Marketing of The Forum

[Grains]

I have been on this forum for a little of 3 weeks and although I may or may not be the one for suggestions I think that feedback from anybody could be positive.

Have you ever done a study on this forum to see which new users have never been to a forum before or been a member of? And, compared that to the discussions threads they were posting and who the interacted with. Have you considered when a new member shows up for the website to point them to kind of a mission statement of the site and the general consensus/rules within it.

Have you ever taken a census of the members who reached lets say a post count of less than 100 and not returned and seen what interaction they had with other members/moderators/administrators? (The reason I ask is so many post have been started by members who have not logged on since forever and have less than 100 post and seemingly disappeared. )

One forum I have been in, I never joined but I have perused, has moderators who cannot conduct in the actual threads. They simply moderate. After all that is what a moderator is.

Hypography is a great site. The one thing I do see is the fact that for the past 3 years some of the main contributors are still the main contributors. This may be fine. But I was just curious if any studies have been done to examine these different factors and the growth of hypography overall.

I was just curious because I am in business and naturally I examine the business aspects of things. I was just curious to what your site is doing to attract new members, more importantly: retain new members, and offer new exciting things to hypography.

I think member retention would be one of the things I focused on most. As acquiring new members is the most costly part (advertising, word of mouth, etc) and retaining members is the easier part if done correctly.

[Buffy]

We've done some informal studies, however there's always more to be done!

I'm a marketing maven myself, so I'm quite familiar with what you're talking about here and agree with your conclusions about retention of members.

On your comment about moderators, I'm not sure that you'd find that even a large minority of discussion forums have moderators who "only moderate": that would be the most boring job in the world. We're all here because we enjoy each other's company, and enjoy discussing all of these topics ourselves.

Its a club: some people find they enjoy it here and others do not, but almost without exception, the reason people stay is that they like the "atmosphere" and the people.

Content is King of course, and one of our distinguishing charactersitics as a Science Forum is our willingness to discuss all sorts of theories beyond the "conventional wisdom" and that has brought in an interesting cast of characters who make this place even more interesting.

No, we're not Slashdot or Facebook, but we're not trying to be. Some people don't like the reception they get here, but often its because they *don't* bother to read the rules that are easily located at the top of every page of the site, or try to look around and get a feel for what this place is like but rather barge in and start making demands about acceptance, and to those folks this place can sometimes look like a biker bar at 2am on Saturday night.

Its unfortunately those folks who make this place sometimes seem unfriendly to what I call the "women and children" and so if anything we can be quite harsh with folks who are antisocial.

If you've done marketing, you'll know that its expensive. I've had multi-million dollar budgets to play with at work, but there's no money here at all. Word of mouth along with a very high Google Rank (which unfortunately the Spammers just love to try to take advantage of), gets us a long way....

I warn you against believing that advertising is a science,
Buffy

[Tormod]

Originally Posted by Grains

Have you considered when a new member shows up for the website to point them to kind of a mission statement of the site and the general consensus/rules within it.

I do believe this is being done to some extent already. Guests are welcomed with a message about our forums and a note to sign up, where they are presented with our general rules. After signing up they receive both a PM and an e-mail with a prominent link to our rules page.

As for marketing, Hypography is not marketed anywhere AFAIK.

Member retention: We can be better here and always have some sort of project in the pipeline. We do launch new features now and then but it is mostly the ongoing discussions that keep this site alive. Since many of our members are students we see strong seasonal variety.

And for some reason June 2008 was our best month in years, with almost twice the traffic of June 2007, and the best month on record (which means the best since about 2004)!. I have no idea why but the statistics show that we get lots of traffic from search engines, blogs, and sites like StumbleUpon...so word of mouth is important for a site like ours.

[InfiniteNow]

Originally Posted by Buffy

On your comment about moderators, I'm not sure that you'd find that even a large minority of discussion forums have moderators who "only moderate": that would be the most boring job in the world. We're all here because we enjoy each other's company, and enjoy discussing all of these topics ourselves.

I agree, and think you made a very well formulated point above, but let me ask you (and all others) this.

Should staff members who are noticably absent from the site, who contribute very little and have, at best, only a tiny and miniscule understanding of the context and momentum of all of the recent posts on which they are being asked to act, be allowed to make and enforce larger decisions such as banishment or suspencion of members?

The point being, if the staff member fights for the expulsion of a member based on only a tiny handful of examples, then there is little chance that they have a valid understanding and appreciation (even awareness) of that particular members greater contributions... their overall presence as part of the Hypography landscape are likely to be missed and absent from the decision making process for these irregular staff members, since their overall lack of participation greatly calls into question their familiarity with the case under discussion... I posit that the ideas of inactive staff members be evaluated, but that their ability to leverage changes on posting behavior of members minimized.

Basically, the most active staff should have the greatest say when issues such as banishment come to the table.

This is just a thought I've been having today. I thought I'd raise it openly for discussion.

[Tormod]

Inow, how do you suggest such a rule be implemented? Ie, how would we distinguish between active and less active moderators?

[InfiniteNow]

Post count. Login records.

It's just an idea. Geesh.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by InfiniteNow

Should staff members who are noticably absent from the site, who contribute very little and have, at best, only a tiny and miniscule understanding of the context and momentum of all of the recent posts on which they are being asked to act, be allowed to make and enforce larger decisions such as banishment or suspencion of members?

The point being, if the staff member fights for the expulsion of a member based on only a tiny handful of examples, then there is little chance that they have a valid understanding and appreciation (even awareness) of that particular members greater contributions... their overall presence as part of the Hypography landscape are likely to be missed and absent from the decision making process for these irregular staff members, since their overall lack of participation greatly calls into question their familiarity with the case under discussion...

Sounds pretty abstract to me. Probably not worth worrying about unless it actually happens, and quite frankly we have mechanisms to deal with it, there being quite a bit of review and even reversal of such actions, as you may be aware.

A beastly ambition, which the gods grant thee t'attain to,
Buffy

[sanctus]

Infinite, we do it already in my view. When we discuss a reported post for example, then the ones who know most about given thread and member(s) act.

[InfiniteNow]

It was more just an idle thought I'd had, and saw this thread as an opportunity to share. Nothing serious. Just try to remember that most of the active staff cannot act (anything beyond infraction or moving posts around). That's part of why I asked. So many staff members are no longer active to any great extent, so I imagine (especially the admins) it would be tough to truly understand context.

I was just putting it out there.


Btw Buffy, yes, I know almost precisely how things work behind the scenes here. Hence, my opening this up for discussion.

[Tormod]

Originally Posted by InfiniteNow

Just try to remember that most of the active staff cannot act (anything beyond infraction or moving posts around).

This shows that you do not know how the staff works, or what powers they have.

I think it's a shame that you take every opportunity to put the work of the moderator team into question. Even here, in a thread which was supposed to be about marketing Hypography.

If you want to discuss the staff's work I suggest you do it via PMs or in the Feedback forum rather than hijacking other threads and making thinly veiled accusations.