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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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