Online communities unfiltered: 2025 trends, challenges, and opportunities
We won’t sugar coat it — managing an online community is hard work. But the payoff of getting it right is unmatched. In this unfiltered guide, you'll get real-world insights and practical strategies from over 15 different industry experts on how to help your community thrive. In this guide, you'll learn: Trends shaping online communities — from tech shifts to evolving member expectations. The challenges community leaders are facing and how to navigate them without burning out. Actionable steps to drive engagement and business impact. Read the eBook here!529ViewsSign in to react to this post0CommentsGreat SEO Builds Community, and Great Community Improves SEO
Plant the seeds of a flourishing community with SEO. Just because you built it in the digital world doesn't necessarily mean the people will come. Communities across the digital sphere are dependent on the life-blood of traffic. A thriving community is often based solely on user traffic. Traffic can come from various sources: Twitter ads, Facebook posts, in-app guides, word of mouth, etc. But thanks to the infinite knowledge of Google, chances are high that your customer found your community page through a Google search. According to the website world wide web size, there are roughly 20 billion web pages searchable by google. For reference, if every page contained an average of 500 words, and someone was to read every page at an average pace, it would take them 170,000 years to read every page. 170,000 years ago, humans had only recently started to wear clothing. It's important to remember that roughly 250,000 new web pages are created every 24 hours, according to siteefy. SEO is one of the most rudimentary and genius solutions to cut through billions of pages in this information-dense world. SEO can supercharge your community Ask any digital marketer, social media manager, or even the garage band blogger about increasing web traffic, and you'll hear those three sacred letters; SEO. Search engine optimization is equally complex and simple. There are two types of SEO, on-site SEO and off-site SEO (aka link building.). On-Site SEO is search engine friendly, optimized titles, good descriptions, well-formatted URLs, correct use of H1, H2, and images, SEO titles & descriptions. Off-site SEO refers to actions taken off your website to boost traffic. It could be people sharing your website or getting referred from social media or other services. This aspect of SEO can be slightly troublesome as you will not have the same level of control compared to on-site. However, when it comes to community SEO, if you have done everything right, your users and customers should be working as off-site influencers for your brand. There are a plethora of various SEO strategies in the wild. A great place to start is our best practices article hub here. User content drive SEO more than branding. Community SEO is a massive game of push and pull. You need good SEO to draw new users into your community, and you need dedicated users in your community to continue driving SEO. This idea might feel clear as mud, so here's our Khoros resident SEO and community expert Allison Fasching on why community SEO is vital to success. "The inherent properties of an online community contribute directly to higher SEO value, but it's imperative to understand how search engines work and ensure you are configuring your community in the most efficient way to improve SEO continually. For example, user-created content gets a much higher SEO value tha…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsTaking Dr. Micheal Wu’s Gamification Theory into the Real World
Years ago, long before Khoros was Khoros and was simply Lithium technologies, a rather curious and beautiful theory was introduced into the world of digital communities. The idea was that if you added some version of gamification and the proper motivation to community users, the digital community would outperform most of its competitors. Gamification floats through various strategies and online communities, but what exactly is gamification in the context of digital communities? In as few words as possible, it is the process of rewarding users with digital badges and increased access or features in the community. Gamification is a prime example of using extrinsic rewards versus intrinsic rewards to influence more people to use a community page. Former Lithium data scientist Dr. Michael Wu explored this concept concerning gamification back in 2014. All of Wu’s findings are far beyond the scope of this one article, but in short, Wu theorized that you could use both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in the gamification of a community page. If you are not familiar with intrinsic and extrinsic motivations a nd rewards, Wu said it best in his original article: “An intrinsic reward is an intangible award of recognition, a sense of achievement, or a conscious satisfaction. For example, it is the knowledge that you did something right, or that you helped someone and made their day better. An extrinsic reward is an award that is tangible or physically given to you for accomplishing something. It is a tangible recognition of one's endeavor. For example, it’s a certificate of accomplishment, a trophy or medal for winning the race, a badge or points for doing something right, or even a monetary reward for doing your job.” This theory applies to almost every single human interaction or action. The key difference between