Online Community Onboarding
I love what Samuel Hulick is doing at UserOnboard. His teardowns of the initial onboarding efforts of popular websites, apps and social media platforms are insightful, humorous and good-spirited.
According to Samuel, “user onboarding is the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product.” Onboarding is a big topic for online communities. We want to increase the likelihood that new members will become amazing contributors. We couldn’t have a better guide than Samuel. Among our topics:
- The creative, less disruptive ways of confirming email addresses
- How to introduce new members to community functionality
- Using lifecycle emails to engage members
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?
The principles of good community management can benefit more than just professionals in our industry. They can be applied by managers and executives in other disciplines, helping them to be more effective leaders.
There are people who believe that, in order to be a community professional, you must always be connected. Because the internet is always on, so must we be. But if you follow that belief to its logical conclusion, it ends in burnout.