Gunnar Opticks provides “digital performance eyewear”. Yes, that’s a real category and according to the Gunnar marketing materials, a very important one given how much we stare at our monitors these days. For gamers vision become even more important as eye fatigue can lead to [virtual] death, as well as cause long term “real world” problems.  [my disclosure on gunnar optiks at the end of the post]

So what do you do when you’ve got a product that solves a problem people don’t know they have? You could talk up the benefits until you were blue in the face, or you could take the social road and get the top customers of arguably the top mainstream gaming system manufacturer in the world to do the talking for you. But getting people to talk requires them to have your product — and that’s where seeding comes into play.

Gunnar’s seeding program is straight forward – take the top 10 posters on the Alienware Arena forums, send them out a pair of shades and ask for their initial thoughts & a full review in return. Throw it all into its own sub-forum for branding & to keep the conversation visible and in less than a week you’ve got a few hundred comments and thousands of views from the core of your target market.

4 ways to social success with Gunnar’s seeding program

1. Encouraging honest reviews.

In their program overview the request is simple: Post an initial comment, in-depth review and final thoughts. No mention of the tone of the posts, no requirements for a good story, no pulling unknown members who may just be employees. It’s up to the, already respected, user. By not forcing “positive” you actually encourage it – transparency goes a long way to winning people over, add a solid product and you’re in business.

2. Asking for a follow up [keeping the conversation alive]

Gunnar didn’t just want to get a week’s visibility, they want mentions down the road and they want people to know the long term benefit too. So rather than taking a one hit & go approach they’ve asked for 3 phases of comments getting them 3 waves of exposure. On some forums people will put their gear & reviews right into their signature; it’s all about fitting into the individual community to make the most of it.

3. Engaging with the testers & other users

This isn’t set it & forget it. Gunnar’s done the right thing getting the forum staff involved and also bringing their own employees onto the site to answer questions and provide the facts. It’s full transparency since those employees are marked as a part of the company and are sticking towards the facts, offering positive thanks and leaving the opinion to the user. The seeding program shows their commitment to the community, the one to one engagement puts them in the “good brand” category.

4. Backing it up with sponsorship banners [the action opportunity]

You don’t want to stop in front of the finish line, you want to cross it. Gunnar’s program is all about conversation but with people talking, sharing comments, and hyping the product up, it’s essential to have a way for those not in the program, whether it’s other members or casual visitors of the site, to have a way to act. Gunnar chose to sponsor the forum their post is in with a few targeted banners – nothing too strong but an easy click to get members around the community into the area & reading the review.

As the Gunnar example shows, forum seeding is a great way to stir up conversation about a brand people may know about but not have tried or just aren’t talking about. In the world of community, nothing is going to outweigh a trusted member’s opinion on the overall perception of a product and getting involved with a few giveaways is at the same time a great way “in” to a community without having to worry about seeing as spamming or advertising – it’s value for consideration – a win all around.

* Disclosure:  I know the team at Gunnar [although finding this example was a pure coincidence thanks to @alienware on twitter] and use a pair of Gunnar 3D glasses and sunglasses in addition to my Oakley shades.

As the original social network, forums dominated the web for since the early days and have grown along the way. Often started as a hobby or network between friends, these small sites can reach hundreds of thousands, even millions of users and unlike the big networks, the topics can be very focused from Frequent Fliers to Disneyland Tricks to Headphones. But just as the close-knit community built and user to user focus of forums give them huge reputation power, it makes entering into them tricky to say the least.

Here 4-steps to getting involved and unlocking the potential of forums.

Understand the community, its membership and dynamics.

The first part of getting involved in any niche community is of course knowing the niche. I’m not talking about product expertise here but rather community – does the forum allow businesses to post? Does it have certain requirements for disclosing information? When can links be used? Is it owned by a company or a few friends? Does it have rivals? Who uses the site? Novices in the space or the top players or both?

Make a plan to integrate, not just advertise

In the past most companies considered a social strategy to mean placing ads on a site where customers could interact with each other; not exactly engaging and thankfully we’ve learned a lot since then but old habits die hard. While it’s easy to write a check and treat it as another opportunity for direct marketing, that’s not utilizing the opportunity and not likely to succeed.

This doesn’t mean going in and selling but educating, answering and simply participating is a huge win and done right, generally welcomed. Stick to the facts like when a product hits, how it works, what support is available [social support goes great with forums if you have the CSR staff]. Leave opinion, debate and subjective analysis to other members or at best referring to a previous post that gives it. By showing that you’re more than an ad you can demonstrate domain expertise and the experience your company offers.

United Airlines may not get a good rep in every post but having a representative on FlyerTalk.com, the world’s largest frequent flier site, to share company updates and respond to comments insures the FT users know the airline is, at least, listening. That’s a critical first step for driving business.

Leverage sponsorship to show your commitment to the community

Since most forums are self funding or even unprofitable businesses and hobbies, brands, especially larger ones, that come on board aren’t just buying advertising, they’re helping to keep the lights on.

Whether it’s on the site, at events or even at your own trade or press events, reminding your industry of the commitment your company is making to the community and the ability for users to share with in it is a strong message that you can leverage as your sponsorship continues on over time.  No matter how much people may dislike ads, or even question your brand, if done right your sponsorship becomes a symbiotic relationship.

When I founded Scubaboard.com in 2000 we had no idea it would grow to become the largest site [and community] in the dive industry. As we grow, so did costs, and our early advertisers stood up not for the exposure value but to drive something they saw potential in. Many years later, the owners of the site still call on them for events and posts: they are a part of the community.

Devise ways to put your product in front of the user honestly

Of course the goal of your involvement is to drive your business. Whether it’s gathering feedback, market research or seeding a new item, forums are an ideal place to learn and influence but it’s got to be done right.

