How Would I Know?
A lot of interesting things happened in NOLA last weekend. Some of which I’m at liberty to discuss, some of which I’m not.
But by far, the most disconcerting had to be the number of people who said to me at one point or another during the conference…
Oh, I saw that you closed/killed the Funboard forum. I used that ALL THE TIME. I was sorry to see it go!
WHA…?
Ove the entire life of the Funboard, which was the Vanilla-based forum system used here at the Funcave, I personally accounted for over half the postings.
I simply couldn’t get anyone to talk at all.
And I just couldn’t understand why, either.
I thought I was posting intresting topics, especially for a starter board, etc. Open-ended stuff.
But two key stats from the Funboard tell a certain story.
There were 650+ members of the Funboard at the time of its closing.
But there were over 17,000 anonymous views. Now, that’s not accounting for multiple views from same computer, etc.
Still tho…that is a HORRIBLE conversion ratio.
No matter what, I chalk a good bit of the relative failure of the Funboard to a group of things I like to call The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly…
GOOD = Super strong content (which doesn’t generate discussion, simply lurkers/leechers)
BAD = No working notification module/plug-in for Vanilla
UGLY = The utter lack of support for it among my peers, including a few who were downright hostile toward it, ridiculing the effort to start a place where folks wouldn’t be, well…ridiculed for asking a simple question.
But even if that has been fixed, the simple fact of the matter is that if people don’t get off their own duffs, and support resources they find helpful…
Whether that support is monetary (FB was never a pay site, so this is not about a money thing), or simply posting a comment, question, a note of thanks, or whatever…
If no one takes the time to offer the kind of support that resource needs, then that resource will die.
That is a 100% stone cold guarantee.
R.I.P Funboard.
Evidently folks other than me miss you. Maybe there are more. Really tho…how would I know?
|| posted by chris under clueless, community, funboard, kma, thumbs down || || ||
Here are the two unspoken truths about the SMB that nobody likes to talk about out loud, the “Anne” syndrome.
First, everyone likes to think they “own” the attention of the people who gave them a business card or email address. Since those people generally have nothing else of value to them, they guard them, pretend to represent them, extend almost fiduciary duty when talking to others. Naturally, your effort to take the attention of their crowds and put them somewhere behind a wall where their “influence” and “leadership” can’t shine leads to some fighting. So when you start something without getting input of every Bob, Sue and Joe it hits your kneecaps immediately.
Second, what have you done for me? Seriously, you’re an MVP, you’re paid to do all this stuff for me and frankly I am not feeling the love. Oh, you’re not getting paid? Well, still, I don’t see how this does things for me directly. Let me offer you some feedback: I want my questions answered, quickly, professionaly. If I have a followup, I expect to call you on the phone, and I expect you to answer immediately. If I am at a customers site, I expect you to stay on the phone with me until it works. I expect you to send me a shirt, or at least a mousepad, so I can put it on the clients desk and show my affiliation with you. On the second thought, I want my logo and my color scheme all over it and just “Powered by Chris Rue” on it. But make it small. And no web site, because I don’t want my customers to go to you. And don’t you dream about going direct. But you should advertise the crap out of yourself. So in closing, I expect you to market, spend money, give me marketing, do my work for me - and I will just be the trusted advisor that goes in and gives impartial advice to the customer because I am ethical and you’re just a filthy mobility board operator thats paid off by Microsoft. Ok, fine, not paid by Microsoft, but still a jerk.
Now, above is a joke, but its a joke people play on me every single day. Why did you expect it be any different for you? In order to get people to pay attention to you the system needs to work for them, not the other way around.
We’re in a different space now. The good, decent, hard working people that would have appreciated your efforts and gone to the deep end for you are few and far in between. They have been disaffected and turned away by the masses of charlatans posing as IT people, unskilled middleman IT guys crowding the market with their mediocre marketing, dudes that couldn’t get along with their coworkers and let their skills depreciate so they got fired an unable to find another IT job.
So now you get the pleasure of dealing with the same people that couldn’t keep an IT job because they have the personality of a whiny 7 year old, which used to work in the marketplace where an IT guru would sit in a dark room and not expect to have any social graces.
Now they are out and about and you, YOU CHRIS RUE, are not doing enough for them.
The times where peer collaboration existed are long gone, most the people out there are not our peers and the only way to get them is through a filtering group like HTG - but in the open field you get exactly whats out there.
Can you filter out a few good men out of thousands of unskilled pinkslips? I think your own statistics answer that question.
-Vlad
comment by Vlad Mazek — May 16, 2008 @ 8:12 am