Forums have been around since the earliest bulletin boards on the web. They are not going away even in the hyper connected world of Twitter and social communities like Facebook. If anything, the growing acceptance of online social networking as a norm and use of social networking platforms and applications are breaking down what were previously barriers to participation. More non-participating lurkers are becoming active forum participants. How do you make sure your readership is consuming information from and participating in your forum? The challenges and many of the solutions have not changed for forum owners and managers since the original days of bulletin boards; however, there is now much more online clutter that your message must cut through. Here are some proven strategies and tactics for developing and maintaining an online forum.
The Challenge
For the publisher wanting to start a forum as part of the online community and circulation development strategies for the publication, there is a two-fold challenge. The first part of the challenge is to get the desired level of participation from the desired audience. The second and equally daunting challenge is dealing with the management that comes with an active forum.
Publishers are familiar with the challenge of growing and maintaining circulation, for this is essential to the publication’s health. Publications that offer a unique focus deemed valuable by their subscribers thrive. A forum must not only provide an editorial slant so to speak that cannot be found elsewhere, it must also be attractive to users. This attraction is not just a nice user interface with trendy graphics; the real attraction is the quality of the discourse in the forum. To bring the quality discourse to your audience, you must make your forum easy to understand, easy to find, easy to use. This will all add up to making it easy for the visitor to see the unique value of their own participation in your forum. If you make it easy to participate, users will return and become regular readers and participants. You must make sure that the reader’s first visit is not the last.
Learn from Others
Before you add a forum to your publication’s online presence or find yourself looking for ways to reinvigorate an existing forum, visit other popular forums. Check out the competition. Visit with the dispassionate goal of analysing what makes one forum more attractive and worthwhile than another. Go beyond the look and feel. Look at how many different voices are being heard in each forum and how current the threads are. These are signals of a healthy and active forum. Then, consider the topics, and look at how they are set up and managed. Don’t just visit once. Set a schedule to visit several forums on a regular basis to see how the discourse ebbs and flows within them. If you plan to monetize your forum, look at how other forum owners have addressed this. If premium content is only available to members, evaluate closely if the scheme used for monetizing the forum is helping or hurting its overall vitality. When you finish your analysis, consider whether you would want to return beyond your competitive study and what attracts you to one forum vs another.
You will probably develop a list that includes at least these characteristics. The better forums have a wide variety of topics being actively discussed each time that you visited. A site with many empty threads is much worse than a community with a few broad and active forums. Activity should dictate the creation of new discussion threads. Your goal at the beginning is activity, not topic volume. As you conduct your competitive survey, you will also probably find that you are drawn to forums which have a number of individuals posting to each topic, not just a single forum administrator posting a perfunctory entry on a few broad topic headings. A healthy forum has breadth of coverage as well as depth.
You will probably discover that quality discourse draws participation and gives the forum a texture that is palpable. The readers / participants feel drawn into the discussion and readily add to it. You will see that making sure that lurkers (those who read the threads, but seldom post) feel comfortable and welcome is part of the management of the forum experience. From your competitive survey you will undoubtedly discover that a vibrant forum is lively, inviting and comfortable for all participants.
Building the Community
Forums are communities, and the strength of the content created is dependent on the strength of the members of the community. Building a strong community requires having ample expertise available to and participating in the forum. Early on, you and your helpers must be the most active posters in the community. Every question must be answered quickly. Dialogues must be created. In short, activity must be generated, and it will be up to you to generate it. Very active forums use the community as forum moderators, and experienced community builders have found that there is a strong vein of altruism (wanting to help, wanting to be part of the community and wanting to be recognised as a guru) that drives people to become moderators - tap into this.
Selecting and rewarding participation as moderators presents a challenge. Moderators must be passionate about the topic, deeply knowledgeable and willing to spend considerable time involved in the forum. Once a forum is started, new moderators will bubble up to the surface from among active participants. Identifying initial moderators for a new forum is a different task.
