How can we use conversations from elsewhere in forums?

🧠 Forum Collective
#1

We hosted a discussion on Forum Strategy and explored some answers to questions.

This one was: How can we use conversations from elsewhere in forums?

  • Do a poll in Slack and break down the “why” of the answers in a discussion on the forum.
  • Embed tweets, social and news items to generate discussions/ideas
  • Collaborative note taking
  • Repeat questions from Slacks and Support
  • Shared wiki post for takeaways from conference videos
  • Recap questions asked during an event interview that dont’ get asked live
  • “Make a forum the place that you know the idea will be discussed”
  • Bring trends, news and new ideas to the forum for deeper dicussion

This is a wiki post, feel free to edit this list directly or add a comment. :blush:

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#2

Make your forum your discussion engine for all your content across multiple providers. Most forums are pretty good at embedding content when you paste a link in, so you can share tweets, Youtube videos, etc and then be able to discuss them underneath.

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#3

Might forums possibly be an ideal place for our community intros to take place, especially if intro prompts encourage including links to contact like LinkedIn and Twitter? Forums provide less noise/distraction than chat-like spaces like Discord and Slack. It could also be a small step to socializing the use of the forum for everyone (getting rid of that initial first post stage fright).

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#4

What I like about this idea is that folks naturally introduce themselves over time via their appearances on a forum. It could be via likes, replies to an existing thread or starting a new thread – or perhaps sharing a thread in other places.

I tend to get a sense of the people of the forum as they do these things and I feel like their acts of community forumness allow me to be introduced to them without the need for an official introduction.

Yup, that all takes time relative to an official intro yet I tend to be a fan of getting to know someone without knowing them first and then a natural connection might form.

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#5

Gotta say, I love this so much.

Then if forums/tools can show what people actually do in a nice/informative way, that’s a really nice way to get a true feel for someone, rather than how they present themselves as one specific point in time.

I have mixed feelings about intros in general. I never use to do it or have a place for them in my early days of community. I personally dislike doing them myself.

They’ve also become such a focus or obsession on getting people to introduce themselves in the belief that it increases chances of people staying around. But I think people stay around and engage for a number of reasons.

I kind of feel that the software should surface new people (as an opt in?) so that the community can come in and say hello if they want to. Or we can just observe, react and acknowledge people’s existence.

Adding something that I wrote in on introductions:

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#6

Agreed. A formal introduction doesn’t make up for the lack of conversations worth reading or jumping into.

That said, I do think they’re effective for chat. An intros channel in Slack, Discord, or Teams helps with making quick connections.

1 Like
#7

I love those ideas:

I think that extending the life of events and content through discussion is excellent and very community-oriented.

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