the two motivation and reward systems is longevity. Generally speaking, intrinsically motivated people will almost always continue to perform an action or task. A great example of this is the super users of a community page without any game theory applied. The super-users will continuously engage with a community page because they genuinely love to use the website. However, according to the Nielsen group, only 1% of all website users will seriously contribute to the page. For the other 99% of the community, the question that Wu was aiming to answer was what would motivate them to start engaging with the website. His answer was to use game theory to increase extrinsic rewards and motivation. This can be done simply by adding more features, rewards, and badges that you can proudly display as a community user. Khoros customer Pandora did this exceptionally well. So, what exactly did Pandora do? Pandora embraced game theory in a wonderfully organic way. At the start of introducing the Pandora community, users were already looking for ratings. By adding a simple r…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentState of Community Management 2023 Report: Biggest Takeaway
In today's dynamic online community landscape, staying informed about the latest trends, challenges, and best practices is crucial for community leaders who seek lasting success. Discover the valuable insights and recommendations in The Community Roundtable's 14th annual report, The State of Community Management 2023, tailored specifically for community leaders. This report is a goldmine of tactics and strategies to enhance your strategic community planning and ensure your online community remains effective. We highly recommend you take a dive into the full report to get all the best insights, but here we’ve provided the top takeaway to help your community thrive in the ever-changing digital landscape. Harness the power of evangelism With the myriad of responsibilities shouldered by community managers, internal evangelism often takes a backseat. However, simply advocating for the value of a community may not be enough. It's imperative that the community manager isn't the sole voice singing the praises of the community within the organization. In The Community Roundtable’s research, 90% of best-in-class communities surveyed reported positive perceptions from executives. So how do you foster this support from leadership? Start by coordinating efforts and identifying team members who can act as champions to get support from middle management and executives. Holding the interest of stakeholders is essential to the long-term success of any community program. Why is internal buy-in so important? To start, building a thriving community is difficult. Not every business considers it a necessity, and some stakeholders may view it as a nice-to-have rather than a mandatory investment of time and resources. Tailoring your communication to different teams within the organization is key. For example, marketers tend to care about how a community can grow its audience or generate positive sentiment, while product teams care more about how the community will help them receive feedback from customers and further innovation. When each department understands its role in community building, they can allocate the necessary efforts and resources for a healthy and successful community. Above all, never stop evangelizing — seize any opportunity to speak to others within your organization about your community program. Although this can be challenging with the growing prevalence of remote work, make sure to communicate your message whenever and wherever possible. The more community evangelists who understand the language of community, the easier it becomes to promote the program throughout the organization. Take advantage of The State of Community Management 2023 to stay up-to-date on community management best practices, trends, and strategies. Download the full report here to learn how to navigate impending challenges and lead your online community to thrive in the months and years ahead.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsExploring AI Use Cases in Khoros Communities
Welcome to the Khoros view on our future with AI! It really is an exciting time for online communities in many ways, but we are just at the beginning of exploring how this technology will impact how we work in communities. At Khoros, we have been hard at work on Aurora, our next generation of online communities. While we have focused on our new technological foundation, natural language processing, and large language models have come to dominate the conversation in tech. Naturally, this has led to plenty of exciting discussions about the future of online communities. With Aurora, we are focused heavily on developing robust API’s, decoupling the UI from the backend of our platform, and building modern app experiences that will enable us to quickly tap into future trends in technology, whether it’s the metaverse or generative AI. What is Khoros working on now to further innovation in this space? There is much to explore with generative AI as it is still very new, but we will experiment and are planning on incorporating new technologies into our products. “One of the biggest initiatives we are working on is an orchestration layer for customer engagement that sits between these services and direct engagement with users offering the ability to control the use and workflows of that engagement. Whether it's easily swapping or testing new