Recently in Forum Communities Category

Last week I talked about the importance of developing new and unique features to make your forum community stand out above the crowd in order to win & retain visitors. But the story doesn't end with adding features, there's a lot on off the shelf forum software to customize and customize it you must. In the second part of this series I explain a few of the prime areas to change because at the end of the day to win the user over your site needs to get them back.

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.

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.

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.