I want to reorganize the current Straight Dope Chicago and Barn House forums and am soliciting feedback on the best way to do this. These forums are an important part of our business strategy - the CL sales force is based in the cities where we have print newspapers and these are the markets we know best. Experience suggests we can get a much better rate for ads we sell locally than for national ads, where the sheer volume of online content drives down the price. To sell local ads effectively we need as large a base of local readers as we can get. The idea behind the Straight Dope Chicago column and corresponding SDMB subforum was to develop an online community comparable to the one that has coalesced around the national Straight Dope, with a view to eventually replicating this in other CL cities. Unfortunately, we haven’t developed the critical mass to make this work, even though the tracking services suggest we have a sizable concentration of readers in Chicago. I think this is a function of two things: (1) there are too many forums, which diffuse what traffic there is, and (2) the local forums are easy to overlook at the bottom of the forum page.
What I propose to do is to combine all the SDC and Barn House forums into one, called Straight Dope City Edition. The forum will appear just below the Comments on Cecil’s Columns forum. This will be the place for all place-specific questions and discussion, not just about Chicago but anywhere. All current threads from the existing SDC and BH forums will be consolidated in SDCE. If traffic warrants someday we can subdivide this by city; for now we’ll ask posters starting new threads simply to indicate the city of interest in the header, e.g., best ribs joint in Kansas City. We’re planning some related changes for the SD home page and column archive that we hope to implement later in the year, but this seemed like a good place to start.
We need to do something because we have good reason to believe the local sales strategy works and will make money for us. However, I’m open to suggestions on the details. Comments?
Ed, man, I know you think this is the wave of the future and all, but I just don’t see it working. Who is going to stick with SD-Lite, or SD-Local, or whatever you want to call it, when the real thing is already thriving? MPSIMS and IMHO tend to catch a lot of the “What is there to do/Where should I eat in City X” type threads. The responses those threads draw come from Dopers scattered around the globe, that just happen to know something about the locale in question.
Not trying to be mean or insulting here, but I think you’re hoping to sell an inferior product side by side on the shelves with the real thing. Wherever you put the local forums, people are going to see…hmm…cheap, off-brand knockoff or name brand product for the same price?
I’m not a marketing guy, and I’m probably wrong. But that’s the way I see it.
I don’t see how the Barn House fits with the mini-local Straight Dopes. It should be a forum all to itself. Personally, I’d fold the BH into IMHO but I realize that you are using it to market your book. Maybe it could be a subforum of IMHO or put it up top on its own. It shouldn’t be mixed in with the City Editions because it isn’t a locally oriented topic.
As for the City Editions, I’m kind of with Oakminster here. I don’t see it taking off but it’s not going to hurt anything to give it a try. We are a big message board but we’re not that big. Local stuff will do just fine in with the regular stuff. I don’t think moving those forums up top will generate significantly more traffic for them.
As you point out, a forum needs a certain amount of critical mass to be successful. So the question to ask is “why would anyone post in the new forum”? When we’ve added new forums in the past, the answer to that has always been the same: because they’re clogging up the other forums talking about this stuff already. That’s not really the case here, as we don’t really have a lot of place-specific discussion.
So you need to either think of something that will make people want to post in the new forum (e.g. different features or rules than in the existing forums), or you need to think of an external driver to bring people to the local forums from off-board, e.g. advertising or some sort of tie-in with Creative Loafing like local entertainment listings, coupons, and discussion. (I’m just spitballing here, I don’t actually have any good ideas for this.)
As proposed, I think you’re just moving the SD Chicago ghost town higher up the page.
You already have SDCE, except that it is General Questions/IMHO (maybe even The Pit in some cases :D). If your suggestion about adding the city to the subject line worked it would be happening already.
ED, I’m gonna side with the comments you’ve received from our members so far. I don’t think a shift/realignment will make much difference. Somewhere, somehow, you need to have feelers out there in cyberland bringing in people who have questions/obversations about Chicago to this Board. I don’t know how you do it. You’ve got the people onboard who answer the questions, and I include myself, but you don’t have the traffic coming in. Shuffling things around won’t bring anyone in.
On the technical side, a question: Is just putting the name of the location in the title of a thread going to be good enough for the advertisers to which content to target? And can the advertisers even distinguish between the threads in the same forum to give them different ads?
