MESKOS Forum Development Blog

When is a Community Successful?

Every online community wants to be successful. But what determines a forum is successful or not? When can you confidently declare your community is successful?

What are online communities?

An online community is a virtual place where people can gather together online to share opinions, thoughts and an opportunity to engage in discussions. Online communities can be in a variety of forms, including: forums, social networks, blogs and chatrooms.

Community Success factors.

There are a number of ways an online community can be judged to be successful. Here are a few ideas:

• The number of registered members.
• The amount of interaction.
• The amount of revenue being generated.
• The value of the relationship within the community.
• The amount of traffic the community is attracting.

Only a number of points will be judged to determine the success level of a community. It is important to know that different forum owners judge on different factors.

What are your individual goals?

As a forum owner you must set yourself goals and targets. With out them, it will be difficult to declare your forum is successful or achived success. Only you can determine if your forum is successful. Why? Only you know when your forum has achived a goal/target. A great example are Niche forums, then even if you only have ten members you can justifiably call your community a success.

A big brand looking to develop a positive relationship with its customers may have 100,000 members and a million posts, but if the content is full of negativity about the brand and its products, the community is a failure.

Remember to not compare your community with others. Every other community has different aims and goals. Their targets are different and every your very own forum is unique. Know what you want, what you want to achieve and strive towards it. Nothing controls the success level of a community, except you!

Share your Thoughts.

Is your community successful? Have you reached your goals/targets? If so, share your experiences.

Tags: achieve, community success, goals, success, targets

The Well Known, Quality not Quantity!

The Well Known, Quality not Quantity! (PART 1)
5 Ways to improve your forum quality.

Maintaining quality content within a forum is difficult for forum administrators because its usually most difficult. As you can see many forums may be based on a unique topic but their off-topic, general chat or
spam areas are most active and hold the majority of the boards total post. This is quantity not quality.
Of course, there are many other quality problems that forum face: members posting useless or immature responses, people who like to write in “IM speak”, spamming, unanswered questions, and many other problems can also affect the quality of a forum.

Within this article, i will provide a number of tips which will assist you in maintaining quality not quantity.

Emphasis on Topical Forums

90% of forums have administrative topics or general discussions located at the top of their boards. “Announcements, Suggestions” etc. The top half of the forum should contain all your significant (focused) topics, why? because it’s what visitors/members first see. You need to emphasis your forums focus, make it easy for your members to participate in the topical discussions. Example: If your forum is related to gaming, move all your gaming discussion forums to the top and locate your announcements, introductions etc
underneath.

Control the Spamming/Illegal Advertising

You must control the amount of spam and advertising throughout your forum. Have strict guidelines on where and where you can’t advertise. Many users try to find loopholes in your TOS and rules to advertise. Example: the General Chat forum. Users may take advantage of weak guidelines and create a topic similar to: “Post your forums here” and leave a link to their forum and never return. Remember to be focused.

Encourage Quality Posting

There are many ways to improve the quality of posts from your members. Award members publicly when they post a quality topic. Let your community acknowledge the fact they get awarded for the quality not quantity. Also try to encourage your members not to post with IM language as its difficult for ‘older generation’ members to understand. Such terminology includes: “Lol, Rofl, Brb” etc.

Follow The Leader

As an administrator of a forum, you must set a good example. If you take the time in creating quality posts, your members will find you inspiring and also do the same, its psychological.

Promote Wisely

As stated in some of my previous entries, promote wisely. Only exchange with forums which you would like their members to associate with your forum. Example, if you advertised at a Random Chat Room, yes you would gain main visits but are they worth much? and are those really the type of people you want at your forum?

Well, here is another entry of mine.
Good luck with your forum and always remember, Quality not Quantity.

© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008
Reading Your Way to Success.
Building a Successful Forum.

Tags: advertise, quality, quantity, success, successful forum

Don’t Let your Forum Die, Keep your Members Alive!

Don’t Let your Forum Die, Keep your Members Alive!

Keeping your members active, dedicated and interested is quite a challenging task in the long run. Administrators and the staff team will need to hold regular events to keep members interacting with each other and the forum.

Here are some ideas which you can take up to maintain activity within your forum.

1. Contests - Contests help bring back members and activity, depending on how successful it is managed etc. (Read my “Forum Contests, Forum Success?” Guide).
2. Forum Add-ons. Such as Money, Bank and shop Mods. Motivates members to post more for more forum credits. Remember! never to inflate your forum money value. Keep it controlled and managed.
3. Quality Content - A necessity for a forum to be successful is regular updates on new quality content.
4. In depth-Discussions - I have noticed, forums with a forum (or sub-forum) for debates increases the forum activity dramatically. How? because once a member joins a debate, he/she will be wanting to keep returning and enforce their point of views. So give this a try. But remember, keep this forum moderated, don’t allow excessive abuse or flaming.
5. Incentives - Incentives work extremely well for members to maintain their activity. One popular award for members who are active is the ‘Member Promotion’, promoting the member into a special or more elite group where they have additional profile features (more inbox space, custom team icon, different colouring etc). If you don’t have this in place, give it a try.

