Forum Moderators: rogerd
We're looking to start a Q & A's forum for our website which sells widgets and were wondering what are the steps to make it a success, in generalised terms?
[ Our site network fluctuates between 5 - 10k uniques a day which we focus on sales ]
And then what measurements should we be looking for to support this claim of success? What do site owner folks generally look for?
I haven't seen quantitative measures of community success, but certainly general indicators would be vigorous dicussion, growing membership with many members remaining in the community, etc. Indicators of lack of success would be many unanswered posts, conversations that die before they get very far, and not many members sticking around for very long.
An idea which I had ( nothing new i expect ) is to allow moderators that offer complimentary services in their own business' to display a free advert for their business via their profile ie advertise their company/personal authority.
Then have them contact "early adopters" via a push and pull strategy, with emails to key people to respond to the post. Some comments which would act as bait, would be key, I would have thought.
What's the best way to attract quality moderators and contributors?
What's the best way to motivate and secure the moderators loyalty for the long haul?
[edited by: Whitey at 12:30 am (utc) on Mar. 10, 2007]
I'm thinking of working this through the planning stages with a marketing consultant, familiar with "building communities" which hopefully will result in a well implimented forum. What are the initial budgets i should be looking at, assuming nothing too complicated:
I thought:
- 2 days sit down discussion/planning/strategy $1200
- Software recommendation based on above for tasks strategy/identified $200 by a seperate expert
- Implimentation and software $300
- Initial training and moderator support over 1 month $50 per hour say 10 hours
And then what would the operational budgets be [ i guess it depends a lot on the activity levels ]. But in broad terms, what would the line items be:
-Server costs / administrator
-SEO
-Programmer
-Moderators
-Motivating remuneration for key contributors
Have i missed something, is there a better way to do this?
Good moderators will emerge as you build a strong community - you may find it difficult to recruit mods early on (or even identify who would be good). For the first few months, or even the first year, you may be able to handle mod duties yourself. It all depends on the level of activity and how quickly it grows. The good thing is that if you have a lot of activity you should be able to spot some potential mods.
The rates you are describing for professional community building help sound low... but if someone with good credentials will work for those rates you will probably benefit from that assistance.
The rates you are describing for professional community building help sound low
What is the market rate for these approximately .... it was just a "thumb suck" that i put up.
One issue to consider is that most forums have various levels of users - unverified members, regular members, members with penalties/restrictions, moderators, admins, etc. If you want your other software to drive user setup and authentication, you'll have to figure out how to make the member type and status in the forum work. COPPA verification (kids under 13 need parental permission to join) is another consideration, though it seems that COPPA has been weakened by judicial rulings.
At the moment I have an e-marketing guy drawing up some early stage plans, but as always i want to be a step ahead to ensure we are heading the right way.
A couple of things, in the "ABC" stages:
Integrated solution versus better software
- I can clearly see that established board software like vbulletin and phpBB are full of great features and easier to use, but we have an exisitng front end management CMS to organise our e-commerce on the front end and I don't want to intergrate seperate solutions.
Why?
Because I'll have to deal with seperate developers with all the headaches that causes.
Is that sound thinking or am I not thinking out of the square?
The system that we look like using is Gossamer Forums, which seems a fair way behind the others. I wondered if anyone's been faced with a similar integration issue and can comment on making do with something like GT's product.
Moderator Guidelines
Again I was looking out for some models to observe that declared the moderator guidelines and the incentive structures [ voluntary ] as a benchmark.
The one that impressed me the most was "FlyerTalk" which is mentioned on some other recent post.
Does anyone have any top quality benchmarks that they have worked to?
