As a comment on the Let’s Try Some New Stuff thread:
I can understand that you would want to bring in more users, and so the idea of increasing functionality to make it a funner place is of course not a terrible one. But really, this isn’t particularly worthwhile.
The customers you already have are already happy with what we have here and people don’t pick up a new message board to chat on because it has a search feature with a 30 second wait rather than one which has a 300 second wait. They don’t choose a message board because it has forgiving sigs that can be ten inches tall or allows/disallows avatars.
Ultimately they come because the people on the board seem to discuss the sorts of things they are interested in, in the fashion that they are interested in it. Making that all slick and fancy means that–if there are any competitive boards to the SDMB–you have an advantage over those, but it doesn’t really do much for bringing in new customers.
Now I’m not sure exactly how to find the map of users that someone once made, but the key thing to note from that was that the further away from Chicago you got, the more the thumbtacks on the map became further apart from one another.
The SDMB will only ever appeal to a certain type of person. If you take a group of people and make them all aware of the SDMB, X% will sign on, Y% won’t. You can’t get more than X%, but you can get less because people aren’t aware of the SDMB. In Chicago, the people who would sign on probably have; you’ve probably got the full X%. In Seattle or Los Angeles or whatever other areas, they haven’t been made aware, so you’re not getting that X%.
So I mean, the first thing this means is that the board can grow. If you figure out however many users we have in the Chicago area and divide that into the total population of Chicago, multiplying that value by the population of other cities in the US will tell you how much the board can grow if you were to penetrate those markets. Theoretically, you could probably get a hundred times more users. While as adding slick features maybe gets you like 5% more users. Unless you’re on the edge of making decent money, where 5% matters, you’re better off to concentrate elsewhere.
Now marketing towards a locality requires paper (posters, flyers, etc.) and local people, which is costly. So really you’re better off to focus on internet advertising. People on the internet are, after all, the people you are after.
Now before you can figure out how to advertise, you want to figure out what you have to offer, and thus who you want to advertise to.
At first blush, I would say that the things the SDMB does strongly are:
- Factual information from experts.
- Friendly conversation using proper grammar on all subjects.
For the first item, you’re looking for people who enjoy or are looking for factual information. Examples of these are college students and teachers; anyone looking at the Wikipedia or going to a skeptics site; economists, doctors, lawyers, and other analytical professions.
For college students and teachers, you can go directly to the school. Call them up and say that you have a website which specializes in factual information from experts. You have a PDF that they can print out and put up on their bulletin boards (so outside of designing the PDF, it’s their money to print the flyers and post them.) For the Wikipedia, go through all of Straight Dope columns and then make sure that there’s a link to them from all of the relevant Wikipedia pages. You could also try to think if there’s some sort of cross-promotional thing you could do with them. Skeptics sites, check them out and see if they have a bulletin board. If they don’t or if the board isn’t very populace, you could contact them and see if they wanted to use the SDMB as a surrogate, centralized skeptic’s board. Phil Plait–former SDMBer–is now the head of JREF. You could ask him if there’s anything he could do to promote us. And then with economists and doctors and so, maybe see what all organizations there are and again see if their websites have an active message board, and if not then ask if they would be interested in making us it.
You could create profession-specific sections of the board.
The second item above, advertising us as a general conversation board, is a bit harder. If you can get enough people through skeptics’ sites and doctors’ sites and so forth, it might not be worth trying to to advertise as a general topic board. But assuming you want to, probably the key thing is to remember that a lot of people aren’t aware that there is such a thing as a message board where you can go and socialize with people. This is probably your key audience, internet n00bs. Figure out where most n00bs go, Facebook or wherever, and see how one can advertise specifically to those people, with the specific focus of making them aware of message boarding.
Also remember that Cecil’s columns are humorous and snarky. You’ll want to decide whether you want to advertise this angle. Humor certainly brings people in, but snark possibly shrinks that to a smaller subset. The tagline of “It’s taking longer than we thought” may be off-putting for many, and it’s pretty prominent.