Free Moz Seminar on driving traffic to online communities

[ForestForTrees]

Hi everyone,

Moz will be having a free online seminar on "How to Drive Activity in Your Online Community:"

Richard Millington, Founder of FeverBee, a community consultancy, will take you through the community management framework, a process of content, activities/events, discussions, and platform design to drive high levels of activity in your online community

I think that Moz are great marketers and SEOs, so I'm planning on going. Feel free to hit me up if you go, too and maybe we can compare notes about how it applies to XenForo forums. If enough people go, I have a private chatroom where we can make snarky comments in realtime. What could be better?

Links:
http://moz.com/webinars
http://www.feverbee.com/

 

[ForestForTrees]

I just finished the webinar and it was great. I didn't expect to like it very much, figuring that I know my own niche so well, how could I learn from a so-called expert. To some degree, that was true, but within the first couple of minutes I was struck by how well he understood and could explain some of the core community dynamics that I think are most important in running a vibrant community.

For example, he talked about how too many communities focus on informative content, whereas other things like jockeying for status and bonding are often actually just as important if not more. He gets it. He gets the type of stuff that I see on my forum every day. Even if he isn't going to rock my world, I figured that I wanted to hear his ideas. Soon after it started I pulled in one of my mods and the other plans to watch it when the recording is published next week.

I think it's worth watching for anyone interested in growing their forum.

Also, it may disappear within an hour or so, but you can download a pdf of half of his ebook for free in exchange for your email address. Presumably there is a one click unsubscribe, so it was worth it for me (I don't plan to unsub, though; as you can tell, I'm quite interested and ended up buying the whole book as well). Here's the link:
http://www.feverbee.com/moz.html

Here are some preliminary notes from my first watching. I may update them after a second watching:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Fwb_sWZocBB44O88BgW2xjdsYsqqBvR26VbSKpwqrM/edit

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Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the notes.

 

[ForestForTrees]

We haven't had much discussion on this thread. Do you think that's because people aren't interested or just don't think that a consultant would know his stuff?

Here's the link to the recording: http://moz.com/webinars/how-to-drive-activity-in-your-online-community

 

[Dakis]

That's pretty cool stuff, lemme have a view and I'm interested in discussing this

 

[Motobaka]

I’m listening to it. Thanks for the info.

 

[SelfSufficientMe]

If you could summarise some of what you consider to be the main points in your own words here that would be nice

 

[CivilWarTalk]

Jest read the first half of the free e-book, it's very informative for new forum managers and established ones as well...

Going to watch the webinar shortly...

 

[ForestForTrees]

Yeah, I was impressed by how relevant what he covered was for my site. Not life changing, but it is good to know I'm on the right track.

By the way, it looks like he's organizing a 2 day web community conference in London. The speaker list is pretty impressive:
http://www.virtualcommunitysummit.com/

I even thought about forwarding the conference link to it to to @Kier, @Ashley, and @Mike. I've always felt that the "Xen" in Xenforo indicated a well thought out Apple-like emphasis on usability. In some sense, this Feverbee group seems to be a great match for XenForo. They are looking at community design even more carefully than KAM are looking at interface design. Feverbee attempts to apply science to community design, and my inclination is to follow the effort as much as I can, to see what it comes up with. Perhaps KAM might like to do the same to help them peer into their crystal balls and better plan for the future. In my niche, I know that I sometimes feel I have to be able to see the future just to survive, and I bet KAM feel the same way.

Last but certainly not least, the presenter from the webinar, Richard Millington, created an account here and PM'ed me:
http://xenforo.com/community/members/richard-milllington.64736/
He even offered to answer any follow up questions we might have, an offer I might take him up on.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask them here and I'll relay them and the post any answers here (license permissions issue). I don't know if he'll answer them, as I do set a pretty high bar for awesome and not everyone might get the same treatment , but I suppose there's only one way to find out.