Company: Google Local Guides
Company background: Local Guides is an official Google program for Google Maps contributors who share their experiences by way of reviews, photos, business information and more with over 120+ million global program members.
Contact: Traci Cappiello
Title: Program Manager, Community
Related URLs: www.localguidesconnect.com
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe your community(s) and how you decided to start a community or grow/change it? (user request, Khoros suggestion, internal idea, etc.).
Connect was launched in July 2016 to bring together smaller, disparate online communities of Local Guides. Our mission was to become the place for our most passionate Local Guides to connect with each other and Google, to share ideas and more. Since 2016, our program has grown with over 1 million members in our forum, with nearly 200k new registrations in the past year.
2. Tell us about how you made it happen? Did you stage it first? Who got an early look? How did you drive adoption? Did you get executive buy-in? Did you have any key iterations?
Before full launch, we ran a beta phase with select superusers.. With a content strategy focused on program and product news as well as community member recognition and connections, we created value for our community members and directly invited them to join via email. In 2018, we completely revamped our community and continue to make roughly 100 improvements each year based on community feedback and needs.
3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible.
Connect has enabled connections that are critical to our program satisfaction while also helping us to help the community with content. Since launch with great growth in the past year, we’ve seen:
- 350k+ topics and 1.1 m+ comments
- 22k accepted solutions
- 30 community members now moderate the forum