Forum Promotion

[Canoro Philipp]

should the forums be more promoted?

many people has discovered the forums when they have a problem and return to the website, and looking around for help they find the forums.

calls for help is the most ones we got.

if the forums would be promoted not as a tool for help, but as a form of comunication between residents, all residents would be more united, it would be as a massive communication media, the usefulness of the forums would increase, because what happen mostly here is that we all learn from each other, reading in articles, real life experience, our own reasoning, and the SL forum posters must be around 1% of all the residents.

if we have the forums as a popular form of communication, we will all learn from each other, there is so much that people would share, with so many different backgrounds and perspectives, the wisdom of the masses will increase, the acceptance to each other. there would be thousands forum posters, it would be a constantly alive place.

how to implement this?

we are in the process of evolving the profiles, we should have the option of that what we comment in the forums appear also in our comment streaming service, answering that comment would bring them to the forums, people would use the forums as hangouts, and the forums would evolve to not only be a place for help but a place for massive communication between residents. it would be like the internet is to real life.

[Keli Kyrie]

I think probably the best way to get people here is by going back to what got me here. We use to see recent post on our dashboards. It was one of those post that caught my attention and got me over here.

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

I agree with Keli...seeing updates from the forums on my Dashboard is what got me interested enough to take a look. 

[om Piers]

+1

[Canoro Philipp]

@Keli @Sylvia

that was a great solution

maybe we dont see it anymore because the old GD was the wild west.

now that the forums are more family friendly, we could have them back.

[Canoro Philipp]

it could be any form, the forum software is a system that has a lot of potential, the forums are something like groups, but public.

[Medhue Simoni]

Sadly, It seems to me that LL fears the negative voices. Personally, I think the only reason there are negative voices are because of the actions of the Lab. All affects have causes, and vice versa.

To me tho, I love the forums, and this is probably the smallest group that I've every seen. If I were LL, I would have promoted the forums when things were there most contraversial. I would have given every single user their own blog in the system. Yeah, I know, I'm crazy like that. Think about it tho. Crap is spread out all over the metaverse. If LL had all the voices centralized, and spreading the word directly from the SL website, then LL would get all that traffic that normally goes to those wordpress pages and such. All these outside sites that we have to goto to hear the different voices of SL make any kind of cohesion impossible.

What SL is sorely missing is anything resembling a Mass Media system for SL. Besides every1 having their own blog, there should be a page just for the newest and latest video on Youtube created by a resident. No matter what it is, except nudity and sex stuff. This should be a stream that every SL user can play on their land, like a kind of SLTV, with commercial spots that LL can sell.

Rod seems to be going in the right direction, with each of our profile pages having a board for us to post things. We'll see how that goes. But we should also have SL twitter feeds, and that kind of stuff. I mean, there is something said about SL on twitter, practically every few seconds.

 

[PeterCanessa Oh]

Without question - LL should do more to encourage people to use their 'in-house' tools instead of the endless promotion for facelslap and twit.

[Canoro Philipp]

there should be a mass media.

without a mass media we are all disconnected, and the cooperation is minimal.

we are getting a comment stream service like facebook and twitter in the new profiles, its a great idea, but we should be able to make the comment in a space that reaches more than the people we personally know.

it may be a better way, but the forums, this place where we come together and post to the public knowledge, seems to be the closest user mass media we got.

[Canoro Philipp]

thats right, a good step is to provide us with an in-world comment streaming service in the new profiles, that way we are not going to need external comment streaming services to communicate with each other, i hope that public mass media will be the next step to implement.

[Mickey Vandeverre]

They are promoting them way too much for my taste!

And I'm a hard core promoter.

Type your name into a google search or type a popular topic from forum and you'll get the picture.

My forum profile now appears above any other marketing that I bust out in a big way, and not too thrilled with that.

Anyway.....you've got nothing to complain about.

I don't think they should promote them.  I complained forever when they appeared on the dashboard, as some of the threads were quite embarassing.

