Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards
On April - 25 - 20105 COMMENTS
- ISBN13: 9780814401972
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Every day, millions of users log on to their favorite online forums and interact with others to get advice and discuss everything from the latest news and trends to their hobbies to their professions to whatever else strikes their fancy. Administrators have to lead these communities, deal with difficult users, and choose moderators. Legal constraints, spammers, and technical issues can turn the excitement of running an online community into chaos. With the right… More >>
Include Online Communities in Your Online Publishing Strategy
Part of your online publishing strategy should include some type of online community – blog, board, forum, etc. After all, you’ve got great content that you want to share with as many people as possible.
Patrick O’Keefe speaks from experience and offers great suggestions in his book Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards. When your sites are properly integrated, it makes it easy for users to get involved and will encourage visitors to become participants.
O’Keefe explains that there are few ways to create an online community:
1. Create a new stand alone community
2. Create a new online publishing site along with a community
3. Create a new community to add to an existing online publishing site
Option two and three have the definite advantage of directly linking with your online publishing site to draw more traffic. You will have more topics to discuss and your community will develop a following, not to mention the increase in content and pages, which Google loves.
Try to create as many cross links between your online publishing site and your online community for maximum exposure.
Read more of our review at Mequoda.com
http://www.mequoda.com/articles/online-publishing/online-publishing-book-review-managing-online-forums-okeefe/
Rating: 5 / 5
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, mostly because I was so surprised at its tack. I was fully expecting a boring treatise on the technical aspects of online forums, but instead what I got was a fairly thorough discussion of all the really important things: how to choose a focus, how to grow/manage a forum, how to interact with users, the importance of respect in the entire process, how to create solid guidelines, and such.
This is the kind of book we’ve needed–I’ve been telling business owners and corporate marketers for years that they’ve been focusing on the wrong things (ie, what software to install) when what they should be thinking about is all that “other” stuff.
Rating: 5 / 5
At a well-known conference on small business marketing, I recently conducted a workshop on building online community. I recommended this book to all of the participants for a thorough start-to-finish resource for building online forums. There’s a good amount of material in here that is also applicable to other forms of online communities such as blogs, social networks, etc.
Well done, Patrick, we needed a resource like this!
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve known the author, Patrick O’Keefe, for years. I’ve also managed online forums. Patrick shows you exactly how to run a successful and organized forum in this book.
Patrick shows you the things that you don’t think of like problem users and managing a staff of moderators. I would highly recommend this as the “field guide” to managing any public forum or message board. If you run a forum and have any higher up moderators/admins this would be a great buy for them, too. There are many things that most people wouldn’t think of when it comes to running a forum and Patrick covers them in the book.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is a must have for anyone either considering to run a forum or a person who already runs a forum. Great real life experiences and ideas shared for building, engaging, and properly managing a community. Although I read through it once, this is definitely a book that will serve as a manual that I revisit several times because there is so much actionable information contained in the text. I’d definitely recommend this book.
Rating: 5 / 5