Jan 22 2007

Forums, friend or foe

Prompted by the post on commenting, I got to thinking about the other great tool for generating community buzz, the forum.

None of what I am about to say is my own work, as I have no original thought in my head about blog and website promotion. These pearls of forum (foral?) wisdom come from a podcast I recall by the great British web usability and accessibility guru, Paul Boag.

When you start a forum, make sure you have lots of regular visitors to your site already. Maybe 5% of your regulars have the time and inclination to frequent a forum and contribute. And of that 5% only 5% will become regular and reliable contributors.

When you set up a forum keep it very simple and limited in scope. ie Have literally 2 or 3 categories and no more.

Before you launch it, pre-prime as many friends and relations as possible and tell them to get their butts on your forum at x hour on y day and get writing intelligently. A tall order for some of our friends, but you get the idea.

That is a quick and easy way to get a buzz going within a confined space. And then, a bit like a house party, as it gets more rowdy, open up more rooms. Once a few sub categories suggest themselves, open them up and start to transfer posts across. That way there is always a sense of proactive community.

The Pisstakers get about 2 comments a week from around 500 unique visitors, so a forum is pushing it at this moment in time. However, we have a plan that when we hit 10000 uniques a month, we will have a forum ready and waiting to launch on the world. This time next year you are welcome to call by The Pisstakers and be funny.

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    6 Comments on this post

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    1. Lee said:

      I love the idea of a forum to float ideas about the blog and extend the dialogue with the readers. That’s what we want here so people can take advantage of the wealth of experience we have.
      On pop culture heroines I plan on opening a forum if only for the authors and potential authors to have somewhere to suggest topics proofread etc.

      January 22nd, 2007 at 9:49 pm
    2. Matt said:

      Forums can definitely be a huge asset and resource to a website. Id much rather have a discussion on a forum rather than in a comments section etc. You are sure to have a bunch of BAYB authors there when you are ready to launch!

      January 22nd, 2007 at 11:13 pm
    3. Maryam in Marrakesh said:

      Oh eek. So embarrassing, but I don’t actually know what a forum is. Could you explain or give some examples?

      January 23rd, 2007 at 9:55 am
    4. Ed the Editor said:

      Hi Maryam

      I suppose one description is “software for organising discussions”.
      An example of the latest direction in standards compliant forums where clean code makes for clean presentation is Get Vanilla

      The nearest example of what a forum does is right here at BAYB.

      Hope that helps to get you on the right track.

      January 24th, 2007 at 12:10 am
    5. Lee said:

      Hey Ed you were the winner of the advertising competition so if you have a 120×300 banner send it through to me or PoEt and we’ll get you up on the rotation – otherwise let me know and I” do one up for you if you like.

      January 25th, 2007 at 6:09 am
    6. Ed the Editor said:

      Hi Lee or PoEt,

      this is the winner here, giddy with excitement!

      I sent an email with the banner url for you to use. I don;t know if you got it. If not, I will resend it

      cheers

      Ed

      February 1st, 2007 at 4:11 pm

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