There’s Overlooked Value in Forums
on Apr 17, 2008 - 3:32 PM PST
One of several pictures of Sanjay “photochopped
by members of CrowdGather network forum General Mayhem
One of my goals with this blog is to learn from the people who come to Mixergy events. So I interviewed Sanjay Sabnani, CEO of CrowdGather, a company that’s quietly building a large social network by consolidating online message boards.
Here are 5 things I learned from him about forums:
Forums create a passionate community – When I asked Sanay for a picture of himself for this post, he sent me a bunch of “photochopped” pictures that his members created. Most site’s users don’t care about a sites’ founders, much less take the time to create fun pictures of them. (By the way, I noticed that, after the Keith and the Girl podcast started a forum, their fans started getting tattoos of their logos, so these passions can be pretty strong.)
It’s better to add a forum early – Sanjay points out that, when TechCrunch launched their boards, they got a ton of users, but the messages were mostly a collection of “check out my new company” posts. You want to build the culture before the crowd arrives.
A few ways to get an audience – The fastest way to build a community is to buy an existing forum. There are lots of message boards whose owners don’t have time to manage. To build your boards from scratch, he recommends posting on other message boards and putting a link to yours in the sig of your posts. Moderate other forums to get credibility in the community. And, of course, you can buy ads on other message boards.
Let ‘em speak – Forums work when they’re about what your audience has to say to each other, not what you want to impose on them. In an extreme example of what can be said, when Paris Hilton’s phone was hacked, Eminem, Vin Diesel and other celebrities had their phone numbers posted on GenMay.com, one of Sanjay’s forums. (Washington post article about it.)
Forums are still very Web 1.0 – Users who are members of lots of forums, have to keep a separate profile on each one. The search feature on forums is rudimentary–I can’t even find a search bar on most message boards–which is why so many people post questions that have already been answered instead of searching for a previous response. All these issues and more, is what Sanjay is hoping to solve with CrowdGather.
Update: Here’s a great example of the power of forums. Sanjay linked to this post from GenMay and suddenly this low-volume blog is getting traffic and I’m meeting great people by email.
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April 17th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
I’m truly addicted to forums! The chance to talk and exchange ideas with people from all parts of the word is fascinating to me.
Great blog post!
April 17th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
[...] the blog post for the full article, I’ve removed a majority of the info above with the dots….. There’s Overlooked Value in Forums : blog.Mixergy.com And you can see a photochopped picture of my boss ——————– Brandon Sheley / [...]
April 17th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
this [m]an is a genious!
April 19th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
WTFOMGBBQ
April 19th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Sanjay is our god. We worship the brown man and his largeness. :-)
April 19th, 2009 at 10:03 am
Dude, those comments are old.
April 19th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Mike. Bill Gates himself left a comment on this post. How can that comment
be old? ;-)
May 27th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Alright. Sanjay posted a link to this blog again. One month between comments? Those comments are old! :D
May 31st, 2009 at 5:55 pm
This is one of my earliest interviews.
I'm still wrestling with my equipment, but back then my equipment was so bad
that I didn't get a good recording of this interview. It's too bad. Sanjay
was right about people underestimating forums.
July 1st, 2009 at 8:40 pm
It's really great that Sanjay purchased a private forum dedicated to Cardmodels. He was keen on sending in some goon to get rid of much of the active community that had been there for a few years prior to CG's rampant purchase. Now instead of 200+/- posts per day and 5-10 builds active per week. The forum has about 15+/- posts per day and no more builds. Many of the card models that were being designed were free and those designers were banned as well. Sanjay and his admin have been nothing but rude and insulting not just to the existing membership but to new people as well. If you really think that Sanjay is concerned about people communicating then please consider his admin policy of deleting posts in such a manner as to shape what he has done to that community.
When you consider other forums as COMPETITIVE you are closing yourself off from outside information. Currently there are dozens of cardmodeling forums in various languages around the world. Sanjay has been successful at pushing people towards these forums and away from cardmodels.net because member's had their every word censored by the administration there, when they asked why this was so, their questions were met with either public insults by administration staff or outright banning.
Consider this when you register on a CG forum.
July 2nd, 2009 at 3:40 am
It's really great that Sanjay purchased a private forum dedicated to Cardmodels. He was keen on sending in some goon to get rid of much of the active community that had been there for a few years prior to CG's rampant purchase. Now instead of 200+/- posts per day and 5-10 builds active per week. The forum has about 15+/- posts per day and no more builds. Many of the card models that were being designed were free and those designers were banned as well. Sanjay and his admin have been nothing but rude and insulting not just to the existing membership but to new people as well. If you really think that Sanjay is concerned about people communicating then please consider his admin policy of deleting posts in such a manner as to shape what he has done to that community.
When you consider other forums as COMPETITIVE you are closing yourself off from outside information. Currently there are dozens of cardmodeling forums in various languages around the world. Sanjay has been successful at pushing people towards these forums and away from cardmodels.net because member's had their every word censored by the administration there, when they asked why this was so, their questions were met with either public insults by administration staff or outright banning.
Consider this when you register on a CG forum.