When it comes to topical communities like forums, the single most effective way I’ve ever found to build positive influence [in more than 11 years of experience] is getting product in the hands of users through challenges or, for a more general product, open sampling.

It’s a simple concept – you invite users of the community to try the product by chiming in with a few details. After a couple days or weeks of collecting submissions your team, along with a representative from the forum, selects a number of “testers” spanning different interests, experience levels and statuses within the community. Each gets the product, theirs to keep, in exchange for an honest review on the forum [with disclosure of the freebie of course].  Keep it easy, transparent [that means allowing a review good or bad and promoting this heavily] and large enough to be seen.

A couple weeks after launch you’ll find that not only did you get a pile of reviews but chatter about your brand is up all over the forum, after all, you’re the guys who believe enough in your product to give it to people to test.

Just like on the major networks, the big leap in truly leveraging forums comes when you stop seeing it as a silo and start seeing it as a part of your communication strategy.

Integrating a community into your business process is like having your own open focus group of target customers 24x7x365. Input and commentary, whether it’s positive or negative, flows freely for those willing to take it and use it.  The more you give, the more  you get seen, known and trusted.

So if you’ve integrated your business with a community brought product in and are looking to what comes next, start thinking about how the community can exist within your business…

• Run new products by the community for first stage testing?
• Invite members to special events at trade or consumer events?
• Seed every launch out as a source for kick off marketing buzz?
• Bring commentary on products & your company into team meetings, reports, and the flow of business…. It’s not good until the community says it is.

Fast forward a few years and having a forum equated to a community. People posted, people sent messages, it was all about the niche and communities like ScubaBoard grew to become the largest their industries. Then, just when it seemed like forums were maturing to become the mainstream idea, a little site called Friendster popped up followed by MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and all the other broad networking sited that have stollen the spotlight.

But while Facebook and YouTube may have the eye of the world, the reign of forums has not ended or even slowed. As the owner of ScubaBoard has shared with me over the years; much as people enjoy talking to their entire social circle, the major networks have done little to really support niche discussions and topic communities like diving are very much driven by independent sites. Still, it’s rare for a forum to make the cover of the WSJ and if you take the 1/9/90 social engagement rules, forums are the wrong side of the metrics.

Forums have not evolved. They’ve remained about the same concept, post and reply, member, and almost all about content creators and readers with little done to encourage the vital 9%… the responders.

The future of forums is of course in integrating and growing up.

What applies to Facebook holds just as much weight in a dive community, gaming community or baking community…. People want to connect with their friends. colleagues and contacts first, the larger audience second. People want less sites, less logins, not more and Facebook connect, LinkedIn logins and similar tools offer access to hundreds of millions, even a big forum is usually just a few hundred thousand with a small fraction remaining active. People want to be able to engage without having to write a novel, or even write at all.

By focusing on the micro interactions; liking a post, posting a simple picture or short update and bringing that content out from the forum and into the mainstream sites, the opportunity is there for an entire world of thousands and thousands of sites to grow into what forums should have been all along, true social communities.

Its time for forums to evolve not just because the world has changed but because if they don’t, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, or some other currently undeveloped network is going to find a way to take the niche user and move them right on over to the mainstream.

So for all my contacts still running those amazing communities you’ve been cultivating over the past decade or more, I challenge you to think about these 3 goals:

- How do you use integrations with major social to expand to a new world of member and truly grow

- How can you reduce the threshold of membership to allow individuals beyond advocates and content creators to be able and willing to participate

- And how do you push your content out to be seen by the majority of the world may never see your site but are connected to those who use it or the topic its on

From where I sit everything in “new” social media is applicable to forums… it just hasn’t been prompted. What forums need is the same centralization other sites have been built around, what forums need is a feed to connect a user to their contributions, to their buddies and to the information that makes sense to them.

Whatever forum technology you have now or are thinking about bringing in down the road be sure it offers a portal, a way to collapse information and to get users from point A to the point B they want without surfing through dozens of sub-categories and hundreds of links. I’ve recently come up with my own interface for the vBulletin forum system which provides an a feed with elements including posts, profile updates, social group requests and much more. While it’s too early to talk about the impact it had, the initial comments from the sites using it and their users has been positive. I suspect those that really embrace taking their forum from a list of categories to a feed will see more activity and more visits as their users are able to sort through the noise quicker.

Now that you’ve identified your resources, technology and got a head start on setting up your community’s options it’s time to get it launched, growing and turn it into something your business can benefit from at the bottom line.

Seeding the community

Communities with no activity, no content and no members fall flat on their faces no matter how strong the brand behind them may be as visitors end up without anything to participate in and all alone. Thus before any emails go out, announcements are released or the world gets to see your community it’s absolutely essential that there be some level of seeding to provide a foundation and work out the kinks.

Seeding a community doesn’t necessarily mean faking discussions or users but rather is about strategically building content. Content starts

Once there’s a small base of users, FAQs, and other resource relevant content it’s time to bring in an “alpha” group. For a peer-to-peer forum this generally means a group of known associates who are already interested in the topic. Brands of course don’t tend to have any such group so customers have to be used and ideally those customers are ones with a high affinity and loyalty for the brand (segment “A”). Getting the seed group started is all about identifying a short list of customers (a few hundred ideally) and preparing an email to invite them into the beta site.

For many people being invited to the “prelaunch” is an impressive feat and something that makes them rally behind the site & brand and contribute heavily. Of course not everyone will end up sticking around or even show up in the first place which is why it’s important to ask enough people to join, have enough staff involvement to make it clear that your commitment to the community and introduce enough topics through your internal seeding process to give them somewhere to start.

Once your seed group has had some time on the community it’s time to bring people in before they run out of discussion topics or interest.

Launching to the world

An ideal launch is fast, heavy and hard driving as much activity as is possible. While it’s possible to launch with just a new link on the navigation bar or bit in a newsletter email small launches tend to lead to small membership numbers and therefore limited growth potential as visitors see little going on to compel them to join the branded community versus a peer to peer one in the same space.

