Convincing Companies Not to Invest in Community
Not every company is ready to invest in community, or what they think of as “community,” anyway. Half-hearted, impatient efforts can do more harm than good and leave both the company and it’s customers unhappy.
Sarah Judd Welch heads Loyal, a community agency that helps brands develop and leverage their communities online. But that doesn’t mean that every company she talks to gets pushed off the community cliff. Plus:
- Why the ROI of community doesn’t actually matter
- Metrics to measure community quality
- The viability of Slack as a community platform
Continue reading “Convincing Companies Not to Invest in Community”
If you manage an online community long enough, you will have members who experience the ups and downs that life has to offer. They’ll accomplish great things. They’ll find love, get married and have kids. But they’ll also deal with personal loss. They’ll fall ill, and they’ll die.
Some companies don’t want their employees, even their community team, to have a strong personal brand. They feel like time spent on a personal brand is time away from the business, and that the employee is building their brand on the back of the company.
I love what Samuel Hulick is doing at 
With an eye on the conscious and unconscious biases that lead to the contributions of women being overlooked and undervalued, this episode focuses on credit. Sharing it, taking it and ensuring it reaches those who have earned it; not just those who are the loudest.
When a company responds to a complaint posted in an online forum, they receive a greater boost to customer advocacy than when responding to complaints lodged through phone, email, social media or review sites.
Copyright can seem like a big, intimidating topic. But it’s one of the most important areas of law for the online community builder, because we are constantly working with content. Sometimes our own, but mostly the content of others.
Companies mishandle fan sites all the time. If you are lucky enough to have fans building resources and communities around your products, services or talents, you have something really special on your hands. Don’t ruin it.
Filtering technology is essential for large online communities and can be beneficial for communities of all sizes. But I almost never hear community and forum software vendors talk about it. Most communities are simply stuck with a basic word censor. Why?