Congrats, you’ve signed up for a Vanilla forum! Now what?
Starting a community is an exciting but large undertaking. Sometimes it can be difficult to know where to begin, especially if this your first time using Vanilla Forums. Here’s a list of 10 things we recommend you do first.
1. Confirm Account and Billing info.
Before you dive into customizing your forum, it’s a good idea to double check that your account and billing info is correct and ready to go. This will ensure that your forum subscription is never interrupted.
- Go to https://vanillaforums.com/ and click Account on the upper right hand corner.
- Sign in with the login information provided in your welcome/new forum email.
- Confirm your plan, your credit card info, and select your billing notification preferences.
Have any questions about your account or your preferred payment option not appearing? Contact billing[at]vanillaforums.com. We’re happy to help!
2. Select Your Logo.
This is an important first step in setting up your forum, as it can instantly convey the personality, brand and purpose of your site. Accepted file types include .jpg, .gif and .png. Files should be no larger than 10 mb.
- Go to https://vanillaforums.com/ and click Account on the upper right hand corner.
- Sign in with the login information provided in your welcome/new forum email.
- Select “Dashboard” in the upper right hand corner (to the left of “Account” and “Profile.”)
- Under the “Appearance” section, select “Banner.”
- Enter your homepage title, your site description, upload your banner title OR banner logo, and upload a favicon. Click “Save.”
3. Select Your Layout.
Vanilla offers different options for how users can view your forum. Here, you can select from “Discussions,” “Categories,” or “Activity” layout options.
- Select “Homepage,” under Appearance.
- Select the page you want your users to see as soon as they visit your forum (Tip: all Discussions is the most popular.) Click “Save.”
4. Select Your Theme.
Your forum’s theme is like its wallpaper. A nice theme makes your forum more inviting and memorable , so it’s important to select one right from the get-go.
- Select “Themes,” under Appearance.
- Choose your theme. You can “Preview” a theme before clicking “Apply.”
Don’t see any themes you like? You can customize a theme (or create your own) by editing the html/css. Click “Customize Theme” under the Appearance category, or contact lizzie@vanillaforums.com if you’d like Team Vanilla to create a custom theme for you.
5. Customize your domain name
Instead of having your new forum’s url look like this: joesforum.vanillaforums.com, it can look like this: joesforum.com or forum.joeswebsite.com It’s a simple, two-step process that we recommend for all new forum owners. (Please note that you must purchase or create your desired url from a domain registrar before customizing your Vanilla Forums domain.)
- Log in to the domain name registrar where your domain is hosted (ex. GoDaddy, Rackspace, etc.)
- In your Admin control panel, create a DNS record for your domain so that it points at our servers. You have two choices here:
- If you want to use a subdomain (forum.joeswebsite.com) create a CName record for your domain that points to your Vanilla address: joesforum.vanillaforums.com
- If you want to use a top level domain (joesforum.com) create an A Record for your domain, using your forum’s IP address. To look up your forum’s IP address:
- Visit http://network-tools.com/
- Choose “Lookup” from the list of radio buttons
- Enter your forum name (joesforum.vanillaforums.com) in the long box, select “Go”
- Look further down the page, it will list your IP address
- Back in your Vanilla Dashboard, you’ll notice a Custom Domain menu under the Appearance category. You can alternatively follow directions for setting up your custom domain here. Or, if you’ve already followed instructions to configure your custom domain, you can confirm that it’s configured properly here.
6. Add users
It’s not a community without any users! Select “Users” below the “Appearance” category in your Dashboard.
- Click “Add User”
- Enter a username and password (or generate a password.)
- Enter the user’s email
- (Carefully!) check the role(s) that apply to this new user
User login information will then automatically be emailed to your new users. As an Admin, you’ll always be able to edit your user’s roles, and password re-sets are always available, too.
7. Registration Settings
How do you want your users to access your forum? Do you want to grant them access immediately, or do you prefer reviewing and accepting applicants individually? Select “Registration” from under the “Users” area of your Dashboard to choose from a variety of options.
8. Set up social connect
How do you want your community to log in to your forum? Via a password, or via a social network, like Twitter, or Facebook? Add different authentication methods by selecting “Authentication” from your Dashboard.
Here are some further, step-by-step instructions for configuring Facebook, Twitter or Google Sign-In for your forum:
http://vanillaforums.com/blog/help/how-to-add-facebook-twitter-google-and-openid-to-your-community/
9. Categories
Categories organize your community’s discussions. Select Categories from your Dashboard menu to add a new category. You can configure custom permissions for each category you create, however this isn’t necessarily something you have to do right away.
