What makes a good online community member? The concept of choosing your community members may not have occurred to you before. We usually focus on changing the platforms, the questions we ask, the events we host, the community manager and other methods to improve our...
When you hear about a "power user program what comes to mind first, community or product? There's often confusion about exactly how a power user program looks, and who's responsible for it. Is it the product team's responsibility? Is it the community team? The...
Community is not marketing. Community is part of your product. It's part of the User Engagement Cycle. In the cycle, marketing drives users into the cycle. Users connect with your product, then with your brand, and then a community is formed when they connect with...
"We need a community! Go o' mystical community manager, and build us a thriving community!" Shut up you. Blindly saying "We need a community!" won't get you very far. There are many different community programs which are built for entirely different purposes. You...
A lot of business experts will tell your company to "engage" people and "build community", but what does that actually mean? It's important, when hearing advice like this to ask "why?" and "to what end?". The why, for me, has always been to create a positive emotional...
Some of the most exciting and innovative companies are looking for community managers today. Here are 10 amazing opportunities that you can apply for: 1. Coursekit - Community Manager The instructors who use Coursekit are some of the most interesting and...
How do you first get started building a community? It's probably the most common question I hear. Communities are awesome, right? Every company wants one! But where do you start? Having built a number of communities over the past few years, I've learned a lot about...
When users are awesome, you should reward them right? Ehhhh.... maybe. Read the following delicious mix of adjectives, nouns and verbs to learn how rewarding your users can be a bad thing. Why Bad? We'll start with an example. Say you have a message board, and...
A very important distinction for a community builder (or someone looking to hire one) to make is whether they're focused on building internal communities or external communities. The way I see it, you can build an internal community within your existing userbase,...
This was one of the scariest moments of my career. Actually, it wasn't really a moment...it was more of a period of time. I blogged, I branded myself, I built up credibility for my voice and words...I even convinced myself of how super awesome and knowledgeable I was....