Making your forum successful requires a substantial dedication of time
No Comments
Written by Atila on August 26, 2008 – 1:49 pm
Part 2.
Dedicate Requisite Time and Resources
Making your forum successful requires a substantial dedication of time. However, you can have your existing customer service team or a key employee or two help moderate the forum. In addition, once your forum is established and a few key members emerge based upon frequency of participation, you can ask them to help moderate the forum. In general, you need not spend more than 10 to 15 hours per week managing the forum, especially if you have active members looking after the board and providing responses to other members. However, if you want to be proactive and post questions before a member asks them, you may need to dedicate more time to managing the board.
Conduct Contests or Giveaways
One way of generating participation on your forum is to periodically hold contests or giveaways. For example, you can give away a $100 iTunes gift card to the person who submits the most compelling testimonials about your products or services. Another idea might be to provide a giveaway like a logo T-shirt or mug whenever someone on your forum exceeds a certain number of posts. Many successful forums offer active members milestone awards. As mentioned earlier, one way of rewarding your most active members is by giving them a moderator or similar status. Moderator status is usually designated by an icon or some other symbol that notes the status of the member.
Set Rules
In order to create a successful forum, you need to have very specific rules about what is and is not allowed. You may decide that the forum is a place where you allow members to promote their own services. For example, you should have a policy that disallows or minimizes members from posting self-serving links to their Web sites for SEO purposes. Moreover, you may want to have a policy that forbids competitors from coming to your board and posting advertising messages or maliciously stirring rumors or posting false information. Finally, a forum is supposed to be a place where the community helps to set rules and standards. Therefore, you should consider asking your most active members what rules and policies they think should be implemented on your forum in order for it to attract new members and provide existing members with valuable information.
Ask Friends and Colleagues to Post Questions and Comments
When you first launch your forum, ask your friends and employees to post on it. Your employees can start out by posting common questions and concerns shared frequently by your customers. For example, you can start a forum post around what products have sold best during the holiday season. Your friends and employees can simply respond with their opinions and you can step in with the answer based on your experiences. You can also use your first few forum posts to ask members what they want to know more about and how you can best use the forum to help them. Finally, your first few forum posts could be on topics about which you are interested in requesting feedback from customers. For example, you can pose questions about desired shipping methods or experiences with packaging.
Share Information About New Products
Probably the most effective use of a forum if you have an e-commerce Web site is to share information about new products as well as to inform members about promotions and special incentives. For example, you may provide an exclusive percentage-off offer to all your members or a special free-shipping coupon to active members of your forum. Regardless of your approach, a forum is a great place to keep your customers interested in your products and informed about special deals and offers.