Launch tactics start with traditional promotional changes like adding the community link to navigation elements and email templates, sending out a dedicated announcement email. The opportunity for real growth however is in pushing to other sources – including community relevant information on packaging (“for support see www.oursite.com/support) , in instore materials, directly in ad campaigns (“get comments from real customers”) and of course social networking channels (networks, tools and even other communities).

Launching also means morphing existing community related campaigns to include or point to the new forum. For some brands this is as simple as directing keywords like “discuss XYZ”, “XYZ reviews” or “XYZ forums” to the forums while for those with more robust community tools it may mean a new blog post and link on the blog structure, an updated twitter profile, an announcement to facebook fans and so on.

The more distribution points brought into the initial launch the more successful it will be. For some companies even going so far as to buy media to promote the community makes sense but often times a community can get started without any real marketing or ad costs although it’s always a good idea.

Develop a strategy for long-term growth

Like a gym or any subscription based business, forums have a natural growth and attrition pattern that, despite all the effort in the world, never goes away. For branded communities these retention rates can be very, very short with the majority of new signups joining the site, posting one or two questions and then bailing. Even those users who stick around and become active participants will eventually drop off whether it’s months or years later. This is normal but requires that there be a constant influx of new visitors to the community to refill both the short term and long term membership rates.

This of course means continuing to visibly drive traffic far into the future and well beyond the initial seed and launch efforts. For the most part a long term strategy can look much like the initial launch strategy but with a clear path for continuing to build engagement. Setting objectives for monthly member acquisitions, a list of forums and social networking tools to be involved in, and offline or product standards to continue to highlight the community help to insure that membership doesn’t stagnate.

Beyond direct promotion long term growth can also be achieved by building a word of mouth campaign behind the community. Communities that make it easy for members to bring in their own contacts and social networks to show photos, have their peers get answers and so forth lend well to social media sharing. Being responsive and proactive can also draw in mass social media attention on blogs and larger networks or PR all of which helps keep people aware and coming in.

Keeping long term growth also means long term moderation and response. While it’s tempting to put effort into the initial launch and then pass the day to day off to volunteer moderators or a lone customer service agent that won’t cut it. Keeping the “brand” involved with engagement from more senior roles and the marketing team is a long term part of a community and without engagement the community will suffer while much of the opportunity for value will be lost.

Keeping up with questions

Just as involvement is essential for growth it’s also essential for getting a positive vibe on the community. Forums that leave their users without answers for days on end tend to find hostile members who consider the brand old, slow and not good. Equally damaging if there is not a constant level of involvement from the brand users may begin to feel complete ownership of the community as it has become “theirs” instead of

Keeping up is as important as launching in the first place and to do so it’s important to be active in bringing forum content to the resources assigned to manage it (see part I for more on resources allocation). Luckily most forums allow members to receive updates when topics are started or responded to and some can even be extended to send SMS updates. Larger communities may require moving away from email and following RSS feeds which easily showcase active topics.

User alerts can also be helpful in responding to issues like spam, abuse and misplaced threads and should be farmed out to a number of resources such that someone is available to deal with them as often as possible. If a community has volunteer moderators they will likely take care of most of these issues but since the community ultimately reflects on the brand it’s important that their actions are followed up on to insure fair and equitable treatment of all members.

Of course email alerts are only as good as the response given to them which is why it’s essential that someone manage the greater view of the community and check into subforums and issues to insure answers are coming, are satisfactory and fit in with the direction of the community.

Aside from alerts and administrative checks, having resources review the forum at large is by far the best way to keep up with the pulse of it. Successful branded communities exist beyond Q&A type questions and by having brand resources respond in forums from welcome areas to general topical discussion helps show knowledge, expertise and fosters a better relationship between the brand and the user base.

Some moderation required.

Eventually all forums require moderation be it removing of blatant SPAM, discussions of a competitor, inappropriate users or flagrant trolling. For the most part moderation is a straight forward process that is more about timeliness than thought (removing spam is a matter of getting there quickly to hit delete) however there are times where it becomes much more about politics and user relationships. Whenever a user crosses the line attacking another member, flaming the brand or doing anything else that would get their post removed or pulled the process becomes much more delicate and requires a step back. Users and posts will have to be removed from time to time although often times merely engaging with them to point out the issue can be enough to stop future problems.

When a user does end up past the line and needs to be removed the process should be done so much like a termination with documentation gathered and stored, the user notified and their account immediately removed. Comments and questions about the ban are ideally responded to once without diving into specifics and closed. Sometimes users are happy to see the user removed, other times there is backlash but so long as the decision was made fairly and appropriately it will generally be forgotten in time.

Following and enforcing the community rules put in place during the setup phase of the process is the single most important step in moderation and in the event that the rules don’t cover an action they must be expanded before action is taken.

Growth through features

While expertise, responses and visibility all help get people interested in the community it’s almost always features that separate a community. For branded communities featuresets tend to be pretty straight toward and basic but they can and should be thought of as expansion areas. A brand trying to encourage customers to share photos would do well to add a more robust photo gallery if they don’t have one. A dating company looking to bring their users together in telling stories about their matches may add a tool to let users crate individual blogs rather than full threaded discussions. A manufacturer may build a simple interface to let customers comment on the service, value or deals they got at different retail points.

By finding innovative ways to show products, stories, experiences and get users interacting the community becomes more useful and people have more reason to share it and stick around themselves.

Finding real bottom line ($) value from the community

Ultimately communities aren’t about following trends or being social (hopefully). They’re about measurable results for the business. Like most social networking measurement and bottom line results aren’t a simple item to report on and understand. Conversions are generally not immediate, may not use a preferred tracking link and are often not even part of the discussion.

