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.