However you select your moderators, you will want to reward them for their intense level of participation. Before you make a decision on rewards, it is imperative to consider how and why individuals progress from lurker to moderator. A desire to share and add to the community is often the impetus for participation. Contributors who become aware that they really have something to offer to the community and want to be recognised as leaders and gurus in the community become moderators. Intangible reasons, deeply tied to the individual’s self-concept, drive intense levels of participation. Offer moderators intangible rewards because they are participating for intangible reasons – often known only to them.
Some forum leaders have found that monetary compensation will de-motivate such individuals, not jump start them. It changes the motivation and shifts the equation from one of personal satisfaction in being part of a community to a quid pro quo relationship. This long range will make participation less attractive. Similarly, if you chose to provide some sort of gifts to your moderators, be careful in that these can be denominated into payment equivalents. Go for status items that relate directly to the site. Give unique items that no one except these select individuals will have. Provide other status-driven opportunities for recognition such as offline meet-ups, annual gatherings, special recognition, etc. Properly structured, these opportunities can be clear win-win for the publication.
Using the Community to Benefit Your Publication
Content comes to you from the users – your forum is de facto your editorial focus group. Participants are your most committed readers, actively telling you what interests them and what they want you to focus on. Use this information wisely. Tap the sentiment through your moderators. They will be best able to identify and caution on listening too much to the squeaky wheels. All the voices that you hear on the forum may not in fact represent all of the voices, but rather a few squeaky wheels adding their strongly biased opinions. Strong moderators will keep them at bay and guide the discourse meaningfully.
Moderators should give them their due, but keep them in check. Just as there are committed groups of individuals who actively write letters to the editor, so too there are forum participants. You would not necessarily drive your entire editorial focus off of your letters to the editor page, but using some of their commentary and interests is a delicious spice for the editorial mix.
Nurturing and Securing the Community
Provide moderators guidance and help for dealing with squeaky wheels and other more malicious trolls. Develop a set of best practices for moderators on your forum. Consider building scenarios that target how to handle specific issues that require moderation, show how the issue might be handled. You might even provide a set of procedures and communication templates to support your moderators. This might seem like a lot of unnecessary effort, but you need your moderators to reflect your publication’s identity, and the more guidance and actual communications tools you provide, the more effective your moderators will be in carrying forward the message that you want delivered.
Just as you want to be prepared to handle bad acting participants, you must be prepared technically to handle the inevitable spam. Spam is always a concern, and combating it is just one of the technical challenges you will face. When choosing your technology platform, clearly evaluate what capabilities are available to manage spam. It is important to be prepared even before you launch. You must prevent and manage spam early on as it could easily overrun your forum. It is especially important that first time visitors not encounter a forum full of spam, for this is to them a clear signal of a rundown, inactive community.
Let Social Media Be the Wind beneath Your Forum’s Wings
Develop a communications plan to support your forum. Most site owners gleefully announce the launch of their forums and then rapidly delegate them to the basement in their communication efforts. If you want to have a vital and robust forum, communicate with participants and the rest of your publics frequently. Let them know through the informal channels of social media that there is a lively discussion going on in the forum on a specific topic. Use the opportunities presented by Twitter and Facebook to reach new audiences by inviting participation in the forum on specific topics. A poll or short survey conducted within the forum is grist for a tweet and a re-tweet on Twitter. The type of individuals who participate in forums will also be using other forms of social media.
Use social media and the forum itself to promote offline get-togethers for forum participants. Parties, events, and scheduled meet-ups in the context of larger events where large numbers of forum participants will be gathering, draw the community together. Members who attend such events will become more deeply engaged in the community and with the publication. With an increased sense of belonging, they will post more often and will become increasingly loyal to the forum and the publication that it supports. Developing a healthy forum that will support your publication is like building a friendship or any other relationship. It takes care and nurturing.