In fact the measurement process begins before any posts are made, reports are opened or data is gathered. The first step isn’t about data, it’s about goals. While many executives will point to a community as a source for conversions and ask that reporting prove how many such actions took place, that’s not the way to measure community value. Conversions are ultimately just one piece of the puzzle and generally a difficult one to track. Instead communities must be measured on a variety of metrics from awareness & positive impact to reductions in support and eventually conversions. Each of these elements will of course have a different weight for every brand which is why they have to be discussed before a community is launched or measured. For some businesses merely reducing support can “prove” the tactic while others will aim for a combination of sales lift and brand impact.

Measuring these elements is a difficult challenge as most of anything “concrete” takes place down the road and long after the community visit meaning no tracking links, few cookies and a lot of soft value in awareness. Even support issues are hard to measure as having a forum may bring more people forward solving issues that plague repurchase rates and satisfaction but which would have never been asked with a phone only support system making it hard to determine cost savings to support vs lift in customer loyalty.

To discover into community impact which can take time and also have immediate analytics companies generally divide reporting into two areas – community metrics and business metrics.

Community metrics refer to actions on the community which can often be correlated to a business value. For example, if user registration grows 20% a month for 2 years it’s clear that there is more value from the community. If posts in the support forum are made by 20 unique customers a month there’s much lower support reduction than if they’re made by 2,000 unique customers. If the average visitor remains active to the community for 120 days versus 30 days it’s likely the community has improved their brand loyalty.

Each community metric can be further delved into by profiling customers, using survey or segmentation data to understand who they are and for some businesses even correlating it against sales.

For example, a subscription business selling online may look to have each community member tagged to a customer ID and then compare the length of stay of users who visit the community frequently versus those who visit infrequently vs those who have never visited.

For a more traditional etailer, measuring future sales for community members by looking at email addresses and possibly even data captured in the community profile may help to explain a lift in sales rates.

This sort of analysis leads into the second and most sought after data – business metrics. Business metrics are reports or data points that indicate a direct business impact. While these are hard to fully vet (you’ll never know every conversion that was related to your community) there are a few simple ones that are a good starting place. Tagging forum links for conversions will give some picture of conversion rates; giving users tracked referral links can even further extend this. Community specific promotions and coupons also add to the conversion picture. For support looking at customer calls versus support forum tickets can show the number of inquiries and the potential reduction in costs that meant. Feedback and surveys can be correlated to money saved from conducting formal research and testing.

These insights only start to scratch the surface and real digging, profiling and correlating is required to really understand lift. Since most brands ultimately turn back to conversions as a measure of success most research focuses around this. Asking customers in a generalized way how they heard about the business and if they were referred or if they used the forum is one way to pick up on larger conversion trends. Looking at regional or time specific sales in relation to community membership or promotions is another. But again, conversions are only a small part of the forum picture and evaluating awareness, positive social comments (to other sites) and community participation can show results that are far more beneficial than a few direct sales.

Ultimately every branded community should strive to create a comprehensive report showing known (certain) impact to support, awareness and sales as well as inferred value (surveyed referrals, reductions to call volume since launch, improvement social comments, better brand interest in measurement studies, etc…). Only through a comprehensive report can a brand really start to understand the overall value being brought in from the community.

Long term success & the “dream” goal of communities

While most branded communities remain functional sites there are some that start small and end up growing into much larger discussion portals home to diverse topic arrays and a whole lot of search engine listings, viral buzz and opportunity. This is the ultimate result for any branded community and while rare it is something that can be marched towards. Having a sticky and wide topic is certainly important (a tv show or video game has a lot more discussion possibility than a screw or computer mouse) but beyond that there’s no single tip that will take your community to this point. However by listening to the requests of users, finding features to expand and offer and by understanding that ultimately even your branded community is owned in great part by your users (without them you have no community) you can take the steps appropriate to bring your community down that road and perhaps to mass market success.

But even without a huge audience just having engagement is a huge opportunity to improve relationships, gather insights and even drive some sales for any company.

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Missed part one of this series? Find out more about setting up your community including software selection, configuration and resource allocation.

When it comes to using features to drive site usage and interest, what you do shouldn’t end with new developing something new. As I mentioned in my first post, a great deal of forum development is done by programmers without thought to User Interface or best practices [this is especially true for the lower-tier products]. As a result there are some fundamentally broken parts of almost every forum out there, things which simply doom sites to have low conversion rates and high bounce rates.

Take a look at your site from the perspective of a user – how do they get there? Most forums find the bulk of their traffic coming in on subpages – forums, threads, photos, etc… I’ve seen some sites that had their top organic search term drive less than 1% of traffic, when you have stats like that you know people are entering all over the place. This means a lot of wandering users but again, most forums aren’t setup to talk to new visitors at all, in fact most forums treat them like they must know the site to be that deep. Think about it – a visitor google searches for a long phrase topic, a forum pops up since the forum has content on the subject but what the visitor gets is a thread. There’s no way to get to a Q&A on the subject, nothing telling them they can participate in the discussion, no next step, no direction. So unless all of your visitors are forum pros, the experience is lots of confusion, little direction. Most forums have huge bounce rates as a result.

Step forward a few ticks and assume the visitor does hang around enough to figure out that the site is a user community. They want to join so what’s next… click some button called register and this is what they’ll likely see:

If this was a lead gen form on any commercial site someone would be fired. Boxy layout, a page that scrolls when there’s all of 10 fields on it and absolutely no sense as to benefits, costs or next steps. If the visitor wasn’t certain about the site’s purpose or the process this page isn’t going to help much.

So how do you fix these issues? Take a traditional approach. Redo the registration page to something simple like in the example below which I’ve successfully launched for several clients. The results? Funnel completion rates for one client went from under 50% to over 85%. 15% abandonment is something most lead gen sites would kill for.

