatment in turn builds Entitlement, which will only be
mollified by more special treatment. Just as Walter White found that his criminal
actions only led to a spiral of further moral compromise, your veterans will see extra
perks based on join date or post count as proof of their privileged status and then
demand more. They start to see the community as their personal tree house, where
they get to decide who does and does not get to be one of the cool kids. “Newbie
bashing” is an incredibly common sight on communities across the Internet, and it
remains a wretched and cowardly form of bullying. If you allow it because of the fear of
alienating your veteran users it won’t be long before you’ve choked off the flow of new
users to your community. You won’t see any complaints from the tree house either,
just a sudden realization that there are a lot more tumbleweeds around than there
used to be.

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We’ve presented the problem, but where’s the solution? Magnets? Science? Cooking
crystal meth in a second-hand RV? The answer is simply vigilance. Be aware of this
problem. Be aware that people are going to try and pull up the ladder on new users,
and head that behaviour off at the pass. Don’t allow newbie bashing, or any other kind
of mindless bullying. Your veterans can and will be your best asset if you’re in this for
the long haul, but you don’t need to show your gratitude with special treatment or
perks. Show it by doing a damn fine job, day in and day out and making sure that new
users are welcomed. Like so many community problems, the main thing you need to
handle this problem is the courage to tackle it without worrying about alienating your
most frequent users.
Quick Takeaways
Ø Attracting members is vital. Don’t simply build it and hope people
show up, have an attraction plan in place from the start.
Ø Engagement is crucial for long-term success. Make sure your sign up
is hassle free and that users have reasons to stay. Crucially, make
sure they have no reason to leave.
Ø Gamification is a powerful motivator, but it needs to be motivating the
right behaviour. Consider what behaviour you’re incentivising, don’t
simply plug in someone else’s system.
Ø Don’t let your veteran members push new members around. Over
time, this causes a stagnant culture that will lead to the death of your
community.
You can use competitions to encourage users to create a great deal

41

Measuring the Success of Your Community
Once your community is up and running, you’ll need ways to measure your success.
It’s important to have concrete parameters for this, to judge how well your community
strategy is working. There are a number of different aspects of your community that
can be measured to provide a good idea of the health of your community.
Surfacing and Curating Community Generated Content
Your community can be a fantastic resource for content generation. There are a
number ways it can help:
Ø Reading what your community has to say about your products, your business
and the surrounding culture of it can be a great way to come up with ideas for
your own content marketing.
Ø Your community can be a great place to recruit fans to write freelance content
for your marketing. You can pick the best writers and the most enthusiastic
brand advocates and give them an opportunity to be a part of your brand
themselves.
Community KPIs
Questions Answered
Simply keeping track of how many enquiries your staff (or diligent community
members) are able to answer can be a good indicator of success in your community.
The fact that users are interested in your products and their questions are being
answered quickly and accurately speaks to the utility they’re receiving from it.
Leads Created
The one that makes you the best friend of the sales team. Looking at the number of
sales leads that have been created is one of the most concrete ways of showing that
your community is generating revenue for your business. Adding integration to a
service like Salesforce makes it simple to track these statistics.

42

Changes in Call Ticket Volume
Deflecting support tickets is one of the primary advantages of a support community,
but how do you measure the tickets that you never ended up seeing? Look at the
volume of calls that you’re receiving compared to before your community initiative, and
then normalise that number to any other external factors that may have affected it. For
instance, if the call volume has gone up but your company’s revenue have also
increased, you should account for this in your statistics.
Time to Resolution For Tickets and Other Issues
These are a no-brainer for support communities. If your community is helping you to
resolve tickets faster, it’s likely to be paying for itself in terms of resources. As with
sales leads, tying your community into dedicated support software such as Zendesk
can make it much easier to keep track of this metric.
Community Health
Measuring the health of your community can be a little trickier than other KPIs,
because it can’t be entirely based on numbers. Certainly, there are metrics that can be
measured, but it’s important to normalise these against more subjective concerns.
There are a lot of busy forum communities on the Internet that get great traffic, but
have a poorly managed and toxic userbase. Any community manager who’s ever
overseen a crisis can tell you that a thousand new users can be a bad thing, if they’ve
only joined to spout abuse and venom at the populace. Clear metrics that you can use
include:
New Members
With that caveats out of the way, new users are generally a good way of measuring
the health of your community. They can bring fresh perspective, fresh input and fresh
hits for your advertising if you’re so inclined. While this number ticking upwards isn’t
always a sign of a healthy community, a community without new members is on the
road to stagnation.
Active Members
Membership count is nice, but it’s just a number. The heart of your community is its
active members. You can normally expect to see a group of core members who post

43

much more than the average. Keep an eye on this metric, because these members
are the ones you’ll find easiest to convert into the valuable brand advocates that are so
vital to the success of your community. Even if other metrics are going up, a lower
count of active members means that there may be a hole in the boat somewhere.
Content Volume
This is an important metric for most communities. How many comments and
discussions are your members generating? It’s good to have high numbers, but also
for there to be an anchor point between them. For example: if your members are
generating a vast number of discussions but few comments, you’re undoubtedly
seeing a lot of low quality, unengaging content in your community. Conversely, seeing
a vast number of comments in a small number of discussions can mean that you
community is stagnating, and members are staying in their own little tree houses.
Normalise these statistics against your member activity counts, and the subjective
qualities of your board to find out what they really mean.
Quick Takeaways
Ø KPIs will depend on the goals for your community, but there are a lot
of different ways to measure its success.
Ø Choose the most suitable metrics, and set realistic targets.
Ø Have an action plan in place in case your strategy turns out to be
unsuitable for achieving your goals.
Ø Ensure that your community is healthy in the long term by keeping an
eye on its health metrics as well as business goals.

44

About Vanilla Forums
More than ever, consumers of content, goods and services want a voice within
a community of others who all share a common interest.
With so many sites competing for attention, a successful community must be
engaging and reward member participation. Vanilla provides a modern
community platform to organizations who want to improve customer service,
increase advocacy, and strengthen brand loyalty. Vanilla has the features you
expect from a modern platform including: complete theme control, a
comprehensive reputation system, notifications and single-sign-on.
Founded in December 2009, Vanilla started as an open source project. Today,
Vanilla's software-as-a-service (cloud) offering helps thousands of companies
provide a great community experience to millions of people worldwide.
Join the conversation:
§ Twitter @Vanilla
§ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vanilla-forums-inc
§ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vanillaforums
§ GitHub: https://github.com/vanillaforums

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