The Community Roundtable hosted an event recently called “Perspectives on Community & Collaboration Technology,” and it was a great conversation. My favorite part was the opening by Jillian Bejtlich from BAE Systems because she really called out our entire industry for not innovating much in the past year or two. Challenge. Accepted.
Well, I am happy to be able to respond with our biggest community launch ever for this Autumn Innovation Launch. We have new discussion types (Events) with unique features like Live social video, new integrations with game-changing technologies (Slack), better community management tools, new analytics, and our biggest syndication feature yet. Here’s the wrap up of what is launching through the rest of this year.
Accelerated Community Management
Community management has become more important now than ever, yet the tools for community managers have not changed very much. At Khoros, previously Lithium, we helped community managers build and maintain the largest brand communities on the planet - and we built many of the tools that people have been using for the last decade.
However, Khoros also has best-in-class tools for social and contact center management from Spredfast. After a year of looking at them side by side, we have combined the best parts of both and built some new features to help moderate communities at any scale. We are proud to bring the first of these capabilities to market under the name Accelerated Community Management. Here’s a sneak peek.
If you would like to learn more about how to do things like set up feeds for super users, first time posters, or specific topics, contact us for a demo today!
Slack Integration for better engagement
Slack is one of the most popular communication tools today because it makes it easier to manage the flow of information from multiple different channels. By creating more connections between employee spaces in Slack and customer communities, it is easier to engage in both.
With this integration, Khoros Communities notifications flow into Slack, which allows you to:
- Kudo or Like them in a single click
- Reply in Slack
- Share easily to others to discuss in an internal sidebar
- Search for community content from within Slack
Watch this to see it in action! Also, I know what you are thinking, and the answer is yes! We are working on other apps besides Slack.
Events in Communities
We announced Events at Khoros Engage, and we are really excited about this upcoming launch. Events include all the features you expect; date, time, invitations, maps, threaded discussions, multimedia sharing, featured guests AND live social video.
With Events, you can harness the enthusiasm generated by interactions between your customers, company, and brand ambassadors and foster deeper connections with your customers. Events provide a platform to schedule, announce, inform, and discuss all kinds of topics with as many, or as few, people as you want.
How do we know this will work? Because some brands are already running very successful events programs through their Khoros communities! Fitbit, Splunk, Atlassian, Anaplan, Cisco, Qlik, and Microsoft already drive local meetups and even large conferences through their customer communities.
Release Notes with more information.
Email Analytics
I know we just talked about Slack, but email is still a pretty big thing. In fact, people open emails from their communities at a pretty astounding rate. See Exhibit A.
Giving community owners these analytics shows the big picture when it comes to community engagement. Most community notifications include the entire message of the post, so frequently people do not need to click through to get the message. That means that just tracking visits to content doesn’t give you the full view of how that content is reaching your community. It is important to see the delivery and open rate, and how the click rate drives people to the community. Even more important is understanding who is reading, what they are reading, and when they click! It’s all here now in Email analytics.
Comment Syndication: Interactive discussions
Syndication is one of the most unique and innovative capabilities of the Khoros platform. With this release, syndication now includes interactive forums, or commenting! Customers are already using this to bring commenting back to popular blogs, or to enhance FAQs by making them interactive.
It’s a very powerful tool that is only just beginning to make an impact on some of our most advanced communities. Contact us for a discussion today on how you can leverage comment syndication, and stay tuned for this feature on our own site!
Continuing Innovation through 2020 and beyond
We are working hard to finish this year with a strong set of new features. We are also continuing to improve performance across all of our existing features, including a lot of search upgrades.
We plan to accelerate this pace next year even further as we continue to put an industry-leading 20% of revenue back into R&D. If you have ideas about how Khoros can improve, please visit the Ideas board and let us know.