Here’s an example of a basic, moderately optimized registration page:

Fixing millions of potential “landing pages” to guide visitors in topic by topic isn’t possible but with some basic checks, you can make a great step. Greet guests with a message explaining the site, listing the options (other tools, registration benefits, etc…). If you have the technology resources and the time to do it, develop a logic tree and link topics to other pages, micro-portals. If you have a wiki this works wonders… someone hits a page on a very refined topic and at the top, after their welcome greeting, is a simple list of related topics. Boom, they get more content.

Every aspect of the site is up for change and should be reviewed. Most forums use a stock support page to get help, many never change their error message in the event of an outage, or their welcome email which reaches every member and so on and so forth. I encourage every one of my clients to visit their forum as a guest, register again and review the interface and copy in detail, you should too. If you really want to go further ask a few friends or family members to go through your site and complete goals, their feedback is invaluable at understanding how someone with no experience with the site sees it.

As a final thought, consider for a second who makes it to your forum and what your goals should be. I know most forum owners outside large corporations have never considered personas but they should – you should. There’s a few rules tossed around out there that explain just why. 10% — Out of tens of thousands of visits you’re lucky to get 10% to register and 10% of those will be active at any given time. With that mind, you need to treat people properly. The typical guest is at your site for information. Not to participate, no to talk… just to get information. Thus your goal for them is to get a second pageview. To get a third and a fourth. Get them involved just enough to build a little awareness in hopes they return later and maybe, just maybe, increase the registration rate a few ticks.

Another persona set exists in your current membership. It’s great to say you have 100,000 members but if those 100,000 came over an 8 year period and only 5% are active, the new competitor with 25,000 visitors 25% of whom are active has you beat. For those that do register only part will ever post and far less will keep posting but many will or would “lurk” [browse without being active]. Again, you can’t stop this, people will fall out of the activity cycle, but you can respond to and embrace it. You can use messages and email to direct people to be more active but there’s no way to get them all to be active. So instead communicate to keep them engaged as well. People who don’t post lose touch faster which means you need to be reaching out to them. Newsletters with information [content], event reminders, whatever makes the most sense for your niche use it. This keeps you top of mind and increases the odds that someone returns to you later. People don’t have to be actively adding to be of value, the more they read the more traffic you have and the more likely they are to jump back in overtime and use those new features from before.

Look at your community in terms of who is there, what their goals are and develop features, navigation and messages that corresponds to all of them, not just to your power users. When you do this your overall activity increases as does your participation and satisfaction. One size fits all just doesn’t work in an area with so many types.

Remember, there’s always another community looking to target the same niche, that’s the nature of something with such a low cost of entry. To stay top or become top you have to offer more than the guy next door and that means implementing ideas that are not just what you think is good but features that people actually have a use for, can figure out how to use and can find.

I’m sitting in the airport right now on my way to Las Vegas for DEMA, the annual Scuba Diving industry convention. My involvement in the dive industry started in the very late 90s when I, along with 2 partners, launched ScubaBoard.Com, a forum community, as a part of a large dive network. At that time communities were a new concept for most people and certainly something the dive industry, like many others, was struggling to understand. Still, we were late starters compared to other sites and faced fairly strong competition with both “basement startups” and major publishing companies already running successful forums. Just a few years later ScubaBoard was the largest diving community online and has since gone on to become the most visited site in the industry. So how did we do it? Features.

If you run a forum chances are you use a boxed software package. On the “low” end [cost wise] there are programs like vBulletin, phpBB and Invision Board and a host of others. Moving up the ladder you get enterprise platforms like Jive. Regardless of the software you use or are considering odds are the features are about the same. You have forums and subforums, threads and posts, user profiles, private messages and a plethora of other minor features all designed to make your forum match those of everyone else. Lately more social tools have been added as well as some ajax for easier usability but the end goal is still the same – show discussion forums in the same way other sites do.

The truth is most forums are the same because most software is the same. As much as the public has embraced the idea of communities, businesses and the software companies behind them still struggle to understand them so what you see are limited innovations coming primarily from the low end market. This has lead to a “what fits everyone” approach as opposed to a richer development process. In more than 10 years working with forums I’ve seen almost no true research or development to figure out what should go next, mostly its guesses by developers copied by other software companies and called “new”.

This is a tremendous negative to forum owners as there’s constantly need to innovate on your own but it’s also a tremendous benefit as not everyone has every tool available. The successful sites you see out there tend to be the ones that find or develop tools and utilities that fit their niche and move beyond “the box.”

So what kind of features can you add? They say the sky is limitless and they’re right but there are a few places to start so let’s begin there.

Features that plugin (the obvious ones).

• Photo Galleries. This is probably the most common feature you see on forums today, so much so that it’s begun to be included with a few of the forum packages. What makes photo galleries worth mentioning isn’t their inclusion, that should be evident, but rather their possible inclusion. Unfortunately a lot of forums treat photo galleries as separate entities from their discussions. Links are sparse, photos rarely appear in threads and there’s little correlation between the two applications. Any community with photos, be it a dive site with dive photos or a model building site with projects, can benefit from a well integrated gallery. Showing photos in user profiles, making it easy to include them in posts, having a good category, comment and display interface all helps encourage participation and keeps people on the site rather than wandering off to Flickr or the likes.
• Wikis. Wikipedia made them famous but more and more sites are beginning to add their own focused around a niche. The benefit of a wiki should be clear; you can sum up a common question, explain an item and really build an endless amount of content with the help of your users. Again, integration is the key to success. Don’t simply run a wiki, include it. One wiki software tool I know of integrates directly into forum structure allowing forums to be headlined with wiki links. Pretty sweet when you think about it – someone comes with a question about the topic, sees a link that answers it and can jump back and forth between major topics and discussions.
• Blogs. This is a toss up feature that can go either way. Some sites offer blogs to users as a means of journaling while others use blogs to update their users about the site or report on a tradeshow [like I'm about to be doing]. The first type is really ideal for letting users discuss in more lengthy activities like travel focused sites and less beneficial for small topic discussions like a cell phone site, although it’s always possible for someone to make a blog on almost any topic. All that’s needed is a way to name the blog, create entries and ideally search and categorize them.