Beware: Categories can start to add up. In your Dashboard under Categories, you can organize and nest your categories by dragging and dropping them. As you’re working, click “View Page” at any time to see what your work looks like live on your forum!
Also, check out our video tutorial on category editing and organizing here.
10. Addons
Vanilla is endlessly pluggable and customizable. However, if you’re just starting out, select Browse Addons from your Dashboard to view some of our more basic and most popular plugins. Each Addon has a brief description next to it, so be sure to read more about the plugin before enabling it. You can always keep track of your enabled vs. disabled plugins here in the Browse Addons menu.
… And you’ve made it through the fist 10 essential steps! Now it’s time to focus on building up your content and growing your community.
Questions? Join the conversation for our hosted customers here: http://vanillaforums.com/help Interested in having Team Vanilla customize something special for your forum? Contact lizzie[at]vanillaforums.com at any time.
Welcome Aboard!
One of the best things about starting a forum is experiencing the impressive reach and quality of content that a forum community can create. One of the most difficult things about starting a forum, though, is growing that community. It can be a daunting task, and there’s certainly no single correct way to do it.
Based on our knowledge as a forum software provider and considering many of our customers’ experiences, here are 6 tips on how to nurture and build online communities:
1. Recruiting and Seeding Content
Your forum is ready to go, and you’re excited to begin sharing your brand and message with an online community; all you need now are users. Where do you begin? How do you attract that very first user? How do you encourage your first user(s) to seed the initial discussions and remain active when your community is still relatively quiet?
Recruit your friends. Reach out to your colleagues and family members. All it takes are a few users posting a few discussions and comments, and suddenly your forum is no longer empty. Talk about your new forum on your personal Facebook page, and tweet about it! Promote your new forum on your blog or website, if you have one. Respond to your users’ discussions and comments quickly and in a manner that encourages dialogue. Comment on other forums or blogs that are relevant to your brand and include a signature with your community’s URL, if possible.
2. Lower the Barriers to Entry
Registration methods are, quite literally, the ‘gateway’ to your online community. While it’s important to cultivate appropriate community members and to consider security, avoid adding unnecessary barriers to the registration process. In an age where social connect options like Facebook Connect give users one-click membership into new sites, new users can get easily annoyed or discouraged by endless registration hoop jumping, so keep your community’s ‘gateway’ as simple and as welcoming as possible.
3. Follow-through
Persistence and follow-through are essential when attempting to grow an online community. It’s thrilling when new users sign up, however this isn’t the time to congratulate yourself and call it a day. A new sign-up is when your work begins.
Unfortunately, you can’t depend on your new users to guide themselves or remain active on their own. It’s up to you to follow-through, nurture and encourage their activity. Send personal, private messages from within your forum to new members (we have tools to automate this!). Ask them if they have questions, or if there’s something they’d like to see that’s not currently available on your community. Schedule and devise a strategy for sending out a community newsletter or “check in” emails as your community begins to grow. Manually compile your list of contacts and schedule your sending times based on your users’ status/history within the community. Stay in touch with your users and ask for their feedback constantly.
4. Delegate and Manage Responsibility
Hopefully your community will grow quickly! Don’t be afraid to delegate responsibility to others when that time comes. One person simply cannot successfully manage a large community on their own.
Consider your most active and quality community member(s) as you begin the recruiting process because they already know your community’s personality and message (Vanilla can help identify your most valued contributors). Take great care to educate the community manager(s) you select, on what your forum’s personality and messages are (if they don’t already know.) Check up on your community managers frequently and thoroughly to ensure they’re fostering your community and your message with as much as care as you yourself would.
5. Keep Tabs
By now you may have noticed a theme: When growing a community, keep in close touch with your users. Make a habit of reading each discussion and comment every day. This can quickly become a rather hefty task as your community gets bigger and bigger, but it’s the best way to remain aware and engaged with your users. Consider it your “daily community digest.” This digest will dictate how to best evolve as a community and how to react to your users. After your community grows beyond the point where it is realistic to read every comment, rely on your platform to provide you with a roll-up digest of the best (and worst) content being generated by your users.
6. Gamify for Increased Positive Engagement
Users respond to positive reinforcement and gaming techniques. Entice and reward your users by incorporating a reputation system in your community. This can range from the very basic to the more complex. For example, can you pinpoint certain users that frequently post and comment with insightful and productive content? Reward them by considering them for a Moderator position. Vanilla’s new Reactions, Badges & Rewards is another great way to gamify the community experience and to reward active, loyal users. Custom ranking systems, complete with custom requirements, levels/titles and styling, are also possible and worth considering, once you’re ready.