services, or putting the technology in front of humans to experiment and refine, we believe this will be a critical component of enabling and controlling the many use cases that these services make available.” - Nick Hill, VP, Product - Communities at Khoros There are some focus areas for us in product development with the application of generative and conversational AI. The most notable is the relationship between community-generated content and self-service / discovery. Five out of the top 10 sites on the internet today are communities of peer content. Communities rely heavily on SEO to index this content and on searches to drive traffic to the community. Generative AI offers a new approach - but it's still heavily reliant on the continuous sharing of user generated content. With the incredible scale of 18M new posts per year and hundreds of millions of solution views across all Khoros communities, the fundamental need for experts to share, and the need for others to find is unchanged. However, the approach of crawling and links will shift to summarization and intelligence responses. Some exciting new capabilities will be to build on your query, or to generate questions where knowledge is insufficient. Another opportunity we have is exploring the improvements for content moderation. Generative AI tools can help us better caption and classify images and text, which reduces the need for manual moderation and helps improve moderator mental health. This addresses spam and inappropriate content in new ways and adds much more to the moderator's set of tools. However, we’ve al…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsThought Leadership + Outcome Keywords: A New CX Initiative
A common request from Khoros Customers is having more insightful content to drive future strategies in an ever-changing industry. We've heard loud and clear in our recent NPS surveys that you're interested in more thought leadership. The Khoros Customer Engagement team has been hard at work developing content with a fresh outlook on modern solutions and paths to follow as you continue your journey. With these updates, we aim to help you transform theory into practice using the Khoros platform. We will continue to strive to deliver you the insights you need to succeed. Thought Leadership Blogs and Label Outcome Keyword Links Additional Label Tips First, I’d like to highlight our recent content development and distribution initiative. A tool can be used to the extent of the wielder's knowledge. The Khoros platform is no different. The powerful capabilities Khoros offers, paired with the rapid and unexpected shifts in the industry, can feel like going on a fool’s errand trying to stay on top of everything. This is why we launched our unique human-focused thought leadership content to cut through the clutter of vague social tips and misguided strategies. We’re here to bring you the who, what, when, where, and most importantly, the why with all things customer experience and Khoros. We want to ensure Atlas offers our members comprehensive thought leadership and unique content with your future strategy in mind. Stay updated when new content is published by subscribing to the new Thought Leadership Label in the Khoros Insights Blog. You’ll also notice new Outcome Keywords below the labels. Here's how you use these. Labels house the type of content, or in other words - if it’s a thought leadership article, a product update, best practices, or webinars. The Outcome Keywords are used to give you a sneak peek at what that specific content will highlight. For example, an article about how to use TikTok more effectively would fall under the thought leadership label, but its keyword - engagement rate - would highlight the article's focus. You could then explore all other Atlas content that focuses on engagement rate whether it’s an article, forum, webinar, or podcast. In partnership with the Atlas and Enablement teams, we’ve defined all Best Practices and Thought Leadership blogs related to actionable outcomes and included Keywords to help pull together similar content. Each dropdown below contains some outcome keywords that link to similarly tagged content for each Khoros solution. We hope this helps the discoverability of helpful content! Outcome Keywords Marketing Care Community CXI Active platform users Agent Handle Time Accepted Answers AHT reduction Approved and rejected messages Agent Performance Answers Found CSAT Approved and rejected posts Conversations Handled Community Revenue Customer Friction Points …ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsThe Metaverse and Online Communities: Khoros 101
“Metaverse” is a term first coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, captured the imagination of emerging generations and has gained unsurprising traction in recent years. From fully digital lives in online worlds, like Second Life, to a plethora of movies like Ready Player One, each provide a glimpse into what the metaverse could mean and how it could play a part in our daily lives. As we’ve seen, the mission, vision, and values that we hold for our futures are the premise of how these new worlds emerge. It’s not hard to find media covering the topic of virtual worlds, they are real, they exist now, and yet there is so much we have yet to see as far as technological developments in this area. The current understanding and experience of the metaverse varies. Although Meta (formerly Facebook) is creating its own “Metaverse” it is only one of many such projects. There