Don't Outsource Your Forum Search To Google

Mike King

Online communities are becoming increasingly popular for building relationships with clients, users and prospects.  But companies are finding the current technology lacking in areas like flexibility, extensibility, theming and search.  This blog, one in a series covering forum-related terminology, is focused on faceted search.

Faceted Search Results

What is Faceted Search?

Yonik Seeley, the creator of Solr - an open source enterprise search platform written in Java, gives an excellent description of faceted search in his post on the topic.  “Faceted search is the dynamic clustering of items or search results into categories that let users drill into search results (or even skip searching entirely) by any value in any field. Each facet displayed also shows the number of hits within the search that match that category. Users can then “drill down” by applying specific constraints to the search results.”

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Join Our EAP: Gather Forum Software

Mike King

Gather Forum SoftwareForum Software

The team at Inversoft is pleased to announce the Early Access Program (EAP) for Gather – The Future of Forum Software. By joining the Gather EAP, you will be able to download a full version of Gather, install it, and kick the tires. You’ll also get access to pre-release updates that will include new features and fixes. This gives you the chance to try new features before they are released.

How to Join

It’s easy to join the EAP – just complete This Form to create your account and get access to a EAP license and the Gather downloads. Once you download Gather, read through our Installation Guide to get it setup. You can also check out our API Documentation to learn about the Gather’s API that will change the way you think about forums.

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A Case For Branded Online Community

Mike Moloughney

Facebook is no longer a viable option for companies looking to foster a strong online relationship with their customers and prospects. In a previous blog post we discussed the diminishing reach of Facebook for companies trying to engage their users and grow their businesses. The natural next question will be – “Great, so if Facebook isn’t working, what is the solution?” Increasingly, companies are creating their own branded online communities.

Branded Online CommunityReturn on Investment (ROI) will be a factor to consider, as with any business decision. Building a community will take time, resources and money so a company will need to see a return on that investment. There are a variety of factors that can be measured depending on the focus of your community. For example, many companies establish a support community to reduce support costs through call deflection. In fact, in a recent survey conducted by Inversoft, 46% of respondents indicated they consider ‘reducing support costs’ to be a major benefit of forums. If the focus of your online community is increasing your sales, how much more business could you gain by having your customers participate in your own branded online community versus a 3rd party platform like Facebook?

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Moderation Teams and Technology: Improving Customer Retention

Brian Pontarelli

It’s common knowledge that online communities and online games have loyal fans and critics alike.  Many web sites utilize social media management tools, moderation services, as well as profanity filters to weed out as many inappropriate comments and behaviors as possible.  But when it comes to online games, the stakes get even higher for performance.  Usage stats from various sources report that online game players spend 22 hours a week playing the game, despiteCustomer retention the fact that half of the players have full-time jobs, are married and nearly one-fourth have kids.  Surprisingly, only one-fourth of players are teens.  The majority are college students, early professionals, middle-aged homemakers and retirees.  Sixty percent of players have reported at least 10 hours of continuous play.

You would think this kind of fanatical devotion to online games would mean loyal customers for life and customer satisfaction levels through the roof.  However, companies have to work more diligently than ever before to keep performance as near to 100% uptime as possible in order to avoid massive backlash from their fans.

Double - Edged Sword

Online game producers need to deliver content patches faster. Players have become much more adept at finishing new content and many gaming companies have struggled to keep up.  This may be a double-edged sword - the need for speed of content development may improve user satisfaction in the short term, while at the same time increasing the probability of bugs and poor performance.  Satisfying customer demand for content could contribute to a company’s downfall since poor game performance directly correlates to negative player experiences and ultimately abandonment as a subscriber.

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Why Community is Essential in the B2B SaaS World

Inversoft CIAM

Inversoft is pleased to share the following guest blog from Jaime Morocco, "Why Community is Essential in the B2B SaaS World." Jaime shares insights on how a community builds value for brands and their customers and also offers some questions to consider before building a community for your brand's following. This post originally appeared on the Bluenose blog and is reprinted here with permission.

 


 

In an age where we have the ability to be more connected to each other than ever, it can also often seem that we are missing the human part of connection. No matter how advanced technology becomes, or how dependent on technology we are, we will never lose our need for human-to-human interaction.

B2B CommunityWe are living in the age of the empowered consumer. This is an age where a consumer will almost always ask for advice from peers before making a purchasing decision, and an age where a dissatisfied customer will let the world know their state of unhappiness over any and all social media platforms. We value our peers, their opinions, their approval, and ultimately, we seek a feeling of connection to things/topics that we consider to be of high importance.

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