Welcome to my first Invision Community blog post!
For those that haven't yet seen me making my way around this community, I'm Gary, and I have just recently joined the Customer Service team at Invision Community. I want to take this moment to thank the staff for giving me such an amazing opportunity and welcoming me with open arms.
My history goes way back to circa 2004-2005 (I was still…
As the Invision Community platform continues to evolve, so do the precarious ploys of pesky bots.
Oftentimes spammers, whether they are bots or actual humans, spam your community with links in an effort to boost their website’s SEO.
There are already a number of ways in the Invision Community platform to fight against spam, including…
Our native Spam Defense built into the pl…
Since the dawn of the Internet, forums have remained a dominant force on the worldwide web.
Invision Community not only survived the social media boom, we thrived. Our community forum platform is an industry leader and continues to serve thousands of businesses year-round.
If community forums are tried and true, then why is the average Internet user bombarded with pleas to follow a bra…
So you’re a small/medium sized business who purchased one of our plans and launched a new community. The topics, replies and views will start to rack up any time now, right? Riiight?!
Perhaps you’re a major brand wanting to give your customers a place to connect, ask questions and get more information, but aren't sure how to inspire them to join.
Maybe you haven’t even pulled the trigger…
Front-facing support creates visible opportunities for clients to find answers to both frequently asked and uncommon questions.
Earlier this year, Invision Community lifted the veil off support, shifting from a private, 1-on-1, email-driven medium to open topics in our community support forum.
We found ourselves answering the same questions because we hadn’t fully leaned into community…
The holy trinity of successful communities intertwines cause, experiences and value together. Create these and your community will no doubt hold a special place in peoples’ hearts.
Before we unpack this special trifecta, let’s define what success means through the lens of community building.
While success is subjective, there are a few things we can all agree on:
Communities…
Every time I checked in with a newly launched running community, it seemed like there were more and more new people posting.
As a result, I found it harder to find my friends' latest run write-ups and even harder to reply directly to them. Speaking with other early adopters, they felt the same way, and we all eventually drifted out of the community's orbit.
It's natural to want your com…
🟢 Scaling your community requires overcoming many barriers and learning new ways of working with your community. Rosie explores this in her blog: How we are at the small scale is who we are at the large scale.
"In community, we often say to do things that don't scale. To start small. To get the foundations right. To trust that how we are and what we do is what the community becomes, on a larg…
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to moderating/guiding an online community.
Each digital world includes its own series of hurdles to overcome. As a community gains momentum and the registration count climbs higher, community moderators are presented with new challenges. These tasks become inherently more complex as a result, siphoning precious resources and oftentimes pa…
Community sharing is community caring.
Take it from me: prominently curating your members’ content will profoundly accelerate growth. It’s also pretty darn fun.
I’ve run my company, BreatheHeavy, since 2004. While many online businesses shuttered because of social media’s looming presence, mine thrived because of the community. Full disclosure? I had no idea creating a community …
Moderation feels a bit like an outdated term created pre-social media, but it stuck. We’d like to re-frame your thinking in terms of guiding your community versus moderating it.
Guidance is an essential component to any thriving community because it creates structure and boundaries for the community.
Oftentimes, people think community guidance is about restriction, but i…
Harness the force as a community leader.
A long time ago in the Interwebs far, far away... I proudly signed off all my posts and emails with the title: Owner, Administrator. Anyone in a 10-mile digital radius from me was made well aware:
I AM AN OWNER AND ADMINISTRATOR. I AM IMPORTANT I PROMISE. I OWN AND ADMINISTRATE!!!
Granted I held off on the all-caps, but still.…
Promote kindness and foster interpersonal relationships through the power of vulnerability to outshine toxicity in your online community.
Before my time as a Community Advocate with Invision Community, I focused all my attention on my own online community, BreatheHeavy. Pop music and Britney Spears news are the bread and butter of BreatheHeavy. As you can imagine, fans of pop stars are en…
One of the most commonly asked questions we get is how to ensure your new community launch is successful.
You may think that if you have the right features with the correct configuration, success is guaranteed, but it requires more than that.
Way back in the early 2000s when the internet was in its infancy, there was an explosion of new communities. If you had some webspace, a little tec…
Moats have been used for centuries as a way to defend a building from potential attack.
A flooded ditch around a castle is a great way to make it harder to be taken. You can't push battering rams against walls, and neither can you dig under the castle. Quite frankly, a moat is a pretty decent deterrent when there are plenty of other castles to pillage.
What does this mean for your busine…
Conspiracy theories have roots in the 19th century and have been popular for decades. Until recently, conspiracy theorists have lived in the margins. They are often convinced the earth is flat, Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone, and the moon landings were faked in a Hollywood sound stage.
More recently, with 9/11 and the coronavirus pandemic, these conspiracy theories have become more mainst…
The World Health Organization (WHO) is the world's most trusted source of information on international health, and a foremost partner to public health agencies combating the coronavirus. They also understand the critical need for risk communication and community engagement to respond to the coronavirus pandemic -- a valuable strategy that any online community can adopt in these volatile times.
…
If your brand sells a product or service, the first thing that comes to mind as a benefit to building your community is support deflection.
And it's easy to see why. It's something you can quickly calculate an ROI for. Let's say every 20 hits to a public question with a solved answer from a client or team member equates to one less ticket. If a ticket costs $10 to solve on average, it's strai…
We are currently living through one of the most turbulent times in history.
A once-in-a-century pandemic has a grip on all of us.
Whatever the outcome, come the end of the year, few of us are going to be the same again. We will have to sacrifice our personal freedoms, and some of us much more.
Like you, I'm worried about my family, my friends and neighbours. I'm watching the news, s…
The news is currently filled with anxiety over coronavirus and workers are being encouraged to work from home where possible to limit or delay its spread.
For many people used to commuting daily and working in shared offices, this is a huge upheaval which will take a while to adjust.
How do you stay motivated and productive when you're not at your desk and held accountable by your collea…
CEO Mark Triggon, previously the chief merchandising officer at Target, laid out his plans to turn around the beleaguered American retailer Bed Bath & Beyond. Part of that plan was reducing the number of can openers from 12 to 3.
Sales rose.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Tritton explained how tests conducted in his first few months at the company showed that less i…
The goal of every client here in the Invision peer community, myself included, is to launch and run successful communities.
Whether I’m going to be able to achieve that success in the new year depends entirely on trying these 10 steps. I know if that if I stick to these steps, then my community will grow – and I know if you follow along, your community will too.
10. Ignore Google
…
When the clocks strike midnight on New Year's Eve, we will enter the third decade of producing Invision Community.
A lot has changed since we set up in 2002. Our team has grown and our product matured. In a world where online startups explode and die within a few years, we're something of an anomaly.
We still have the same love and passion for creating the very best tools to build a comm…
The engagement trap is a race to community activity for the sake of activity. It's usually measured by simple aggregate numbers like the total number of posts, topics, likes, or members.
Many community managers and webmasters enjoy spouting engagement numbers. It's an easy number to brag about. It's an easy number to find. It's also, unfortunately, a terrible metric to measure.
…