In December of 2010 I gave a presentation at the Canadian Innovation Exchange, where Vanilla had been nominated as one of the most innovative tech companies in Canada. Afterwards, I had a number of people approach me to ask about a slide from my presentation that showed the number of posts on discussion forums vs the number of status updates on Facebook. Everyone wanted to know where I got my data.
Continued…
A successful community is an engaging and welcoming place where people can build new connections and discover new things. Vanilla Badges and Reactions are at the foundation of our member-driven reputation and recommendation engine, which helps you build an engaged and positive community.
Vanilla Reactions allow members to quickly react in different ways to discussions and comments. The Reactions can be used to highlight interesting discussions, suppress abusive comments, flag abusive members, and create more nuanced reputation profiles. Vanilla Badges serve to reward community members for positive participation – members are awarded Badges for receiving praise from others and for various other forms of participation.
Reactions
What can I do with Reactions?
Create a reputation score: Points are awarded for positive contributions and subtracted for posting off-topic or abusive comments. Reactions have a numeric value: most Reactions will add 1 point or subtract 1 point to the member’s reputation score. Moderators have special Reactions that can add or subtract 5 points.
Award Badges: Users can receive badges for receiving positive Reactions such as ‘Like’, ‘Agree’ or ‘Awesome’.
Promote good comments: Comments that receive positive Reactions can be highlighted. The threshold for what gets highlighted is configurable. The default threshold is a score of +5 points. (Comments and discussions are awarded points using the value of the Reactions given.)
Bury bad comments: Comments that get negative Reactions can be collapsed and greyed out. The default threshold is -5.
Member-driven curation: A ‘Best of’ page can be added to your forum. It displays posts that have received the most positive reactions.
How do I setup Reactions?
In Add-ons, enable ‘Reactions’. Once this is done, your Dashboard will show a link to Reactions under new section called ‘Reputation’. To enable Reactions, activate the Reactions that you want to display.
Badges
What can I do with Badges?
Award Badges: By enabling the Badges add-on, members will receive Badges that reinforce positive participation in the community. Badges are awarded for uploading a profile photo, receiving positive Reactions, membership anniversary, etc.
Create custom Badges: Custom Badges can be uploaded. Custom Badges can only be awarded by members in a role where the permission has been granted.
How do I setup Badges?
To enable Badges, enable the Badges add-on. This will create a new item in the Dashboard menu in the Reputation section.
Why does someone join a forum? Common reasons I see are to ask or answer a question, share an opinion, or share work or a hobby. What do these things have in common? They all engage the ego, and they all come with the mindset of “this is serious business.” They can easily devolve into rude competition. You can gather a lot of expertise on a forum with this sort of exchange, but you will not have a community.
Setting the tone of your community is an immense challenge, because it requires vigilance and concerted effort. Not only must you set the example through heavy participation, but you must also find and rebuke comments that set a contrary tone. This is a slow process, and sometimes you need to shatter the “serious business” attitude when it gets uncontrollable. That’s when it’s time to call in the big guns: silliness.
Silliness solves multiple problems at once. First, it just ruins that facade of seriousness. Being silly requires letting go of all that for just a minute. Second, it makes you more real and shows another aspect of you to the other members. Once you’ve been completely not-serious with someone on the Internet, I find that makes it click in your head “This is a real person just like me,” which immediately and permanently changes the context in which you address them.
So what’s “silly”? It can be talking about anything other than the main topic of your forum (“So who else here likes taking weekend camping trips as much as me?”). But to really see the full benefit, delve deeper into goofing around, making jokes, and being completely and innocently tongue-in-cheek and off-the-wall. I like to break the ice by playing pranks on members. How did that member’s title become “Minister of Mischief”? Who changed all of the moderators’ avatars into pictures of Hollywood actors? Be the instigator.
Is this appropriate on every forum? Maybe not. But don’t be quick to say “that would never work on my site.” I find too many forum owners themselves fall into the “serious” trap and think it would damage their site’s reputation to have off-topic banter muddy their site. The irony is that this sort of banter is the surest sign of a truly healthy community that is forming bonds much deeper than the topics at hand.