I don't think that these threads are a proper sampling of second life.  The opinions are like .00001 percent of the population.  Proper sampling would be those who are active inworld and not complaining, and those folks won't be in a forum or message board for the most part.  You don't want people in forum beeatchin' all day...you want them inworld having fun.

Not too thrilled they are pimpin' my name out above all my marketing efforts in order to advertise forums, but I suppose that's google's efforts.  If that's how they're going to operate - I'm going to go get a big honkin' banner ad made.  Promise I won't make make it flash, though.

The marketplace ads score way high in google searches, so the folks at Linden Lab have this google thing down, and should be patted on the back for it.   Not every company can get that down.

Maybe go a bit easier on whatever it is they are plugging in to get our profiles so high up, but all indication is that is the direction they are headed with new web based social networking type profiles, so will just get used to it and try to behave in forums.  It's all about being pimped out.

You better behave on your profiles too.  Looks like you're going to get a spotlight.  Careful with those real life pics tying you in with the bondage ranch.

[Mickey Vandeverre]

There IS mass media.  That stuff you call "Faceslap and Twit"....and it's where it's happenin'.

If you're not using it, you're out of the loop.

And there's a new game in town called GooglePlus, but wee bit of a glitch there, as they are require "real" sounding names, but many second life folks are already there anyway.

There is also Flickr and Tumblr and Wordpress and Posterous and some other places I can't think of names right now, and a ton of second life folks using those to the max.

People are not inworld all day long, and the web is their way to stay in touch.  Promoting Music, Art, Education, Fund-Raising Efforts, Marketplace Merchandising etc.....and all that stuff that goes into "living" in second life as well.

We've been cloistered.  For lack of a better word. 

FINALLY they are making attempts to get ya'll into the world.  If you don't want that, then lay low and enjoy your inworld experience and keep your profile hunky dory.

[Canoro Philipp]

theres the option to have your profile appear in search, not everybody are public persons, Linden Lab understood that and gave us the option, as everything there are two sides of the coin, the ones who want to know everything about everyone and the ones who want to have total privacy, its all about options, because we all are different. in difference from the profiles, the forums are public, whatever we write in here we agree that it can be seen by everyone in the world, so, if we write something here, we have to appear in search.

youre right that what is commented here in the forums is a small sample of what the second life community is, precisely because they are not in-world, the forums represent people that comes back to the website after registering and downloading the viewer, most people dont come back to the website where they download a program, if the forums where more promoted in-world they would represent more accurately the community.

having all the communication tools at our fingertips in-world would solve the problem of having to rely in external social networks, putting in danger our real life identity.

[Mickey Vandeverre]

Well, this is a bit off topic about "forum" promotion perhaps, but I didn't notice that forum profile link sitting up so high last week.

It's the forum profile showing up there at top spot on google.  Not the inworld profile.

Someone else will have to check into this, because I can't remember if I set my inworld profile as private or not....but it's the "forum" profile that is showing up there.

So....someone with an inworld profile that is supposedly "hidden" will have to check their own second life name and see if their forum profile shows up there.  Looks like two different things to me.

That links to all your posts and thoughts in forum, so something to consider.  Knowing that the "topic" you are responding to showing up with an easy google search is one thing, but having your avatar name forum profile show up at number one spot in google search might be yet another thing for some people.  Just sayin'.

And Canoro...I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the Internet is a wild and crazy place, and seems like everyone these days is demanding "real"....so you can't really be assured that you are safe in any case, whether you want your real life info on display or not.  Crazy things. 

Haven't seen our resident privacy experts here in forum lately, but betcha they could fill you in big time on that.

Those social networks are not going away....and they are becoming HUGE.

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

I noticed something like you are talking about last night, Mickey. I was using Google to look up info about a club in SL, and was quite shocked to see the forum profile of someone I'm close to show up in the search results (because of photos that person has posted here)! It wasn't in the top spot, but not all that far from it, either. 

[Pussycat Catnap]

Not showing up like that at all in Bing. Much more useful results there.

But either way - it leads people towards Second Life, and that's a good thing.

