I've had lots of help from Allen Ayers over the years. My site/company ONLY provides carpet cleaning services and sells 3 products.

Can anyone suggest how I can inspire regular participation? How I can create a sense of community so that people will participate regularly.

I'm looking for ideas - I'm open to suggestions and criticism. We update drycarpet.com [ 470 pages ] daily.

Thanks, and stay DRY!

Greg Cantrell
http://www.drycarpet.com <-- main

http://www.drycarpet.com/bulboard/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi

Well sorry, its a businees that is manily phone the idea sucks of talking aboiut dry carpet 24/7 sorry man.

I think we'll have better input shortly ... give me a minute to post later tonight

Sean, any community can appeal to any number of people.

Setting up a community... It's not really that easy, unless you've established one before (I'm not talking from experience here either, I'm no stranger to failure ).

A good thing that gets people to be actively involved in a community is a competition or two, though I'm not quite sure where this can fit in to a company such as yours... I would, however, suggest a feedback forum, in which you can find out what your community likes and doesn't like about your company/site/UBB/etc. It's a good start.

Hopefully Allen will be able to give more helpful advice later.

Yeah. I think it "sucks" to talk about carpet and/or 1-800-DRYCARPET too. But, when you stop to think about the low-tech aspects of "carpet care" I have to admit that carpet, homeowners and housewives are everywhere.

Constructive criticism is earnestly coveted.

Greg
1-800-DRYCARPET

http://www.drycarpet.com

http://www.drycarpet.com/bulboard/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi

Oh, we've been in business over 10 years and we advertise on the radio daily in the #2 market in the country! We mention drycaret.com on all our radio commercials.

http://www.drycarpet.com/radio.htm

Greg

I think I'd work out the basics first.

Where do you site visitors come from? Do they know the URL, guess it or find it on a search engine?

Who are your visitors, repeat customers, male/female, old/young?

You could create a community targetted at middle aged housewives, if that's your visitor base. You could setup coffee shop environments, general chit-chat or broaden your own remit. Start discussions about other wonderful household cleaning tips/tricks, tell them about other household products, advertise them (for a fee).

However, ask yourself this "what does drycarpet mean to you?". Does it mean household management?

Perhaps you'd be better creating a new domain with a more general focus and directing people from drycarpet.com to houseproud.com's forums, or something similarly named.

Paulus,

I like your site http://www.teamnicole.com. I think that drycarpet is not able to create a community. And, that's okay.

Any other Ideas/Suggestions would be appreciated.

Greg

I've tried creating communities before on another site related to Genealogy but all they wanted to do was exchange information about the trees they were researching rather than chat about anything in general. They post "Hi I'm Bill, I'm looking for information about X, Y Z, email me" and that's it.

BTW Are those posts on your message board posted by the people concerned? They appear to be promotional phrases or perhaps comments from telephone calls instead. Do you chat to your customers in person or on the phone? If so, what interests them?

You can create communities on anything but it's supply and demand as always. Here's a forum that works on a wider topic though as I suggested above. Googling for 2 minutes got me this vBulletin based forum.

http://forum.doityourself.com/

Paulus - You wrote:

"BTW Are those posts on your message board posted by the people concerned? They appear to be promotional phrases or perhaps comments from telephone calls instead. Do you chat to your customers in person or on the phone? If so, what interests them?"

Paulus, We email all of our customers after they recieve service. Our db is web based so we have lots of email address. Those that schedule online are asked to visit drycarpet.com and post their feedback. We also telephone our customers and ask for thier feedback regarding the product that we manufacture. Each post is supposed to be associated with a unique IP addresses - I think our BB upgrade may be showing these IP's? We DO NOT post - we leave that to our customers.

I really like what you've done with Nicole's site! Very easy navigation and your message board is very nice too! I spent a while at http://www.teamnicole.com . I was blown away -..the fact that NK is beautiful helped - but really nice site!

http://forum.doityourself.com looks like a active community. I'll spend some time there and snoop around.

Thanks for your help Paulus!

Greg

http://www.drycarpet.com

http://www.drycarpet.com/bulboard/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi

Hey Allen,

http://forum.doityourself.com/ looks nice. I like the "Views" feature. my site recieves 800 sessions per day - so, perhaps if people knew that drycarpet had lots of "View" folks might be inclined to participate.

Plus - I should create a new forum that homeowners might be interested in. For example, since we are a contractor for Gucci & Tiffany & Co we know lots of contractors, painters, finished carp., flooring etc.

Take a look at http://forum.doityourself.com/

Google - drycarpet is #3 this week:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=carpet+cleaning

Yahoo - drycarpet is #1 in web site matches:

http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=carpet+cleaning

My point? We receive LOTS of traffic these days. Perhaps we're in a sector that isn't oversaturated. keywords: carpet cleaning is pretty unique.

-Greg

I think a forum that might encourage people to post is a questions forum. For anyone new or browsing it could be helpful if there was a specific place to ask things. Also a general chat forum, as previously suggested, will many times help create activity because people can 'socialize' and get to know one another. As they become friends and learn more about your products... they'll be more beneficial to the community at large. There is no guarantee when you create any new forum but different things are worth a try.

