Developing Online Communities? 30
Johnny asks: "I'm involved with a project that is looking to develop an online community for technology oriented business customers. Although there are various communities on the web, there is no centralized source of information for the customers. If you could develop an online community to encourage collaboration and information sharing, what features would you want included? How would you go about including features that are widely available in other places (weblogging, message boards, wiki) and generating buy-in from customers."
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A minimal approach would be to integrate.... (Score:2)
So what if you have some reasonably complicated website with login, "stuff" and everything else, and you want to integrate some sort of message-board?
I've been working on a games website [darwingames.com] with a friend, where step #1 was "make games work". Now we're on step 3 or 4, which is "get forum software", but I haven't found any relevant sites discussing integrating some reasonably simple forum software with existing login systems.
There seems to be two schools of thought:
1- You are an end
Tough one... (Score:1)
The biggest problem I've fo
Have you thought about what you're asking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Building an online community is no different than building a successful website, successful blog, or successful discussion forum: you need to have something that differentiates you from the hundreds or thousands of other related websites out there. If you've identified something unique you can offer, or offer in a better way, then you've already answered your own question. If you just want another site to do the same things as existing sites, then you will fail.
This is completely untrue (Score:1)
You will fail? Absurd.
attitude just as critical as digital accoutrements (Score:2)
Re:attitude just as critical as digital accoutreme (Score:2)
If you're going to recommend that we read a dialogue then at least link to its root [slashdot.org] instead of your ending leaf.
Re:attitude just as critical as digital accoutreme (Score:2)
doh (Score:3, Funny)
1) Ask an already established technical community "how to begin"
2) Stating a goal of "generating buy-in from customers" in the same sentence that admits "features that are widely available in other [free] places"
You missed one (Score:2)
You missed another two (Score:1)
- 1) Ask an already established technical community "how to begin"
3) Turning to Ask Slashdot for reliable answers.2) Stating a goal of "generating buy-in from customers" in the same sentence that admits "features that are widely available in other [free] places"
4) Asking the same thing twice...
5) ???
6) Profit!
Set up a netnews group (Score:2)
Selling communities. (Score:5, Interesting)
sort of opposite concepts. In one, people are choosing to work together on something. in the other there's a central power who's trying to get a group to buy something.
The biggest failure of "online communities" in the 'net days is that most of them are corporate sponsored marketing schemes rather than actual communities.
Re:Selling communities. (Score:2)
Me, I'm working on something I hope will eventually be a business of some sort, but it first needs to be a community. I think there have been exactly 3 posts on the forums in the month of beta testing I've done so far, and this is with something like 50 accounts out there. Maybe the commercial aspect scares them off, dunno.
Oblig. Answers (Score:1, Interesting)
Sell your idea to ebay [ebay.com], they might like you. (and the highest bidder wins!)
If you could develop an online community to encourage collaboration and information sharing, what features would you want included?
That's easy, BitTorrent [bittorrent.com].
How would you go about including features that are widely available in other places (weblogging, message boards, wiki) and generating buy-in fr
some thoughts (Score:2)
The manual might come in a wiki structure giving people the opportunity to add their own observations.
You might consider some blog like construction to give people a place to showcase what they have done with the technology.
What's so lame about this? (Score:1)
If you feel let down by your little online community, take it up with your editors who allowed something so offensive to you to spoil it.
developing an effective online community (Score:1)
Reliable source of information (Score:1)
It's doomed, don't waste too much time (Score:2, Interesting)
It's been done before.
If your potential customers want to talk about [your product related things] they already are. Somwhere else. Getting them to migrate over to your (heavily moderated) community ain't going to happen.
The marketing effort needs to have it's own marketing effort.
Next, assuming that people want to have a community and don't, it takes a a critical mass of users congregating in the same pla
Joel Spolsky has written about this (Score:2, Informative)
Something good from Something Awful (Score:3, Interesting)
forums are key (Score:3, Interesting)
Forget about it (Score:1)
Also, if you want to do research into the needs of your target audience, you do not ask the readers of a website that subtitles itself News for Nerds what to do, unless you wish to st
Hmm... (Score:2)
Yikes. It sounds to me like you want to create something without any specific goal other than "creating a co