Growing Successful Communities

[#1]

I am curious to know what others have done with their existing Message Board content when moving over to a new community platform?

Best practices are to start fresh, which is what we are doing.  However we are migrating over the content and will put it in a Private forum for archiving purposes.

There is a lot of good content in there that I would love to see resurface however I know that goes against creating a new opportunity  for new topics/conversations/content.  We have our superusers from the old Message Boards that we are welcoming with a special Forefather program (pre-launch tour, ect.) but they have been the creators of all this content and I want to be absolutely sure we aren't missing any opportunities that I might now be aware of.

• Has anyone been in the same scenario, if so, what did you do? 
• Any suggestions or ideas?

Thanks!

JigsawGal

[#2]

Hello Jennyb

Good to see you at the forum. This is a much better place to discuss.

Concerning what people do with their old content after migrating to a new community platform, it depends on many things. Such as the reason for moving to a new platform, the value of the content, etc. I've seen people put them in private boards for archival, if the content are old and not useful. But if you believe there are really valuable materials in there, some communities do put them in a read-only board, so people can still get value out of these old content. Some community even allow full participation on the migrated content. So it really is all over the board.

One factor that I observed is that it depends on the type of community you have. If you have a support community, the value of the content last longer than those of enthusiast communtiy whose value are more transient. So support community tend to keep their content live, where as enthusiast communities tend to put them in archive or read-only boards.

Well, these are my observations. Perhaps others can comment on the reason behind their choices to give us more insights.

[#3]

Hi jennyb!

First off, I think you are absolutely approaching this in the right way by thinking of the content in terms of its value to the users, as well as its value to your organization. That's a good approach to take, as is your Forefather's program to make sure the superusers are made to feel a part of the process!

Also, I think Michael's response above was right on about the different ways people think of content value between support and engagement communities.

There's a couple of things I was curious about, though, that I think would help some of our other members with the discussion:

You mentioned you chose to archive the content in the new location, instead of continuing the old structure in the new location. I can think of good reasons to do either, can you go into your thoughts a bit about why it made sense for your community to archive old content? And can you talk about why you opted for a private vs public archive?

Thanks again for this wonderful topic - looking forward to hearing more from you and the community!

[#4]

Thanks for the feedback, this is an awesome conversation and I really look forward to learning from this.

As of right now, this is the plan, however because we haven't launched yet, the plans might change.  We have received recommendation that it's best practices to start fresh to allow for all members to have equal opportunity to come in without feeling like it's already owned territory to allow for new content, less hand holding, new conversations, better answers and the like. But I continue to have a little bit of a gut check about using some of the content because it's a support community on our current MB for the most part and the members have helped a lot of members.  I could see the value in the content.  I would like to use some of it at least.

We hope to open up and encourage the enthusiast's in them as well.  Those will be all new conversations.

This is what I am thinking (thinking as I go).....would love your feedback.  During the soft launch process, what about allowing our Forefather group who will be coming in during the soft launch process and having them go through the content and picking and choosing what they deem valuable content to move and into which forum.  This way the good content gets put back in BY THEM and what isn't relevant won't matter.  We could then make the old content a PUBLIC read only forum and should a member think something should be moved, we can decide together...  Oh I am liking this!  Idea's on how to set that up so they could move the content would be great.  I suppose we could give them the permission to do so for that time being.

Thanks so much for stimulating my mind on this.  These are the types of things you have to try and get right according to your communities needs the first time.

JigsawGal

[#5]

Years back when we switched our forums to Lithium's platform, we migrated all of our content and left it active.  Being primarily a support forum, the content has tremendous value and in some cases is the only support that we can offer for legacy products.  If we were to change forum vendors today, I am certain that we would make the same decision.  The content also has high business value from a long tail content standpoint - we get many search referrals to the forums which hopefully is helping to answer user's questions or introduce them to our company. 

As for the user's ranks, I know that we tried to keep the most important parts of them in the initial switch and then add room for growth.  It is extremely important to my users, some of whom have been participating in our forums for 10 years now, to keep their status so I certainly think some sort of program where they get to keep status is a good idea.  This way, new users can easily recognize when they are being helped by an expert and it continues to encourage the super users to contribute. Starting over from scratch could certainly lead some users to jump ship.

Anyhow, it sounds like you are going through an exciting time and I wish you luck!

-Laura

[#6]

Another question along side of existing MB content...  How much content, if any, do you think should be generated by the company itself?  Q&A's, tutorials, video's, ect...

My thoughts are if we are pushing for a peer-to-peer support community, we will want to be selective with this and allow our members to generate the content.

I would love to hear what others have done or are doing...

Thanks...

[#7]

We use a mixed bag. 

I have quite a few boards, but three main ones.  Main in the sense of the highest traffic.

After not too long, I realised that there were obvious recurrent issues.  My background as a tech support agent helped, admittedly.  Anyway, I figured that it would be best to try to head off alot of noob questions at the pass, so I created "COMMON ISSUES - Check here first!" stickies at the top of each of these three boards. 

In each one I put common problems and complaints and linked to their answers.  Most of the first answers I linked are in our company KB, but as I'd read forum users, both our designated or nascent superusers as well as the occasional Joe Blow user, offer their solutions, I'd add links to their posts in those stickies as well. 

Like I said, this heads off many questions at the pass.  It also shortens answers in that people post questions sometimes, and all one often must do is say "See the Common Issues sticky at the top of this board.  Cheers!"  and finito.

Although I totally understand where you're coming from, jennyb.  We saw this as an opportunity to seed the forum, and on top of that, users are always clamoring to hear directly from the company in the forum, so this is somewhat of a concession to that oft-voiced desire.