How to make forum popular

[bar]

Hi

i have been assigned a task to market a online forum on barcode/RFID and supply chain community.

Can any one give me some idea

[fisicx]

You can tell everyone about the forum but you probably won't get any contributions unless the forum looks vibrant. What you need to do is start writing posts and getting collegues and friends to reply. I would suspect however that this is such a niche area that the chances of building a lively and interesting debate is very slim.

Questions for you. What is your reason for wanting a barcode/RFID and supply chain community forum? What do you hope to achieve? Who are your prospective memebers? Until you can answer these questions you can't even begin to market the forum.

[bar]

Originally Posted by fisicx

Questions for you. What is your reason for wanting a barcode/RFID and supply chain community forum? What do you hope to achieve? Who are your prospective memebers? Until you can answer these questions you can't even begin to market the forum.

So that we know what are people concern and then we can take those concern back to product desgin.
We wanted to create this community

1.To spread awareness about some hot topics like sustainiability/tracability/ databar( new barcode for retailers) and many other things
2. To understand people concern in putting up a supply chain

All retailers/suppliers and manufactureres can be our prospective members.

what time frame we should look at in which a niche community can become popular

[fisicx]

Reporting concerns and problems can easily be done via a feedback form on your website. Do you really want everybody to post about problems with your equipment on a public forum?

If you want spread the word about new products, systems, upgrades etc there are better ways than a forum. A blog or a newsletter would be much easier to manage.

'All retailers/suppliers and manufactureres' is not a realistic target audience. It's a bit like saying all men are prospective customers of black and decker. Yours is a very niche field and I can't see many people getting excited about discussing barcode readers. The average retailer isn't going to be too interested, they are too busy working to worry about the latest barcode reader.

So far I can't see a compelling reason to set up a forum. Blogs, articles, newsletters and press releases would be far better (and still provide the oppertunity to comment and discuss). But if you really want to go ahead I'd work on 2-3 years to build up a decent community.

Do you have a mailing list from your existing website?

[fisicx]

Hmm.

nicky from www.gs1uk.org/forum/ is busy asking questions elsewhere and it appears 'bar' is member of the very same.

I stand by my previous comment: a forum is not the way to go in this field. I looked at you current posts and there is nothing of any value that couldn't be posted in a blog. You haven't even deleted the spam!

[wecando.biz]

I agree with Graham here, it is worth thinking whether a forum is the best place to achieve your aims. That said, if you want information shared openly with participation by all it is a great thing to get right.

For anything of this sort, word spreading virally can be a major thing - about 65% of the members on our site joined because they were invited by a friend or colleague. It is worth putting in easy mechanisms to allow contact lists and address books from other systems to be fetched into yours, where you can then send invitations on that member's behalf as they instruct.

We have some neat tools for doing this on our site under My Contacts, Add More Contacts (you can only see these if you are a member). I;d be happy to tell you how we did them in a PM if you wish, but worth seeing whether you could easily build such things into what you are doing first. Something like a hosted phpbb site wouldn't support these.

IH

[big.gamma]

You can always pay people to post at your forum. This is just to get things started. after a while you can see some visitors will actually post at your forum. People wont post at forum which doesnt look active, because when you post something you always expect some reply.

[Ian J]

One potential problem area with forums is that there is nothing to stop your competitors and rivals from posting on your forum and syphoning off any potential business for themselves

[roy]

Only just caught up on this one.

One of my long standing clients is the RFID Centre

http://www.rfidc.com/

Might be worth a chat with them. Mention my name.