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I’ve written about driving traffic with forums before, but what about running your own forums to keep traffic and build your business?
This week, I’m pleased to bring you an interview with social media thought leader Patrick O’Keefe. As the recent author of Managing Online Forums, and founder of the iFroggy Network, Patrick has a decade of experience developing and managing community websites.
Preface: Online Communities as a Web Strategy
If your visitors can discover consistent and new information daily, they’re more likely to return. If visitors form relationships with each other conducted through your website, they’re more likely to return. If they can use your site as their own platform for success, they’re more likely to return.
Online communities of all stripes can achieve these goals, from mailing lists to social networks. But forums are at the center.
The golden egg of web success is getting your visitors engaged to the point that they become invested in your success.
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Note: This article originally appeared on the blog of Drew McLellan, who was kind enough to invite me as a guest blogger. The article is reproduced here in full.
In the movie, Anchorman, there’s a moment when the character played by funnyman Steve Carell becomes so overwhelmed by the volume of the conversation - and the lack of attention being paid to him - that in a desperate plea to have his voice heard above the din, he shouts, “LOUD NOISES!”
Steve knows about bad advertising. We all do.
And yet so much advertising is just companies shouting loud noises. We’re all susceptible, as business marketers or just people who want to be heard, to be a part of this system.
When everyone else is talking loudly in the cafeteria, you’re tempted to raise your voice so people can hear you. You get a little louder, then someone else does, and soon the whole room is louder. So you get a little louder, so someone else does, and so on.
It’s not that you wanted to be loud, but you couldn’t help it. It’s a “collective action problem”, a tragedy of the commons. We’d all prefer everyone being quiet to everyone being loud (less noise in our lives and less spend on ad dollars), but as long as everyone else is quiet, we cheat a little and raise our volume. And so does everyone else.
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I tried to put that line into a presentation on “digital innovation” for a late-blooming client (a behemoth of traditional marketing). The account team vetoed it - too many suits in the room, I think.
But I consider “nobody cares about you” to be the most important point of the whole presentation. It’s what marks the difference between the way things used to be and the way things are now.
See, traditional media is built from the bottom up to support business objectives. TV exists to sell ads. For a long time, the only way for Americans to spend their intellectual surplus (as Clay Shirky would say) was to watch sitcoms:
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