Hi all,
this is a bit of a general post, but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas or suggestions on keeping the interest going in your community.
To put my community into context, it is a business community for a software company in a B2B environment. 90% of the users are current customers. After being live for a little over 3 months, I think the community has gone a little flat and posting has started to decrease.
I'd like to introduce "digest" emails, even if it means having to make these up manually, to encourage people who have registered and then never returned, or non-regular users to come back and post.
Another idea was to ask "experts" from various industries (that our customers belong to) to write topical articles or to share existing articles - it would increase the quality of material we have to show and give the writer some extra exposure.
Finally, I'd like to take some of the more regular posters and give then moderation permissions - as a thank you for their participation, and also to encourage them to write more and get others to write more.
Cheers in advance,
Daniel
"NEW Content is King" is our mantra at www.emrupdate.com.
We started out as a simple Bulletin Board then moving into more formal segregated forums. Your content and discussions would give you some idea of how to partitiion different discussions. That may not be the answer for all forums because you tend to get one section dominating the forum.
We started specific blog sections to try and encourage discussion and to provide a reserve of resources that new posters could start using. We do a "Getting Started" section and "Interviews" which are now video based using www.ooVoo.com to record the Flash.
We've tried to encourage our Vendor customers to start their own Groups -- but so far we've not got any interest -- probably because people don't know what a Group really does. At least I think Groups could play a part in keeping your old-timers interested. Hope that helps.
Nick
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" Sir Isaac Newton 1676
hello im new here and i was wondering if bbcode works here
never mind
Cheers Nick,
I'm interested in using groups when we upgrade to CS2008 - we have customers from various industries on our Community, so I see it as a way to get industry specific content directly to the people who are interested in it.
New content is the best way to attract people to the Community completely agree.
I'm working on a monthly email (digest style). My thinking is that this will hopefully attract people to come back, rather than making them visit the site to see new content, a selection of it is delivered to their inbox.
Do you have a public site to view?
From my old Groupware days at Lotus and before (1993-2000), the same rules ring true:
Word from the top always works. A good example is here - folks like it when the founders blog and provide a direction for users. It doesn't stop there - get the second tier to chime in and give them incentives to contribute.
Make the spend and get outside experts to contribute (you can do this by trading content and expertise with them.) I've got some expert bloggers coming on and have spent this last month recruiting them. I have 4 and am hoping for more.
Honey attracts bees: Have great news, great titles, etc.
Reward folks by profiling or highlighting regular contributors in interesting ways. Have marathon post sessions with the highest and most meaningful contributors rewarded by vote of the others (give away something meaningful like a Gift cert for dinner)
Embed group think as part of the process: Encourage someone if they have a debatable question to post to get their answer. Encourage a discipline to interation that involves the site.
Come up with interesting forum titles: For example: Worst Cases for Customer Service, where the rules are that you start your forum by saying: You know when you have bad customer service when....
Encourage the meek: I posted in http://johnstack.spaces.live.com : Encourage the meek. They have a voice. Get them to come out and join the party.
Collaboration can rock, its not new, it can be part of the culture if you have the appropriate support and encouragement within your constituency to make it happen. It has to be valuable and worth the time for the participants.
Hope this helped.
In addition to the great recommendations above it may be beneficial to deploy Harvest Reporting Server to better understand the topics that are truly of interest to your community. This will assist in not only identifying the key influencers of the community, but also better understanding the social interaction of your community and key content will allow you to drive a content calendar that is more engaging to the community.
I offer monthly contests to members who have a certain number of points. That helps to keep the momentum going.
http://community.metalreview.com/forums
mattb: I offer monthly contests to members who have a certain number of points. That helps to keep the momentum going.
Good idea! Do you offer prizes then?
I thought about doing a spotlight on particular members - something I've seen on xbox.com - perhaps a quick interview.
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