Sometimes changing some of the icons (new message, smilie or posting icons) can make a difference.

I did have to look for the message board links. They're not all worded the same nor in the same place but if others are finding them that is all that matters. (Some of the "feedback" links go to the forum and at least one other pointed to mediaramp.) It's just something I noticed.

Drycarpet

Here my suggestions, it looks like you sell a great product and your customers that are posting are most GREAT testamonals for your product.

I think you need a bunch more topics and you current forum topics are way to business like, how about some topics like

DRYCARPET, did it work for you ???

Tell us about your stains ?

DRYCARPET tips

Other household cleaning tip, secrets & solutions

also put a forum on there for small talk or chit chat, because right now if they are not talking about your products, there is really not a place to post.

To me these topics sound alot more inviting and will probally get more people posting.

How about a monthly contest, where the winner with the best tip (or whatever)posted on your board, gets a free bottle of your newest product.

Dear Deb and Glassrattler:

I've created the forums that you suggested. Now, I guess I''ll try to recruite a moderator or two?

Thank you both for your suggestions. I'll keep coming back each hour or so to see if any other suggestion come in. Thanks again !!

Greg
1-800-DRYCARPET / drycarpet.com

http://www.drycarpet.com/bulboard/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi

It might be helpful for you to add a couple of categories. One for Drycarpet Info and the other for General Stuff. Adds a little seperation between the forums.

A Chit Chat forum is a good start. Household Tips and Tricks also is good.

You could also consider adding a Professional area for contractors, and business customers.

Register a couple of phantom users and start a few conversations in your Chit Chat forum...maybe something about recent movies, summer reading, etc. It might draw out some of the lurkers on your board.

I would organize the board as follows, although the activity is a bit slow for a lot of forums at this point:

Cat: Drycarpet Info
- Announcements/News
- Questions/Info/FAQ
Cat: Customer Testimonials
- Household Services
- Professional Services
Cat: General
- Household Tips/Tricks
- Chit Chat
Cat: Professional
- Private forum??? for contractors, etc.

Use the darker blue background and white text for your category headers.

tackalberry:

Thanks! I've made the changes you suggested. But, how do you suggest that I get over the guilt of registering a couple of phantom users? I'd feel silly doing this.

Thanks again!

I did the very same thing when starting my personal site (stand). After the site got busier, I eventually revealed the most obvious characters I created and still occasionally post under those names The old-timers there know it's me and they love it

Lots of busy sites got started that way... throw yourself some softball pitches in the form of questions users would like some info on, and post the answers as the info-guy. Post items of general interest in the "chit chat" forum.. games, interesting links, funny stuff, etc.

But my IP will be revealed and will look pathetic

Logged: 216.237.32.165

Make it so that only Admins and Moderators can see the IPs.

Thank you Allen

Thank you Paulus,

I finally found the feature that turns of the IP address and turned it off.

I have a couple alt-nics that I use. I used to do all of the news posts but I decided that we needed a real news guy so "TheNewsGuy" was born. I even gave him his own forum. He reports industry news and always adds a bit of commentary (opinion) that I wouldn't normally get away with.

I don't try to mislead anyone with these nics, I just use them to add a bit of flavor and variation to the boards. I think it can be a great idea. I have to agree that a couple phantom users in a chit-chat forum can be a great idea too. sometimes all it takes is a small amount of activity to get the others rolling. Don't be afraid to post information even if your last post hasn't been replied to. carry on like everyones watching and have a good time while you're doing it.

Hey thanks TheX: TheNewsGuy, DryNews is a super good idea .. I'll try it! Thanks .. who ever you are

X is one of our newest moderators and a 3-time winner of our member spotlight, with 3 different designs He's pretty good at the community thing too

hmm...

.::cracking knuckles::.

design wise, i think you're fine. sure, you could alter the colors or graphics a little here and there, but thats not overly necessary.

what you really want (or what it sounds like you really want) is some ongoing conversation -- some web traffic!

and, here y'go:

start up a discussion about the worst mess anyone has had -- and the reasons there WAS a mess.

the one driving (and constant) factor of people searching out your site is that there's a whole buncha dirty carpet in their place -- so, have them share why!

what mom wouldnt wanna share the horror story of having to clean up all her kids magic marker from the family room floor? or the kids who trashed the house while the parents were away and needed to tidy things up before the vacation ended? or the dad who thought he could handle dinner on his own -- before spilling the spaghetti sauce everywhere...

if there's one thing that makes a tight community, its horror 'gab' stories like this. (think about all the moms talking about this on their outings, anyway).

they're fun to share AND read ... and they're limitless! especially to people searching out your message boards.

taking it a step further, you can have the contest voted upon by the other members for the best or funiest monthly (yearly?) story.

so, there y'go

drkknght: Thanks for the comments / suggestions! They're great - I will start moving in this direction.

bumping for the newbies