Put a sig in your profile here, to lead people where you want them to I suppose.

 

[Mickey Vandeverre]

"appears" that they've kicked it into high gear on getting the profiles high rankings. 

also "appears" that those who do major networking and promoting on the web....their forum profiles score very high in the search.

Very Interesting!

[Mickey Vandeverre]

I spend fair amount of time each day, each week, each month, each year...working on getting people to the right resource.  As do many others.

Looks like LL is paying attention.

[Canoro Philipp]

i did the check and youre right, the profile of people that has posted here is as public as the information they shared in the public forums. yours include recent posts, your public statistics such as date registered and total messages posted, your questions, and your answers. mine includes my non-private images, and kudos i recieved and given. it makes sense, everything is in reference of the information we decided to make public. every word that comes to the public forums is public information, so it makes sense that the forum profiles come out in google.

is a good thing that we have the choice to hide completely our avatar reference profile where we have our groups, picks and information about ourselves.

i agree, people are finding social networks very useful, maybe the internal second life social network is going to be as useful for communication between residents.

[Medhue Simoni]

Yippie!!!:smileyhappy:

So if I post comments or announcements on my Profile, it will be ranked in Google, possibly high. That would really kick butt. That is way better that any facebook bs, or tweet. I personally feel FB is a complete waste of time for marketing. Twitter is a thousand times better for marketing, but still not quite what it could be.

[Mickey Vandeverre]

Maybe you're on right track, Medhue...maybe not.

You know that Facebook thing is huge.  There were a few articles written about that. 

I've been doing some unscientific research this weekend, and I realize that a google search might customize each person's search a tad different....

But on the searches that I'm doing, it appears that the larger social networking circle that one has built up...generally it's twitter...the more likely your forum profile or link to forum pics will show up very high.  Also, those who have a wiki page on the second life main site, that is showing up quite well too.  Above their store listings or personal blogs, actually.

So if you want to work it from that angle....looks like you need to really build up that twitter following.  I'm not really keen working that angle, as the profiles are very limited, and would prefer that anyone I meet through social network go straight to one of my blogs.

You would think that a few names that use the forums every day would just be jumping out at you in that search (seems like there should be a correlation there)....

but not what I'm seeing.

And all these months thought that LL might not have a clue on how to use social media.  They most certainly do.

[Knowl Paine]

I believe increased promotion would be good. Kudos

A message at the Login screen would help. Grid wide notice. A couple of signs at the Info hubs. Help from all the help groups, they could post signs on their land informing Residents of an additional resource.

A promotional contest of some kind. Maybe a writing contest for content creation categories, or a photo contest that uses the Forum to host the photos (your Avatar, your build) voting could be done with kudos. Best forum badge contest. A Second Life trivia game. A register to enter prize give away.

An Inworld meeting with me as a prize; that will bring them in. :smileyvery-happy:  

 

[Peewee Musytari]

When the new forums were introduced and renamed as the "Community" I thought that was supposed to refer to the SL community, but it is almost becoming a separate community here on the web from the one inworld & I totally agree that more effort should be made to integrate them.

The new Knowledge base is both much easier to navigate and more clearly written and it is being wasted because the SL inworld community are not making as much use of it as they should...Which you can see by the types of questions asked on Answers, 99% of which are easily answered by clicking the KB tab instead.

If ALL residents were encouraged to come to the forums (as much as they are encouraged to go to the Marketplace) they would not only find a place to voice their opinion, but all the up-to-date news and by default they would find the KB and start making better use of it when they do have a problem or question.

I agree the MOTD should absolutely be used more to get people here.

[Medhue Simoni]

I would have to agree. the KB looks alot nicer and seems quite a bit easier to navigate. When I started in SL, the KB was all we had and it worked well. Then the wiki was introduced, which was nice, but just made it impossible for a newb to find anything. I'm very happy we are back to the KB being newb friendly and more front and center than the wikis.

Now, I just have to remember to send people there.:smileytongue:

[Miyo Darcy]

In my opinion there is not any way to promote this forum here as there are better alternatives out there,