  Corporate or as they should be called “owner” blogs on forum sites are an interesting way to update the membership about ongoing events or the inner workings of the site and since the site is ultimately controlled by the user (if they don’t like it, they leave) they’re a great way to lend to some back and forth discussion and suggestions.
  Done right blogs don’t even require separate software [although it's generally nicer]. Simply using the right style and layout can turn a forum into a corporate blog. For user blogs you’ll need something a bit more robust but fundamentally the idea is the same as a post only with a longer intro and less back and forth discussion thereafter.

• Classifieds. Almost every forum I visit has some level of bartering but when that goes from a few posts to a full blown mini-eBay it’s time to look for ways to let people make better exchanges. At the lowest level forums can be restructured to show open and closed offers. Thread prefixes help to keep things orderly [and should be something people can order off of] and some sort of rating system helps establish credibility. For the larger and more utilized marketplace putting in a full blown mini-classifieds system can have huge advantages especially if it has a good way of providing search results and automated updates.

  As with most of the other easy features getting a classifieds system isn’t so much the issue as making it fit well. Tools that require the user to leave the forum area tend to fail versus those that are integrated, work with existing profiles and show up as a forum, as a part of the profile as an integrated offering.

Features that are specific (the hard[er] to get ones):

• Member Search Tools. Whether it’s to plan a dive, meet up and cheer for the team, or talk shop, finding other members is probably one of the most common themes between sites. However most sites leave users to ask for locals when of course few people check back to see these requests. A strong member locator can help people connect up, extend their network and thus build a strong reason to return to the site. This can be done using maps, straight text search tools or a combination of the two.

  Think about it, would you rather post a request for a member with a shared interest, wait a few days for replies and contact each other or just click a few fields and find people instantly.

• Directories & Databases. Regardless of what type of site you have there’s probably a reason to create a directory be it of places, of products, of hikes, quests, ideas, recipes, etc… If done right directories allow users to create volumes of content and information which is extremely useful for search, for visitors looking to get ideas about a topic and for other members. Integrate the directory back to the forum with contributions showing up in profiles, reviews showing up in forums and you have an easy to use way of making for a much easier user experience.

  Relying in forums to act as directories is a problem most forums have – problem is threads get old, don’t tend to have many search fields and the same topic comes up over and over. With the help of a directory information is easier to sort through and gets used. Simple.

• Group Tools. Many of the forums out there have strong subgroups sometimes external to the forum (i.e. topic clubs) and sometimes included. Regardless of the nature of the group the experience tends to be pretty poor – users to go a subforum and talk with likeminded members in the same interface with the same links. Simply applying a customized skin (cobranding) to various group forums is a huge step in giving them an identity that remains clear. Member badges, group identification and group lists are all directly features that likely exist with little or no technical change but directly extend the experience even further.

  Of course this can go further and should. Why not create specialty calendars for groups with the fields and elements they need? How about letting group leaders send out email updates and newsletters? Creating custom registration pages for the group is also a no brainer as is landing pages, welcome greetings. Everything your site has or should have can be customized to a group to help its identity and use remain strong which in turn boosts that of the overall site.

• Portal Pages. Nothing is worse than launching features no one uses but often times no one uses them because no one can find them. Once you find your site becoming cluttered with forums, blogs, wikis, photos and all the other features you’ve decided on it’s time to get into portals and micro-portals.

  The initial portal most sites turn to is simply a homepage gateway which pulls in content from different features and helps users find the area they want to explore next. As your forum grows however it may be useful to build subportals around specific forum topics. These become part of the navigation structure so rather than clicking straight to a discussion list in your forum, users are transitioned to areas pulling together other relevant content information. The more you have the more necessary this becomes especially if systems live outside of the forum which is typical for photo galleries, directories and the like.

  Think about it, when you go to a discussion site how often to you click off a forum to try other features if they aren’t part of the content stream? If instead of going from discussion to discussion you went to areas pulling content in would that change? You bet.

• News Feeds. Facebook made this one popular although it’s something you can find on any number of sites and something many forums would truly benefit from. News feeds have two major draws, first they help users sift through the massive amounts of content your site probably has and follow the events they started, participated in or were linked to through a connection. Secondly a news feed can bring in events from outside the immediate forum world which, like with a portal, helps push adoption of all those features you added.

  What can a news feed include? For starters there’s the basics like when a post is made by a buddy, a thread is responded to, a new private message is sent and so forth. You can also include reviews of places the user has favorited, photo uploads & comments, new members in the area, group updates and on and on.

• All the other things that fit your site. Again that sky is endless, your site should determine your feature set and you should develop features to extend the site. The goal of features is not to replace members or content, nothing can do that. Rather features give your members something to use and places to add content be it photos to a gallery, listings in a directory or whatever else you chose to add. As you develop more content and people find more interesting tools, more users talk about your site, more referrals are made, people come and it all grows.

Whatever you add be sure it makes sense for your audience and niche. Adding a game portal may seem like a good way to get more activity but what’s the actual value? How does it help your site get more niche visitors? This is no different than deciding your forum topics and content areas; if you allow a small off-focus area you may do fine but if your site is 50% random conversations is it really on point? Do new members really want to participate, to use those tools and will the old ones stay around or find other, more focused sites to spend their time at? Activity is not the only goal, relevancy and value count too.

