8b) How would you help customers to overcome common problems, short-term and long-term?

Short-Term: SEO & Consistency

It's never wasted time when adopting a new community to go back to the data; dig into the analytics and find out where the traffic is coming from, going to, and what it's doing. If you ever get stuck or you're unsure where to find an answer, always go back to the data! Also a useful habit when it comes to creating useful reports for people across the business.

Short-term, we'd be helping people immensely by ramping up our SEO game. The easier and quicker we make it for people to find the answer they need, the sooner they can get on with their project and feel good about their decision to adopt Vercel.

There's no shortage of ways to do this, and no silver bullet. Blog content that hits the correct long-tail keywords is low tech, (fairly) low resource and always effective. Sharing that content onto social media in a few different, interesting ways helps shortcut the delay in blog content being indexed. Over 90% of Gen Z people use an app as their entry point to the Internet, rather than a web browser, so including social media in an SEO strategy means you aren't missing the digital natives.

Creating short, fast, fun videos and building useful YouTube playlists is also very effective, both short- and long-term. YouTube is the second biggest search engine, after all, and there's no practical substitute for a three minute demo video of how to solve a common problem. Nor does production value have to be high. A screen recording with a voice over guiding people through it pays all kinds of dividends, and has the advantage of building a community of YouTube subscribers in the process.

Consistency is the real key to SEO. If possible, and especially in the early stages, posting on a daily basis can have a dramatically positive effect. It's resource intensive, but it works.

Mid-Term: Find the Others

Mid-term, establishing a presence in "external" places where the community is talking about the product is also important. This might be on Reddit, Stack Exchange or a Discord server. Don't expect them to always come to us; we must make the effort to go to them and join in with their communities, too. It's very reassuring for people to know there are real, reachable humans within the business, which sidesteps a lot of negative sentiment when problems inevitably arise, particularly among impatient coders.

Long-Term: Build, Nurture and Maintain a Community

In the long-term (as it takes a while to build this) you can't beat an active, participatory community. Somewhere that users help other users. So even when we're not present, questions get answered, and people connect with each other around the product or business. This user-generated content is worth its weight in gold, and is a powerful user loyalty and retention tool as well as significantly easing our tech support burden.

This goes for an internal community, too. I always make it my job to break down the walls between the employees on the inside and the users on the outside; acting as a voice for the community within the business, and an accessible point of contact for the members that humanises the business. It never fails to surprise me how many problems appear to "fix themselves" when people are learning at discourse between peers.