Vox Tip: Getting the people you care about onto Vox!
So you've been around Vox for a while, getting organized by adding recent movies and books you've read and writing about your day complete with pictures of your cat watching you blog. Or maybe you've just joined us and you're on your way to creating your first few posts and filling out your profile. No matter how long you've been here, one of the things that makes Vox great is having friends, family and neighbors around. Here are a few easy ideas for finding or inviting those people to Vox.
First, consider who you care about in your day-to-day life. If you were to print out some photos from your camera, who would you share them with? Of course, your best friend and your sister are probably people who are interested. But what about your coworker who's always asking about your daughter that's the same age as hers? How about the lady who stands next to you on the bus every day and you compliment her knitting? Are any of these people on Vox yet? All you need to know to invite them to Vox is their email address. When you invite someone, it allows them to verify their email and register in one step. You can read more about this process on Joining Vox.
Secondly, you might discover that some of the people around you are already on Vox. You might realize that your mom has been listening to you talk about Vox so much that she went ahead and joined, but you haven't added her to your neighborhood yet. Or your friend from college who is always emailing you great links may have found Vox on his own. Ask them their Vox address, or do a quick People Search on the Explore page. Once you find out their Vox URL, then visit their blog and in the "About Me" section you'll see the option to add them to your neighborhood. Add them as a neighbor, and additionally as a friend and/or family member if you'd like, and you are set! Now these people's posts will show up in your Neighborhood page! Read more about adding people on Connecting to Neighbors.
Another easy way to find new neighbors is to keep an eye on notifications you receive when someone else adds you to their neighborhood. The email notification gives you links to automatically add them as a neighbor, or check out their Vox first. Click through those links and you might find some of these people have searched for you because you were old classmates, friends from another internet site, or just someone who thinks your photos are beautiful. You can easily reciprocate and add them to your neighborhood right from the notification email.
Bonus Tip: When you add people who you care about to your neighborhood, it lets you take more advantage of Vox's privacy settings because now you'll have people to "oooh and ahhh" with when you select "family" for your newest set of baby photos, or "neighborhood" for your answer to today's QotD.
We personally enjoy every day how Vox lets us share what's important to us with the people we care about! Take advantage of all these great tools today, and let us know in the comments what tips you have for suggesting your friends and family sign up for Vox.
-- Kristine and the Vox Help team
Comments
If I understood the message I recieved from Team Vox correctly, then what I'm going to say is in the works - but I'll say it anyway:
Guest commenting (un-registered folk) would definitely increase feedback on a post, as well as make it more likely for those people to join VOX eventually. - MSN blogs have this feature.
The lack of Guest Commenting is the number one complaint I hear from my friends and my family when I try to get them to sign up for Vox. They haven't had to sign up in the past with my Typepad blog so they don't understand why they're forced to sign up for Vox. It is frustrating to me that I don't have a good reason why Vox works this way.
I've even had people sign up for Vox just so they could comment, but they have walked away feeling it was a negative experience. People hate to be forced to sign up for things. If the product is good (and [Vox is good]) let them sign up because they want to enjoy it for themselves.
Somebody call Kathy Sierra, she'll set Vox straight. ;-)
Exactly.
Guest commenting would allow people to be introduced to Vox slowly, avoiding the experience you mentioned, Palmer, where somene registered just to comment - and then takes off.
I agree with this.
And then even when vox enables this feature, it might be too late to switch. Inertia is a very fundamental human nature.
This is exactly what I've been preaching :)
When I made an entry or posted pictures Multiply would sent an announcement to everyone I had invited. B/c they had been invited by email they were able to view the pics (thumbnails only) and the post, and I could see that certain email addresses had viewed the entries. If they wanted to see bigger pictures they had to register. This was for friends-family-only content.