Building an Online Community for Educators? 23
valianteffort asks: "I have had a site up on the net for over a year, and have attempted to get educators to respond in a way similar to the comments on Slashdot. My purpose is to build an educational community where educators could go to get advice or just blow off steam. Despite the fact that the site has a relatively large number of visitors I have not been able to entice the lively interaction I am hoping for. Does anyone have any ideas about how to get this interaction started and to maintain it once it gets going?"
It isn't spontaneous (Score:4, Insightful)
You posted every news item on your site. No one else's name appears. Nobody is talking about anything.
People don't stop to eat at a restaurant whose parking lot is empty. In order to get a conversation going, you have to have a conversation going. That sounds like Catch-22, but there are ways around it.
You have to start out by recruiting, in the real world, a core group of deputies whose mission is to seed and lead conversations. Five or six people ought to do it. They need to post actively, and positively, modeling the behavior you want your community to adopt.
You also will need to recognize that people need to "warm up" with small talk. Trivial conversation has layers of value that you may not immediately perceive. It's how social norms are established and communicated, and how person-to-person relationships are created. If people want to debate whether toilet paper goes on over-the-roll or under-the-roll, recognize that it's part of the process of establishing the process that can lead to more substantial conversations.
Start by faking it (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the more interesting (and ingenius) business tidbits I ever came across involved Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express. When he started the company, he had precisely one airplane. However, legend has it that painted on the side of that plane was the number 7. Why? People who saw the plane got the impression that FedEx had at least seven planes! It was all about making the company look bigger, which acted as a sort of subconscious trust/value/goodwill builder for potential customers.
You can apply this same principle to your (and any new or stagnant) community site. People are more confident when the numbers are larger. Nobody's going to bother commenting on a story if they get the impression that no one else will ever read what they have to say. And if your site gets few or no comments, visitors do have the impression that no one is reading, regardless of what your access_log says. A Google search shows copious links to your site, so there's no doubt that you're getting traffic. You just need to motivate that traffic.
I used to do some work for AOL, and when a new message board got created in our channel, it wasn't unusual for informal email to go out to various channel staff asking people to go generate some chatter in the new board. Even with an AOL audience of millions of eyeballs possibly checking out your forum, you still have to plant the seed yourself! Having created a couple of sites which focused on web-based message boards, I can tell you that I had to do the same thing there before "real people" began posting.
The first thing you need to do is create some conversations on your site, and the easiest way to do that is to invent those conversations yourself. Register a few accounts at your site and start logging in as various personalities, posting comments and replies throughout each day. Don't be afraid to make outlandish comments and present radical opinions - in fact, these are the sorts of things which are most likely to motivate other people to comment! And, since you'd be posting them under various nicknames, nobody would know it was you making the crazy statements to begin with.
Soon enough you'll find that your bogus conversations are attracting real replies. From there on out, it's a snowball process.
All that said, you might try tweaking your site design and layout a bit as well. My constructive criticism with regards to that would be to shrink the Valiant Etc banner at the top of each page to perhaps half or 2/3 of its current height, move the "Welcome
Donning my end-user hat, when I land on your site I'm sort of confused as to what's what, and the welcome text/mission statement prevents any of the stories from showing without me having to scroll down. That is, the real content of your site is hidden by a large banner and introductory message - neither of which are helpful to repeat visitors. If I were designing the site, the top story "Site-Based School Improvement" and the poll would be the first things greeting new visitors.
Good luck!