Meet Joe Guy. Joe is 18 years old, and he loves the “Maine Coon” breed of cats (Who could blame him? They’re amazing animals). He goes on the web looking for people who share his interest, and eventually he meets a bunch of friends in various places who all own and love Maine Coons. Joe decides to start a discussion forum about Maine Coons, and all of his new friends join. It’s a happy time, and his community grows quickly. Everyone knows and appreciates Joe for all the hard work he does on the board. Throughout his college years Joe continues working on the board, but he’s forced to pass off a bunch of the moderator and admin duties to a few highly reliable folks he knows in the community. Now Joe is 25 years old, he’s graduated college and has a job that he really loves. It’s a time-consuming job, and he has almost no time for his community. He’s cycled through a bunch of admins and moderators, but it still pretty much runs on it’s own, and he’s keeping a decent chunk of change in his pocket every month thanks to the advertisements. Now Joe is 28, he’s married, he has a baby boy, he doesn’t even own a Maine Coon, he hasn’t had one in 4 years. Somehow his Maine Coon community has grown to be really big – it’s probably the biggest one on the internet. The software that’s been running this whole time has had many hiccups along the way, and he’s fixed the problems by throwing more and more money at the server hardware, and he knows that if he changed to a new platform he would definitely save a ton of money. But Joe has a really big problem:
Joe is completely out of touch with his community. He relies entirely on the admins and mods that he’s put in charge. They’ve become the voice of the community, and he doesn’t want to do anything to upset the balance. He knows that in order to save money, he’s going to need to change his platform in some way – Upgrade to a new version of software that runs faster and cheaper. But Joe knows that people are averse to change. If he makes even a small change to the system, people will get upset, and he definitely doesn’t want to upset his moderators. Without them he wouldn’t be able to manage the community. Joe is scared, and he’s about to make a HUGE decision under the pressure of that fear.
Continued…
At Vanilla, we spend a lot of time thinking about how communities grow and evolve. It’s something that we try to help our customers with every day, and we are constantly looking to competitors of all sizes to see what works and what doesn’t. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot of the side effects of what makes a community grow.
Take Facebook. Obviously there are many reasons why Facebook has exploded with contributors, but arguably the biggest reason for this growth is the way they structure friendships. During Facebook’s early days, they noticed that a new user was more likely to continue contributing to Facebook if they had 10 or more friends. So, their goal became to ensure that friend discovery was paramount, and that in a user’s first visit they could quickly and easily get up to 10 friends. The powerful side effect of this method is that immediately the users have content that, while they might not be interested in the content itself, they were certainly interested in the people who were posting it. The content we post online gives others insight into what our interests are, and as such, who we are. It gives others the opportunity to identify elements that strike a chord within – elements that they can use to respond to and help strengthen the relationships they have with others.
So, I join Facebook. Immediately I am surrounded with people I know (or have known) and I’m discovering all kinds of things about them. I see that they’ve already posted pictures with me in them, maybe pictures I’ve never seen before. I’m engaged. I stay engaged. I go back every day. My friend’s list grows. At current standing I have 277 friends. I’ve been on Facebook for over 4 years.
4 years, 277 friends.
At Facebook, I’m essentially in a forum with fewer than 300 other members. Sure, there are bazillions of users on Facebook, but I’m not related to them. I might see a tiny sliver of the content they post if it gets liked or promoted by my friend group, but that’s it. Essentially I’m in a <300 member forum that has higher engagement than a traditional forum, but not on any particular topic.
Continued…
One mistake I frequently see new forum owners make is to start like this: They sign up for their forum, start a “Welcome!” discussion, and then start a “Rules for this forum” discussion which they make an announcement and close. They’ve instantly crippled their site.
Remember grade school? I think everyone, at some point, had one of those teachers who had a big sign at the back of the room that outlined a half dozen “Classroom Rules” that stated painfully obvious things like “Raise your hand to speak” that anyone above the first grade knew. It does little but insult the students.
Here’s the facts: The people who will follow those rules already know them and are insulted and bored. (Like their lives don’t have enough rules to remember already – they’re gone). The ones you’re targeting will simply ignore it.
The caveat is with communities on a large scale. When you have a very large site, it becomes exponentially more challenging to communicate expectations to new members. The gold standard in large-community rules was set by Flickr with their community guidelines. It both addresses common, real concerns, and it sets the tone for the community. “Don’t be Creepy: You know that guy. Don’t be that guy.” They’ve crafted a valuable resource rather than a boring introduction to their site. The guidelines weren’t the first thing on their homepage on day 1. Deciding when (or if) to transition to written rules is an important decision.
Posting rules is the “easy out” attempt for setting the tone of your site. The bad news is, it’s a lot more work than that and will take months or years of hands-on attention. The good news is, the reward is a truly great community, and that’s priceless.