Oh, and if the answer to the first question is yes, just how clear does the name have to be? Would “Big Apple” work? “Springfield”? What if the name is mispelled?
Just to add to the chorus, I’m not sure what will come of such a change. I think you need to concentrate on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or other efforts to bring new people in, rather than (or maybe in addition to) drawing the attention of folks already on SDMB to a particular forum. We’re a lazy bunch, set in our ways, and you know how we howl when things change.
If you want to bring more attention to the Chicago specific parts of the board, you’re going to need more Chicago specific readers. You say the numbers show a bunch of us in Chicago, but what do we need to ask questions about Chicago for? That’s what we have family, coworkers and friends for. People with questions about Chicago, by and large, are going to be people who aren’t from here, aren’t they? Unless you want this place to be the next Yelp or Centerstage…we’ve already got those.
Let’s put it this way: I’ve lived in Chicagoland all my life. I’ve lived in the city proper for a decade. I’ve never seen a single ad anywhere for The Straight Dope or the Straight Dope Message Board. Not in newspapers, not on those ubiquitous wall posters, not online, not even on Google. I was a casual reader of The Reader for a few years, and never even saw the column in there! Only a Google search for “what is passive aggressive?” serendipitously led me to Cecil’s column, and from there to here.
If you want a web presence, you’ve got to *have *a presence. Put Facebook Share and Twitter Link buttons at the bottom of every thread (or every post!), so when we see something interesting/funny/outrageous, or write something spectacular/enlightening/amazing, it’s easy to share with our friends. Update the content on the main page at *least *daily, to feed to Google spiders. Get some tags on those gawdawful Slug cartoons so they show up in Google image searches.
If you need SEO tips, I can’t endorse Shawna Fennell strongly enough. Her focus is on helping ecommerce sellers, but so much of what she teaches can get ANY website more traffic. A lot of her podcasts and written information are absolutely free.
Oh, and can I also add: THANK YOU for soliciting ideas. I know I’ve been gone for a bit, but it’s a really refreshing change to see. I know that ultimately you’re Da Man and you’ve got to make the final decisions, but it feels really, really good to be respected enough to be asked.
Why not just put Chicago ads alongside Google ads in every thread (for non-paying members)? If that’s the only city that you’re going to specifically advertise to and you’re confident that you have a significant population here, then there’s no particular reason to try and separate them off into a separate forum. And if you ever do want to advertise to the person’s locale for more than one city, there’s code that can (with varying degrees of reliability) detect their location and insert the appropriate ad.
I’m all for it. I’m all for anything that financially supports the fight against ignorance. It probably won’t work: most things don’t. But it’s worth a try.
I find the lack of creativity in the newspaper industry to be baffling. If I was a software god, I would do the following:
No .gif ads, no flash ads. No sounds. These get blocked.
Put the ads along the side of the page. Offer a 4 for 1 deal with square text ads: buy one and get three more trailing down on the same page. After all, that space on the bottom is typically blank anyway, and browser cache’s permit them to be offered without any extra bandwidth.
Occasionally, I click to a new page, pause, then return to the original one. I get a new ad. IRL though, any ad I’m going to work with I’ll probably be returning to. So rotating ads on the same page within the same minute makes no sense.
Automate the purchase of ads by Joe and Josephine Bloe. You should be able to buy one with a credit card, subject to a 24 hour approval process. Jeez, just a glance should filter out most of the unacceptable stuff. I suppose somebody nefarious could change their website day to day, but…
Why do most of the national web advertisers shill such …interesting products, in a sociological sense?
The SDMB could have a purchase-discussion-consumption forum. But I can’t figure out whether that would attract advertisers or just give them heartburn.
Condensing the various Chicago forums into one is probably a good idea until demand builds up. When you pitched the idea to me a couple of years ago I had assumed it would start out with one forum per city.
