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[Titans] How the Cisco Meraki Community Uses Blogs

CarolineS's avatar
3 years ago

Editor's Note: CarolineS is one of Khoros' top Titans, our community of pros who are skilled at building customer experience programs. Now an independent consultant who helps brands get the most out of their community platforms, she shares her experience below of using Khoros blogs to help build the Cisco Meraki community. Take it away, CarolineS!


A blog post about blogs!

I’m excited to contribute to this new Khoros effort to showcase real-life community examples. Thanks for the opportunity, BlakeH!

One of the things I love most about the Khoros Community platform is its flexibility. Sure, it comes with a few standard interaction styles (blogs, forums, knowledge base, contests), but a clever community team can do a lot with these base types.

Just the blog interaction style has a lot of possibilities - we have used it to solve a myriad of use cases on the Cisco Meraki Community. For example…


Community Announcements

This community-centric blog is perhaps our most typical “blog”; we use it to keep our members appraised about contests, member recognition, and platform updates. The layout is that of a standard blog, with a running list of posts.

 

Community Announcements blog

In addition to posting announcements here, we use Marketo to email our members about new contests and select other announcements. (Can you guess, of the two posts shown in the screenshot above, which we sent an email about?)

See our Community Announcements blog for yourself here.


Service Notices blog

Our support team uses this blog to post about outages and other wide-scale problems. They link to these posts from within our product’s dashboard and also in customer email communications as needed. We were thrilled to be able to create this for our support team (with, frankly, very little effort). Hosting these outage notices certainly aids us in our goal of deflecting support cases!

 

Service Notices blog

Take a look at the Service Notices blog here.


Podcast

We also use a Khoros blog as a home for our podcast, Meraki Unboxed. Posting the podcast episodes on the community gives members the chance to provide feedback on episodes and to interact with our podcast host.

 

Podcast blog

The podcast blog is here.


VIP Program Roster / Hall of Fame

One of our less-traditional uses of the blog interaction style is our Community All-Stars Hall of Fame. Here, we post photos and biographies of each of the members of our VIP program. We use labels to designate which year(s) they were members of the program, creating a historical record as well as an up-to-date roster.

 

All-Stars "blog"

This blog uses the “masonry” layout for a more photo-rich look. You can see it for yourself here.


These are just a few of our uses of blogs - believe it or not, there are more! But that’s enough about how the Meraki Community uses Khoros blogs. I’d love to know how YOUR community uses blogs. Please do share in the comments below.

Questions? Join the discussion by registering or signing into Atlas.

Updated 2 years ago
Version 3.0

7 Comments

  • SuzieH's avatar
    SuzieH
    Khoros Alumni (Retired)
    3 years ago

    Thank you for this article CarolineS. I love hearing how customers use our products, especially when they innovate to stretch a feature in new ways like your VIP Program Roster / Hall of Fame. Thanks for taking the time to write this!

  • Great post.  I will leverage some of these practices with our Superuser program.  

  • Hi CarolineS -

    Thanks for sharing!

    For the Service Notice blog, is it all manual or do you have any system integrations that auto-create posts?

  • JCTatRedSail - the Service Notice blog is all manual at this point. I think our team is looking into a more comprehensive outage-notice system, and this is just an interim quick-fix. But sometimes quick-fixes turn into the long-term solution... 🙂

  •  

    CarolineS -

    Agreed. I'm struggling with this internally right now. Everyone wants the systems to do all the work, and it takes time. A few processes would go a long way to a better experience -- this being one of them.

     

  • Hi CarolineS,

     

    Question for you about the Service Outage blog. How was the choice made to host it in the community? Opposed to the Docs site

    Where does Meraki currently share product updates and bug fixes?

    For us, at AppD, all of that info is all hosted on the Docs site, but now I'm curious if it's getting enough eyes/attention to be useful. 

     

     

  • i_am_ryan - we chose the community for the Service Notice blog because our docs system doesn't really have a "blog"-like system for timely updates. The community-based blog allows subscribing and also comments (which we only allow from a select set of employees in this particular blog).

    For product updates - there are a few different places for these (e.g. our product itself, sometimes in the primary Meraki blog (which is not (YET?!) hosted on the community), email updates, updates in the documentation articles themselves) - but there is a community home for them as well, a "Feature Announcements" blog: https://community.meraki.com/t5/Feature-Announcements/bg-p/new-features Again, it's handy to do the feature announcements on the community because users can subscribe and employees can comment, and also users can subscribe to individual product-based labels in the blog.

    Hope that helps!