We've also been doing monthly Community Challenges, in which we ask community members to answer a question and get community members and employees to vote for the best answers. Winners of the "Community Favorite" and "Meraki Favorite" prize each get some swag.   This has been a great excuse to email community members as well as our partners & customers who aren't yet community members. The employee voting has given a reason to email internally as well.   Logistics of the community challenge: (1) Ask the question on a blog post, make sure comments are ON and kudos are OFF. Ask community members to submit their answer via commenting. (2) At the designated time, turn OFF comments and ON kudos, and ask folks internally and externally to vote via kudos (3) At the end of the challenge period, turn off both comments & kudos, and calculate the winners! I've calculated winners manually because we haven't had THAT many entries / kudos, but you could also do it via some API calls.   Here's the latest example: New Year's Networking Resolutions         ... View more

@BeckyS - I'd love to talk about the gnomes! 😄   A number of years ago, Meraki's marketing team created an awesome gnome statue to celebrate a product milestone... I can't recall the details. Since then, two more gnomes have been created and provided to top partners for various occasions. The gnomes have been sort of an inside joke / status symbol. Pictured below are Switch Gnome, Security Gnome, and AP Gnome.     This year, someone on our Channel marketing team had the idea to do a "Gnome in the Home" promo in December, taking inspiration from "Elf on the Shelf." I decided to take that and run with it, hiding a picture of a Gnome in a thread in the community each day for 5 days; the first person to reply on that thread saying "I found the gnome!" won a gnome statue for themselves.   This was intended as a fun activity for our most engaged community members as well as Meraki fans who hadn't yet joined the community (we promoted it on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram). Gnome in the Home generated only a modest amount of traffic, but a lot of love 🙂 One community member even wrote a script to find the gnome on the 3rd day, and found it within minutes of me posting it (I had to change the filename of the gnome image for day 4!)   Here are some of the blog posts I wrote supporting this promo: Meet the Gnome (posted the Friday before we started hiding the gnome in the community) Have you seen the Gnome? Gnomes, reunited Happy to answer any further questions about this!     ... View more

So this is neat - I just awarded badges to 1,100 members based on certifications they've earned outside the community - and I can see that 199 people clicked on the badge notification email to see their badge. 18% clickthrough is pretty great!       ... View more

@travis5550 -   You could always start out doing this manually (if you haven't already!) and see how it goes before investing in an integration.   To manually send an email to community members via Marketo - just download a list of users from the User Report in admin, then upload to a list in Marketo. You'll be able to see reports of open rates / click rates from Marketo.   I personally do this twice a week to send welcome emails to community members, since we haven't gotten an integration sorted out yet.   Cheers! ... View more

I also love the User Report and use it just about every day for something. Some things aren't available in the user report though... I can't quite remember what, but I swear there was a reason I needed to use the LSI report....  ... View more