Hi all,
Hope you have had a great week. I was lucky enough to spend the last few days with other Community Managers from around the world at the annual Swarm conference.
There was many smart and talented people to learn from at the conference. It was fascinating hearing about some of the trends in online communities, and particularly valuable to swap ideas about how to tackle common challenges and foster even more vibrant communities.
I was astonished to hear statistics from online community guru Richard Millington about the widespread failure of branded communities. Rich trawled through a press release database and found over 875 branded communities had been launched by companies around the world in the past decade. Yet only a dozen – just over 1 per cent – of these communities were still operating today and had more than 100 posts. It’s certainly not easy building successful online communities!
Rich shared many valuable insights into the common traits that successful online communities tend to share. Common interests and goals are obviously vital. But one thing I didn’t agree with Rich was his view that support forums aren’t true communities. He argues it’s because people just come to get their question answered and then leave. That is the behaviour of some of our members, and we certainly think it’s often a great result if you can very quickly and easily get the information you need and then get back to work. But it’s not the case with everyone.
Regular visitors to the MYOB Community Forum will know that it’s not just staff who answer questions here. The large numbers of Partners and other users who share their valuable time, experience and experience to assist others on the forum is testimony to the fact that this is a true community that people enjoy being a part of.
When I ask Partners at events like our recent Partner Connection about why they contribute to the community, the reasons I typically hear are “to help others”, “to share knowledge”, that “I enjoy interacting with other users” and so on. This is a community that many people really enjoy being a member of. That said, if there’s anything we can do to help foster a stronger sense of belonging and community, please let us know.
One thing that could really help is if you all shared a little bit about yourself. The Welcome board and the Mind your own business board in the Purple Lounge are great places for this. You could start by introducing yourself to the community (and meeting some of our moderators). Or how about telling us what your top 5 tech tools are? Feel free to also start your own threads and ask the rest of the community about a topic you are passionate about. It might be serious, or just plain silly.
It was another busy week on the Community Forum, with 200 new members joining the community and over 460 posts, including 160 from MYOB staff. A big welcome to all those new community members – it’s great to have you onboard.
Our top contributors this week were Tazinx, jenniek, Julie_A_C, MBSJones and Geoff_. Julie_A_C was the star of the week with the most Accepted Solutions, while jenniek and Tazinx also had multiple posts marked as Solutions. Thanks again for all your great work assisting others.
Love your work,
Jason Hill
Community Manager