I hope these 5 points will help you keep your members alive and active.

© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008

Tags: active, maintain, memebrs, success

Establishment Tips

Establishment Tips
A few useful tips to take into consideration and practice when opening your forum.

Yes, this is a blog, which means the tips/points are from my perspective and my opinion.

• Do you have the time and effort to sustain a successful forum?
• Will you have the funds to purchase sufficient investments for your forum? (Even though finance is not needed for a forum (if your using a free forum software) but it is quite useful when advertising your message board.
• Do you have the sufficient skills in forum management to take up informational, decisional and interpersonal roles as an admin?
• If you don’t have the sufficient skills, will you consider a partnership with a friend which you can share the work load and different roles of an administrator.

Those were just some general questions you should honestly answer yourself.

Lets begin on the successful forum opening tips:

• Always have topics opened when opening a forum. How?
  » Register multiple accounts and start posting topics in every forum. This is to encourage members to interact within the forum.
  » Gather a few friends to start topics and reply to them.
  The purpose of this technique is to eliminate the idea of the forum being empty/isolated or un-active. Remember! don’t open ‘lame’ topics, make them interesting.
• Have a competition/contest when you open your forum. Why? This will motivate members in interacting with the forum and other members. Some ideas may include: Posting Contest, Referral, Writing Contest, Designing Contest etc. (Try to develop some unique ideas yourself).
• Appealing Appearance. An essential. Your forum appearance must ‘WOW’ the visitors. If you have poor look, who will register? so remember, always have a A+ skin/theme/design.

I hope this short article will help you on a successful forum opening.
If you have any queries or questions, please reply to this entry and i’ll do my best to help you out.

Written by
Michael. W
© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008
Redistribution of this article will be violating copyright laws.
Please contact me if you would like this doc. submitted to your forum/website.

Tags: establishment, forum, help, opening, success, tips

Creating a Successful Forum

Creating a Successful Forum.

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General

Lets begin with “why do you want to create a forum?”. Lets do some research.

1. Will you dedicate enough time and effort to create a successful forum?
2. Are you entering a solid competition market?
3. Will you be able to convince members to join your forum and leave others?
4. Do you really need to run a forum?
5. Is your idea unique? Will it be useful?
6. Am i re-creating another forum with a different name? (Same services etc)

You should take a few moments answering those questions yourself honestly.

Recently and in the past i have seen an overwhelming number of resource boards coming into play. If you are deciding to create a resource forum - don’t. Only if you have the knowledge and experience to out-run some of the largest resource boards out there, including the IFSZ.

Key Aspects of a Successful Forum:

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Skin. The skin is perhaps one of the more significant aspects of a successful forum. You will notice, most of the active forums have a nice looking skin. I do not encourage you to find a whored skin which is seen on all IPB, IF etc forums but a unique theme which suits your forum genre. Take a few days searching for a suitable skin and working on the forum layout.

Content. Content is the heart of your board. Members join for content, your resources and your discussions. That is what the forum is made up of, text.

When creating a forum, who joins a board with one member online and only 100 posts? This is where you need to work a little. My suggestion is gather friends who you know will dedicate their time to post around your forum and help you create some activity. Keep topics detailed and interesting which will motivate members to discuss. Example: If you’re creating a Prison Break forum don’t start topics like, “How did you find Season 1?” take some time and extend the topic so more discussions can be made, Eg. Discussing the plots, twists, backstage etc.

Once you have around 10-20 dedicated posters, your forum is on a steady level.

Staff. Staffing, many new forum owners find promoting a large number of members to work for them is beneficial. Do Not. If your forum is small, only have 1-2 staff members max. Overloading teams just creates confusion. Honestly, you won’t even have the time to keep track of each associate.

Why is my forum so slow? Members are always thinking beyond expectations. Gaining 1,000 members is not a daily experience. Members are lucky to even gather 500 dedicated members within a whole year. So don’t give-up if your forum is slow, an active community takes to to develop. Keep promoting, open daily topics for new discussions, motivate members to post with recognition, prizes etc.

Innovating. When your forum is on a stable level, you should then decide, “Can my skills be taken further?” Shock your members, bring new services/discussions etc to your forum. To keep your old members dedicated, changes are needed. Imagine visiting the same forum(s) everyday for a year, how boring would it be?

Now its your turn, after reading this article, i hope it has helped you decide if you should create your own forum and if you do, the tips i provided.

Written by
Michael. W
© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008
Redistribution of this article will be violating copyright laws.
Please contact me if you would like this doc. submitted to your forum/website.

Tags: development, forum, success, successful, traffic