is Meta, the brand, and there is the all-encompassing term, metaverse, which essentially means multiple worlds enabled through augmented and/or fully virtual experiences, where people can interact, work, play and more. Brands, opportunities and partnerships are ripe across this ever-growing ecosystem — many organizations are currently building out similar and novel virtual experiences for work, commerce, entertainment and more, across a spectrum of centralized and decentralized systems. As it stands, the metaverse is what we would say is in its ‘prototyping’ phase. Thus, there is so much yet to come, and infinite possibilities in which we can partake. Metaverse and online communities You can’t have a metaverse without community. Think of the metaverse as just like our real-life public and private spaces, except augmented / fully digital with a game-like, fantastical structure. Metaverses are narrative driven and hosted for connection between people, groups, and organizations. And the glue that holds these worlds together and enables a new epoch of collective experiences is the community aspect of them. We can see large-scale examples of metaverses with the recent explosion of worlds like Decentraland, Sandbox, and Roblox. Worlds like these will only become more extensive and are increasing in number over time. Here we will dive into the role of communities in the metaverse and how the evolution of key community considerations provide emerging opportunities for Brands: Enabling a greater sense of meaning Rewards and recognition Ownership Scope and collaboration Social media to social experience 1. Metaverses can enable a greater sense of meaning In contrast to other technologies, metaverses are unique in the advanced sensory experiences they offer through augmented reality and full immersion VR. Avatars let people connect through body language, expressing themselves in real time. With so many added layers of connection and exploration, they come ever closer to real-world-like interactions, …ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsOracle Cerner’s Kandice Eckhoff: The Pros and Cons of Group Hubs
When Blake asked me to write about how our community manages our groups, I was not sure what to write about. We have had groups for so long at Oracle Cerner that we assumed everyone else does too. My name is Kandice Eckhoff, and I am the Product Manager for our Khoros platform, Oracle Cerner. I have been with the company for almost 12 years in various roles and in my current position for six of those years. uCern is Oracle Cerner's collaboration platform used for client-to-client and client-to-associate collaboration on our products and services, ideation, and assists with ticket deflection by providing answers to client questions. uCern was started in 2009 on the Jive platform, and at that time, we let anyone create a group. This was not a good idea. I would NEVER recommend this for a community. We ended up with groups like "Cat Lovers," "<Insert College Name> Alumni, "New Moms," and the like. While the intention at first was good, just getting people using the community, it quickly got out of control. We eventually locked down group creation. New groups are evaluated by our team and created based on business needs. By then though most of the damage was done, and our clients were complaining about search results pulling in random information or stale content. Group owners would leave the company or change roles, and groups were no longer active or responsibly managed, so we ended up with a lot of those. In 2018 we separated associate-only collaboration to help with some of the confusion. During this time, we archived groups, spaces, projects, etc. with no created content or activity within the prior year. Subsequently, when we started planning our migration to Khoros, we again started an archiving exercise to minimize the amount of data we would bring over. We were able to purge 55% of our groups because of this effort. When we migrated, we brought over 2,254 groups. That number has since grown as we have weekly requests for new ones. The need for them varies: private collaboration for specific clients and associates, aligning groups with our products, and associates realizing the need for collaboration on certain topics or markets we are in. As you can imagine managing this number is difficult. Permissions are a nightmare, community engagement is difficult to monitor accurately, and the removal of the "old stuff" surfaced older stuff clients have found inaccurate. In turn, the cycle of constantly curating our content continues. We are repeatedly told no other Khoros client uses groups the same way we do, hence being the group hub unicorn. So how do we manage this many groups? It is not easy. We are currently looking at archiving more inactive groups and realigning our community structure based on feedback we have received. Ideally, we will end up with 1:1 product groups and a couple hundred non-specific groups that remain for topics, regions, or are …ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAn Interview for Change: How AI and Automation Drive ROI