The second consideration point should really be from your users. Whether you come up with an idea from your own brain or from user suggestions it needs to be user tested. One of the great things about forums is the availability of opinions. Ask your moderators, as your super users, poll people and get feedback. Drive innovation from usage (analytics), from comments (feedback) and from your own brain, not just one source. And don’t settle for inferior, your users won’t. If you can’t develop it well, don’t do it. As much as we want to have every tool our competitors have, when you simply copy or clone a tool in a second rate manner people won’t be happy.

ScubaBoard beat other sites because it embraced the transition from classic threaded discussions to linear forums first. We continued to grow by adding photo galleries before others, by making the software we plugged in fit the layout, fit the experience. We embedded elements directly into the forums to promote usage and remove things that didn’t get used. Not everything was a dead on fit but it was innovation, it was features that mattered and people used them enough to return to the community, register and use that. Features aren’t all about being your activity; they’re about helping to support it. Not everyone wants to post to a discussion but they may want to share a photo, review a business in a directory or on and on. The more options you have, the more people there are with a reason to use and return to your site.

Remember, sites that stagnate and fail to innovate are sites that die. It doesn’t matter if you’re big… just as Yahoo!

Next week I’ll address two major challenges with features you already have that impact your conversion rates [registrations] and retention rates [page views] as well as suggest ways to fix them.

There’s no two ways about it, with the value of the dollar and the cost of fuel (even after its recent 20% fall) the airline industry is not having an easy time staying out of the red but maybe if one of them tried listening to their customers and responding they’d be able to make some actual money and gain an edge over the competition. When it comes to advocates, airlines have spent decades building relationships and have some of the loyal customers almost any business many of whom are clamoring to give input and share their concerns. Yet instead of listening and growing relationships, the airlines turn their backs and continue to invest in acquisition as if there’s an endless number of customers – and unfortunately it’s not just airlines doing this.

Like many industries, the airlines have been slow to adopt social tools and few have much in the way of community on their websites of any sort [note: there are a few airlines starting to get it with blogs out there including Southwest's, Delta's & Open Skies by British Airways which are all a great start]. But what I’m talking about when I say community is a dialogue – customers talking to each other and the airlines talking back to them, fielding questions, responding to suggestions and even allowing people to get up and tell stories, share photos, trip ideas, menus and all the other items you find on the numerous third party communities today but in a more formalized way that fosters a relationship and shows their commitment to each other.

And why not do it? Unlike with many industries, the airlines know who their top customers are and talk to them all the time. Hundreds of millions of people collect miles many of whom want more and would be likely to stick with an airline if it gave them better service and many would be happy to share their ideas but the true frequent fliers which are the big revenue generators are already sticking around and are itching to be heard. For these customers, cheapest isn’t the only thing to consider – status means a lot of perks so loyalty is already there, but with service waning and no one listening, loyalty changes.

What I’m suggesting is empowering people, be it the top elites, the general membership or both, to communicate with the airline in a forum where the airline has people who can actually make decisions and solve problems, not just pass them off to the next person on the chain. Like with so many businesses and industries, people are already talking, sharing their experience, griping about their problems, even offering suggestions and doing all of it in places that other companies profit from without the airlines getting any of the benefits they would, and nothing is going to stop the discussion positive or negative. By asking and interacting with people on their own sites in their own environment the airlines get the chance to open the door in a way where people acknowledge their effort and appreciate their service. By listening and making it clear that they want to act people become advocates and advocates bring business in.

There are of course some things the airlines are doing to stay connected – many have started monitoring third party communities and while I’d like to think it’s to stay advised of issues, from the discussions I’ve seen, one gets the feeling that a lot of it is to enforce their policies surrounding what employees say and to stop the trading of airline miles and other items. Not exactly the best use of resources or a good way to build PR but that’s where they seem to have their attention.

Indeed the airlines seem intent on taking an old world approach – gripe about the operating costs, put polices in place which frustrate customers and employees, use resources to track down “abuse” instead of helping the customer and turn to advertising to bring in new faces to drive revenue. But the truth is people are too connected with each other in this world to offer them a bad service and get away with it. And while many customers have to fly and will continue to fly, if all the airlines do is ignore their them, they’ll also continue to be in a position of playing price wins instead of brand wins — even frequent fliers don’t last forever and when they see their benefits erode, so does their loyalty.

In the past listening meant focus groups and surveys, it meant costly research projects and thousands of man hours. While there’s still a need for resources and time, the turn around on questions and feedback once a company gets things going is amazingly quick and unlike with traditional research, by getting involved there’s an opportunity to influence customers on the fly, to solve issues and be seen taking the “right” stance. If the airlines chose to participate in this new methodology and embrace their customers as influencers of the brand rather than just users of it, they’d benefit immensely from direct business and a positive word of mouth factor. It’s amazing just how good of things people will say when they’re given a little response from a company, a little sense that they matter. By continuing to stay “old world” and ignoring the customer’s attempts to aid their businesses, well, they end up the subject of bad reviews, unresolved issues and leave a bad taste in people’s mouth that sure doesn’t help make sales.

From my seat the airline that takes the time to listen and respond, even if they can’t do everything the customers want (nor should anyone expect them to do “everything”), will pick up business right and left – frequent fliers want an airline that values their business and the casual traveler wants a good experience – listen to them and win. It’s a simple theory and yes, easier said than done but if they don’t try, how can they make any impact? And of course it’s not just the airlines who would benefit from listening and nurturing the relationships they have with their customers today… many businesses are in desperate need of a little cleanup to their public image and would benefit from its impact on their bottom line.

Curios about what’s being said about the airline world today? Checkout Flyertalk.com, a frequent flier discussion forum with over 175,000 members and over 10 million posts, trip reviews and stories on just about every airline and air program out there.