You may recall I told you that making the Barn House forum a DIY/Home Repair and Improvement forum was how I would approach that. You know the DIY stuff I’m facing, and I’ve spent a LOT of time on DIY message boards etc. reading and researching, they almost all suck. It still seems to me that a good DIY forum with intelligent leadership and readership could be a serious draw over time. The Barn House is about and connected to Chicago, but that’s not what your book is about, is it? The Barn House to me is a story of someone trying to make their mundane house into dream home, trying to fling themselves headlong into a huge improvement project, and preserve history and culture. That transcends Chicago in my mind. If I was the Moderator of a Barn House forum I would direct it as a DIY forum with the Barn House as one shining inspiration in that regard. Make it a place where people could ask code questions, “how do I get started on this” questions, “how much should this cost” questions, all of which seem to be lacking in other boards. I’d also enable inline pictures in it as well, so people could much more easily show either the problems they’re facing or the solutions (or epic failures) they went through.
This seems like a good time to ask why there isn’t a link to chicago.straightdope.com from straightdope.com; so, why is that? It always strikes me as weird that to get to SD Chicago from SD Earth I have to go though Threadspotting. Perhaps the Chicago forums should be their own board?
I think that the Barn House forum should be kept separately from the Chicago forum.
I think that it would make sense to move the Barn House forum back into the Main section and to broaden the description of that forum into something encompassing any type of home repair and maintenance issues such as installing a new faucet, whether or not to replace a roof, or discussions as to the different heating types. Rather than have those threads spread out in GQ and IMNO, you could have them in one section which would have a broader appeal.
Is there some way that individual threads be “tagged” to a locale? There should be some way for the OP or a moderator to pick what area the thread is pertinent to. Maybe there’s a drop-down menu to choose from a list of specific cities.
Maybe there can be special “subforums” that a thread can be started in (or moved to). But the subforum is displayed “flattened” into its parent forum with all subforum threads show in the forum’s thread listing, rather than the subforum shown as a branch below it with the threads hidden within.
The implementation will depend on the board software, by the criteria need to be:
An easy way for locale-specific advertisements to be served to same-locale threads.
An easy way for viewers to see all threads of interest. (That is, minimize the segregation of threads among many forums.)
An easy way for the original poster to designate the locale. (Moderator effort should be minimized.)
A final thought: you’re apparently already tracking viewers’ location by IP address. Maybe there is a way to use the locations of all posters in a thread to assign the locale of the thread. Or use the locations of the viewers, or a combination of the locations of the posters and viewers.
Yes, the Straight Dope Chicago Environs should be accessible on its own from the main Straight Dope page and from chicago.straightdope.com.
For me, the problem is the all encompassing title “Chicago”. For out-of-towners, the “What’s good to see/eat in Chicago?” is a good question. Even then you may find your choice too far away from where you are staying. For locals, the “What’s to see/eat around {area}?” where the area is their neighborhood, the surrounding 8 neighborhoods, the east/west/etc side, the county, neighboring counties, etc. is useful.
“Where are you from?”; “Flower Mound,” I reply; “Where’s that?”; “West of Lewisville”; Blank stare; “Northwest of Dallas”; “Oh, yeah, I know Dallas.” I would have very little need to visit a Forum about Dallas because I rarely if ever go there. And it’s so broad that I wouldn’t expect to find anything in such a wide topic. Now, having a subforum for every city and subburb is just as useless because I wouldn’t find anything.
I’d like to pick a spot and then widen the search in the Forum for matches. Identify my hotel and then search for restaurants/best-places-to-live/museums and have the search return threads in an ever widening area. But this would require marking your thread as covering an area. But what if the discussion widened the area? Could the OP change it? Creating a post would likely have a drop down that had the six most likely areas widening out from a starting point. You could always choose a new starting point from a Google Map. But, this is starting to get too unwieldy and geeky.
Anyone with half a brain isn’t go to the staraightdope for these type of questions. Evidence? A total of 38 threads since 2008 in the “Out and About” forum. Chowhound has 16,000 Chicago posts in the last 12 months.
Googling “Chicago eating advice” = 3.5 million hits
Googling “Chicago eating advice straightdope” = 4,000 hits with the Chicago board at #9, just above a review of an oil change place.
Of course, the notion that advertising people having more than half a brain has been debunked here many, many times.
GQ and GD are the two powerhouses in the SDMB Conference. The Pit was good, but Ed gave them the death penalty for language violations. MPSIMS has too many hippies for football. IMHO is underfunded, and Cafe Society doesn’t even have a team. The Game Room does have a team, but they’re strictly amateurs, and prefer to play in a beer league.
