Author: Amy Armitage

This article was written for OISV.com and PingZine

Online life is a whole other culture. My first taste was around 8 years ago when I connected to the net and discovered chat rooms. I had no idea how addicted I would become, or the lifelong friendships that would be created.

The things to be learned:

Oh the stress of trying work out terms such as lol, lmao, lmfao, brb, bbl, asl, wtf and ttyl. I felt like a spy in an espionage thriller trying to decode this complex language and obscure symbols without blowing my newbie cover:

;) :D :~~> :p :( *:( :0 (.)(.):-), ;o), ^_^ :-(

The pressure to learn netiquette, to keep up with the latest scripts, styles and colors, to even remember my aliases when attempting to deflect the enemy. I identified the enemy as desperate married men private messaging me with steamy one liners and descriptions of their man parts. Combined with the control alt delete trick I’d fallen for one too many times I aborted my mission.

Mindless chat and watching people hook up and outdo each other with clones, bots, trojans, port sniffing (I thought this related to wine tasting.. seriously), big bold letters and ascii text just didn’t hit the spot. I’d suffered enough netsplits where my friends were plummeted to a whole other server.. the separation anxiety was too much from residing on an unstable network. I took my bisexual 67 year old Norwegian male cover and moved on to forums.

Forums:

Any discussion group accessible through a dial-in {BBS} (e.g. {GEnie}, {CI$}), a {mailing list}, or a {Usenet} {newsgroup} (see {network, the}). A forum functions much like a {bulletin board}; users submit {postings} for all to read and discussion ensues. Contrast real-time {chat} or point-to-point personal {e-mail}. [{Jargon File}]

Forums were less pressure. I started out with the light stuff, the chatter and socialization and then I moved on to the heavier discussion as my appetite increased and my hunger for technical knowledge grew. I didn’t have to respond instantly and I could think about my replies and spell check them. I could pretend to be smart and use search engines to make sure my replies were accurate. My goal was to become a tech girl… a geeky chick… a wonder web woman. Sightings of these creatures were rare and I knew if I studied and networked correctly I could create an entirely new alias.

Once I had the whole concept and look down (even the funky glasses), I landed on lunarforums.com; a space for people who needed help with building websites, problem was, I didn’t have an online space and I had no clue about the basic principles of hosting. I became a lurker (A visitor to an online discussion who reads other people’s postings but does not contribute. Lurking is a good way for a beginner to get familiar with a newsgroup or forum).

Lurking was awesome because I spent about 6 weeks simply observing and applying the knowledge to my new site. I tracked down my very first post.

“what’s the hostname for a MySQL database?

is it localhost? lunarpages.com?”

To my amazement and delight they didn’t sigh at me or call me stupid. In fact it wasn’t even my error. Turned out the issue was server side and I had the correct settings! Woot! That was enough for me. The fear was gone and I became a postaholic. Within 4 weeks the owners of Lunarpages had approached me to run their forums.

WTF? It’s amazing what some bravado and bullshite can do.

Optimizing Forums:

I have chick genes. We all know that women need to nurture and then conquer. I befriended the customers, observed then identified the ones who were genuine geeks… but I had to be sure they had some zing, knew how to ping and were well versed in conversation and communication before I asked for their help. There are 2 kinds of geeks.

Geek # 1: The kind of person who is overjoyed at the idea of writing 5,000 lines of code in notepad and can simultaneously play Halo.

Geek # 2: The kind of person who is overjoyed at the idea of writing 5,000 lines of code in notepad and can simultaneously play Halo but… he/she looks really cool doing it and their language is actually understood by newbies.

Newbie: Someone who is new to the Web

So I rounded up a staff of about 6 moderators, all men (women were still at home knitting and making babies back then) and we changed the face of lunarforums and our customer culture.

Organization:

I drive the people around me crazy with my heightened level of organization and my love of procedures. I know it… Those of you who have worked closely with me know it (be kind if you want to continue our business relationship) and my parents still bear the scars of my mission to optimize their lives.

However; It’s gotta be done. Communication is so incredibly powerful and laying out options and guidelines for your users, providing a structured and user friendly environment is a major influence in the success of your forum and your online business.

Necessary Basics:

• Guidelines for forum members
• Moderators
• A forum for the various aspects of your business
• Feedback Forum
• Moderator Forum (behind the scenes damage control, alerts, staff & moderator chatter)
• Announcements/Status etc
• Chat – Social forums to establish a community feel
• Limit admin panel access to a handful of trusted staff.
• Simple and functional design
• Search feature
• News section - This is separate to the forums and is a header on the top of every page on your forum. Great for indexing so update often.
• Promote your forums on your main page, support ticket signatures, main site etc.

Benefits to Forums:

Social Marketing – It’s the buzz word right now. Get a profile happening, communicate with your customers. Create fans.

SEO: Years of unique content, thousands of posts and a signature space to add all those links you want to promote and get indexed and listed. The more active you are… The greater your success

Alternate Support: Forums can be a community of staff and customers who can unofficially support each other. This gives you a direct line to your users. They appreciate it and you can focus on the quality and response times of your official support services.

Staff Finder: I found 80% of my staff on our forums or my personal boards. They are experienced users, very familiar with our product and I can view their language, spelling, communication skills and accuracy prior to a job offer. They also already have an established profile with your customers. Customer -> Moderator -> Staff.

Communication: We have a staff of approximately 100. This is a wonderful resource from them to socialize, bond and create a team spirit (Goooooo Team!)

Identifying Changes Needed: Customers give you direct feedback on how to improve your business.

Identifying Issues/Errors: Site down, server issues, software corruptions etc. They will tell you and you don’t need to troll through hundreds of support tickets. They will test for you in a live environment.

Mailing List: Every forum member who joins up (past, current and potential customers) provide their contact details. A wonderful resource for promotions and new business. Don’t abuse it. Don’t spam them. I think I’ve sent maybe 2 newsletters via the forums in 5 years.

Risks:

Negative feedback: Very public negative feedback. Don’t delete it. Keep it real.

Spammers: You know who they are. Monitor your forums 24/7. Get moderators and customers involved and provide them free services to reward their commitment and time.

Stalkers: Create a high online profile… Attract freaks. They are like band groupies but on forums. I’ve been dealing with this for years. Don’t get too familiar or friendly and don’t divulge too much of yourself.

Time sucker: Major distraction for staff and to maintain and moderate a successful forum you must check on it constantly and respond to your customers.

Politics: Dramas… oy… fights, disputes. Similar to high school. Zero tolerance and you’ll be sweet. I created a fight forum one time on another popular forum I was running called “The Pit”. I had about 50k members. There were no rules. It was like Fightclub. Awesomely entertaining, but not appropriate for a business.

I could go into greater detail, but these are the basic principles. Please comment if you have specific questions and I’ll do my best to get back with you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Amy Armitage, Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed . Both comments and pings are currently closed.