My experience online practically started with online forums and the communities around them so I find myself constantly drawn back to them and now to discussing them. Since most forums use one of a dozen or so general software packages, it continues to puzzle and downright baffle me how none of these companies has really seemed to do a good job of introducing a marketing strategy out of the box. What do I mean? Well just pick a forum, any forum, yours, one you use, the first one you find in Google, and then dig in to a subcategory or thread and what do you see? You see the content and nothing else.

So what’s wrong with showing just the content? Well as any search marketer would tell you, campaigns need landing pages and forums do too. Paid traffic and link exchanges are easy to deal with, you get to pick the url, you get to create the message. Organic search and type-in traffic is more difficult to deal with since it can come to literally any part of the site but a guest is still a guest and methods are definitely available to talk to them like you would on a landing page, yet few do. What I generally see when engaging with a forum community is a ton of repeat visitors using (and clearly loving) the site and a lot of new visitors bailing on page one or two. Why? Because forums, especially large ones tend to have a ton of content and sections and they can be overwhelming to put it simply.

So for the forum owners out there, I thought I’d put together a few simple tactics you can try on your own sites to help direct traffic around.

1. If you plan to do marketing (and everyone should plan for that) you need to create a landing page for every unique campaign. A basic landing page doesn’t require much – take your existing site layout, simplify the navigation, add in a few images that capture the niche, a headline that speaks to the campaign subject and some supporting text. Throw a few bullet points in with benefits of registering for the site as well as the appropriate links to content that matches the campaign. Now people coming to your site from a listing will have a sense as to what they’re landing on and where to go next.

   You can start with a few basic landing pages for various top level campaigns and if they seem to be working, drill down into more granular levels. Remember to keep testing and refining your landing pages, watching where people go when they hit them, how many register or login and how many bail to gauge success.

   Bonus Idea – If you really want to expand on this, consider creating a few mini-portals which contain a combination of marketing copy with site information from your actual user driven tools to give the user a fully defined jump point for the specific topic they came in on. Mini portals can pull in data from the other features you may have in your forum and get visitors beyond just finding threads and therefore promote more of your site from the first touch point in.

2. Since landing pages require a specific access point and don’t cover the entire site, put a greeting on every page on the site for guests. Often referred to as “welcome headers” or “guest notices”, a simple message describing the community, explaining the benefits and cost of registering and linking to a few popular features and areas is a great way to get visitors on any page to know what’s going on. Returning members won’t see this if they’re logged in, and if they’re browsing as a guest they’ll have another reason to login which you should want them to do anyways.

Bonus Idea – You don’t have to stop with guests here. Create other conditional messages for new members, in active members, loyally members and any other classifications you want to talk to. Give them messages that relate to actions they may want to take, things they need to do (like verifying their email address) as well as general announcements that pertain to them specifically. This way you’re constantly addressing personalized needs and informing people rather than hoping they find their way to your news or support areas.

3. Develop a navigation and forum structure that gets visitors to the right area logically and quickly. With potentially dozens of different topics inside a niche, people need other ways to find content besides just clicking “forums” and seeing a list in use order. Be sure your navigation prevents different ways for different groups to reach information. For a regionally driven site this could me an interactive map or drop downs with countries/ states. For a DIY site how about using category lists grouped into lighter pages with heavy icon use. Even your forum directory pages can benefit in being organized into more defined sections and made easily collapsible and searchable so someone coming in for one specific topic isn’t stuck trying to find it in a sea of dozens.

4. Guests are new so keep things simpler for them than for your power users. Excessive navigation, long stats modules in posts and extra long pages can work wonders for members who return to your site daily to contribute and read but for a guests it’s just more clutter that they have to sift through. Identify the features, navigation elements and data that matters to guests and show them little more. You can always include messaging along the lines of “register to see more” or “access your account for the complete page” explaining and even showing screenshots of what the guest and member experiences are like but at the end of the day you want to insure people get to information and don’t get stuck looking at the number of posts other members made, the upload photo utility and so forth.

5. Recognize that many people found you from a single specific query rather than a broader need so center value around a short term, specific need. When I started my second forum in the Scuba Diving space I realized that for many of our visitors, they weren’t looking to post or join in a community immediately, if at all. Instead they found us because they heard we had information on a topic, a video they should checkout or from an organic listing about a very specific and long-tail query. Pushing everything on these visitors to join a community wouldn’t make sense… instead you need to focus information on getting their question/ thought/ issue resolved. If you can do that, you provide value which you can back up with more interactive tools they may then chose to jump into.

6. This falls much in line with the mini-portal idea as you really want to consider expanding information beyond just threads. Using blogs, wikis, directories and other tools can help push multiple relevant information streams to your visitors that help them find the information they came for in a format they want to use, whether it’s a listing for a specific store or shop or an overview answer.

   Bonus Idea – Within your forums creating sticky topics linking to common threads is a great way to both avoid rehashing ideas every other day and getting members the information they need. If you can identify questions shared by many visitors and answer them in a single thread linking out to detailed discussions you help to centralize information and make it useful so navigation time is minimized and the opportunity for engagement increases.

7. Ultimately you want people to register so clean up the registration process. This almost deserves a thread of its own but it’s a huge issue. No landing page would ever show a form like the standard forum sign up forms… cluttered boxes, limited information and no sales copy, it’s just no good. I suggest throwing out your registration page and putting together something that’s faster, gets just the data you need and continues to reinforce your values and offering throughout the process.

My last suggestion is to continue to think outside the box and customize everything. Forum software comes with tons of features, templates and content which many people just end up leaving alone. If you’re like me and use dozens of forums powering through topics this may be ok but for your new visitors, they want to see relevancy at every step and turn. If you spend the time to customize your pages, remove the items that don’t relate to your site and modify the copy so it does, people become more comfortable browsing and are able to identify that you (and not your competitors) are the destination for them. Don’t assume that just because thousands of forums have a box in a certain place you have to as well… test changing where things sit within reason and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at just how much easier things are to use and how many more people use them.