Forum traffic

[VCNetwork]

Hey, does anyone have any experience in trying to get a forum to come alive?? I've just added a forum to my site, I have about 100 users but none of them are talking, should I stimulate the forum or just let it takes its course?

[businesgoonline]

i think you have to do something, people will just keep quite if nobody is voicing out something interesting, try to create some interesting posts to attract your member's attention, when they found your post is interested, they will start commenting and replying to that post, and they will also frequently come back and check how other comment on that post also, just like youngentreprenuer forum

[Peter.j.bea]

Is this for the VC site? Its going to be hard to determine what is needed to REALLY get your site going. You have to have a good idea for the types of people that are there, the topics, discussions and forums segments. Are the site concepts appealing? Do they relate to your targets? What is the most common topic or thread with the most responses?

A great deal of corporate forums people are indeed hired to develop threads as administrators. More often then not administrators are there to develop an identity for a site to give the members a general connection to the web identity or brand. Each one of these admins have their own respective personality in which they develop their own crowd of "fans" that will always agree and follow through on threads.

One concept I have recently had a client implement into a community site is a badge function. As far as coding and infrastructure I am not quite sure of the requirements, but I have been told it was relatively easy. The concept is this; post quizzes through the site and offer grades based on knowledge. With these "badges" or awards it develops a social pecking order and competition in the site. This also will encourage discussions, help the visitors develop confidence and get the community more involved.

[VCNetwork]

thats a good idea, do you know if it was an application or if it was just him developing the data base?

[Peter.j.bea]

I will talk to my contracts engineer. If he said it was easy I would have assumed it could have been either or from my standpoint of him being an engineer. For all I know he walks on water. I do remember him mentioning a similar function he scouted from a site called okcupid.com.