Jan 27, 2012
Uncategorized
The ways that active forum users are different than the general Internet population can be summarized in two characteristics: engagement and influence. In the age of social media these are two key metrics that marketers are trying to grow for their products. Therefore they should sit-up and take notice at some fascinating attributes of forum members, gleaned from a Post-Release/Synovate report published in 2010. The report concluded that forum-users are:
- 3.5 times more likely to proactively recommend a particular purchase to someone else.
- 3.5 times more likely to share links about new products.
- 4 times more likely to post online ratings and reviews.
- 2 times as likely to share advice – offline and in person – based on information they’ve read online.
Forum members are also much more open to discussing specific products and services. In fact, many forums are built up around that intent. If you look at this recent post from CarTalk, you see forum members specifically discussing Dodge’s new DART vehicle and relating it to the vehicle’s history, or this one where they discuss the pros and cons of different vehicle brands.
Not only are forum participants likely to be engaged and influential on the forums themselves, but they also self-publish and organize events. 20.6% of forum participants have a blog versus 2.1% of the general Internet population, according to the Post-Release/Synovate study. And 18.8% take an active role in organizing an offline event or meetup for a group that met originally online versus 2.4% of the general Internet population.
If you are looking for engaged and influential people to build a powerful word-of-mouth marketing engine then active forum participants should be part of your reach strategy.
Jan 17, 2012
Uncategorized
Discussion forums are based around conversations. They are typically open discussions started around a topic and category and continued openly among members that have access to that particular category. They are like the commons or quad at a university. While each member has their own identity and identifiers, the activity happens in the common area – the category and topic of discussion. This differs from a social network like Facebook in that most of the activity happens on each individual’s home or profile page rather than a common community area.
To be fair, Facebook has worked hard to make your homepage work like a forum by showing you relevant posts from other people in your homepage timeline. Previous social networks like Myspace were geared more to everything happening on your homepage or someone else’s profile page. Still though, we can say that social networking platforms like Facebook and messaging platforms like Twitter focus more on what different individuals are saying or doing vs the group community conversations that are the foundation of all activity in the forums.
A post in a forum also differs from other social networking platforms in that there are much larger limits on post size and they have additional optional features such as text markup, file uploads including inline picture additions and commenting, ability to post programming code snippets, and the like. In terms of the available features in their creation, forum posts are more like member blog posts that follow one after the other in a logical stream.
Because forums are created with conversations in mind, they are structured to make those conversations easy to locate and participate in. They are structured therefore with a defined category – topic structure for easy access to groups of conversations or comments about a specific topic. On Facebook you can’t do a search for or even find a link to all conversations about ‘XBOX 360 games’. On a Forum, you could access this through the category structure in seconds. If you want to access a conversation about a particular game, someone has probably already started one, so you can go there and join in. If not, you can start one yourself and other members will join in the conversation. The structure has been optimised to create and maintain active conversations.
The structure is further optimized to help people find discussions who aren’t yet members. Discussions have their own link structure to make them searchable/findable through search engines. Many large forums have literally millions of links that match to very specific keywords and these are a major source of traffic and new members over time.
There are three main types of members: administrators, moderators and members. Administrators have control over all aspects of a forum, including technical aspects and design. Moderators will typically have more limited administrative privileges mostly related to managing content, but in some cases also providing limited user management. Members are provided the ability to view and post content. There may be restrictions on what they can post or what types of images or signatures they can add to their profiles until they have established themselves as good actors in the forum. This gets into the concept of Roles and Permissions, which provide for exacting member roles to fit different scenarios. For example, a forum administrator may create different member roles to view and/or post to different categories or sub-forums in the forum. There could be special categories available only to paid member roles for instance.
Connections between members typically happen at the conversation or common-interest level. Members can follow a particular discussion by bookmarking it to be notified whenever there is a new comment. They might also follow another member to be notified whenever they create a new discussion or comment on an existing one. Where they wish to make a 1-to-1 connection, they will typically do it through the private messaging system.
That concludes the brief overview of what makes up a discussion forum. In the next post I will cover information related to the size of the audience for forums.
This is intended to be a seven-part series with the following parts:
- What makes up a discussion forum?
- How big is the audience for forums?
- How are forum members unique vs the general Internet population?
- How can marketers create their own forum?
- Where does a forum fit in an overall community strategy?
- What are the opportunities for marketing through external forums?
- What are some of the best practices by successful forum marketers?