Digital customer care can meet and exceed your original ROI projects in several ways. However, poorly implementing a digital Care system can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in wasted time and low NPS scores. Khoros has been a social care leader for years, but a tool is only as valuable as the one who wields it. To get to the bottom of the best ways to use and prove the ROI of Khoros Care, we sat down with Khoros product marketing expert Josh Snider to get an expert opinion on the best and worst ways to use Khoros Care. Parker Hicks What's your background in Product Marketing? And why did you decide to come to Khoros? Josh Snider My background is actually in product marketing, but before that, I was in public relations, and before that, I was in embassy educational policy. I was excited to come to Khoros because I was already working as a player in the space and having a lot of fun creating chatbots and conversational commerce. Khoros offered me to work on use-case solutions, and it was something that just fell into place for me. What has been your experience with the Care platform? My experience has been, most recently, using [the care platform] to create real-world mock-ups for chatbots to send to customers and say, "you guys should get a bot." This is what it would look like within Google's business messages (GBM). In turn, I would build the GBM instance and assign the bot to it. I would pull it up on my phone and simulate myself as the agent within Care, chatting with myself on the phone and recording the whole thing as though I was interacting with a customer bot, so we could help them visualize what it is. The agent UI is excellent. An example would be the proactive web chat we built. It has the ability to create and manage 10 or 15 different chat widgets. Depending on your website and what kind of knowledge base your site knows, you assign different widgets to it. Can you share some of the best and worst use cases you've heard of? Sure. This one's pretty straightforward. A number of companies will want to put a bot on public social media channels. My question has always been, why do you want to do that customer? Their answer is something along the lines of, "Because the brand is getting buried in volume." Sadly, a lot of that volume is bull. A lot of the volume is really easy questions. Obviously, it's the sort of stuff that a bot could handle. However, every time a major technology company has launched a bot on a public social channel, it has immediately melted down or been proven to be useless days upon doing it. I like to ask companies what makes you think you will be able to outperform the big name brands that have tried before. What's the worst way you could use a bot on social media? You don't want to let it train itself, which takes away a lot of your opportunity for …ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentCommunity ROI: Embracing Humanity’s Desire to Help
In today’s digital ecosystem, it’s a requirement to have a community page. No matter what industry you find your brand or company in, having a place for your customers to talk about your business, find support, or ask questions is necessary. Long before Khoros was Khoros, the founders deeply understood the importance of digital communities. It’s easy to hark about how much value you can pull from having an award-winning community. However, few articles and resources are diving deep into exactly why brands are finding these high levels of value and success with their digital communities. This article aims to change that. Of course, it would be a misstep not to recognize some essential realities of running a digital community. The initial bottom line is that running a community costs money. There is no escaping or not paying the hosting, designing, security, and general staffing costs. It could cost anywhere from the low tens of thousands to millions of dollars a year. As the intrepid new community, you might find yourself needing to garner more executive support. You have to consider not only why people use community pages but also how you will find value in all aspects of the customer experience by having a highly successful community. Care and Community Utilizes Human Desire to Help one Another Khoros and several of our customers have proven that customers in need of support rarely care where they receive that support. In regard to digital communities, one of the most engaging types of posts is a support question. Even Google’s algorithm will point customers toward a digital community to answer product or service-related questions. This system is adventitious for whichever brand or company owns the community page, but why would any customer spend their valuable time and resources answering strangers' questions on an online forum? For some community managers, this question isn’t of massive importance. It’s extra work and research to understand why customers answer strangers’ questions in digital communities. However, if your community page starts slipping towards inactivity, you find yourself struggling to understand why your page isn’t being used as much anymore. People tend to help one another for various reasons, but it generally breaks down to our evolutionary hardwiring. This will defer slightly from intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, but the rewards are generally the same. One of the most significant motivating factors is that humans are generally socially ousted for being a “freeloader” or “lurker” in communities or social settings. In Sebastian Junger’s sociology exploration book Tribe., this isn't a new concept. He explores how helping your fellow human was quite literally law in most of ancient society, saying - “This [helping in social setting] is clearly an ancient and adaptive behavior that tends to keep groups together …ViewsSign in to react to this postComments
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