Forums vs. Ideation Forums in ecommerce Forums have been around for more than 20 years, and although they are fairly easy to navigate, without constant micromangement, then can quickly become filled with users and information that isn't "on-topic". Although every thread has their “annoying users,” the biggest inefficiency with forums is that a user has to check back often to see if anyone has answered his/her question, then scroll through the endless garbage to find the golden nugget of good information. Enter DNN Evoq Social, the next generation of forum/community. DNN has really focused the core functionality of their new platform, not to mimic and compete with every other forum or community, but to function in a way that real people would benefit from its use. DNN has taken the concept of ratings and reviews and overlaid it across all the different areas of their platform. This adds a level of intelligent self-correction that takes no additional effort or intervention of a moderator. Why Ideation is Better Than Forums Let’s walk through the first example of how this works. Ideation, or sharing ideas. Everyone likes to share ideas. With DNN Evoq Social, when a user shares an idea, others can respond and vote on their idea with a simple thumbs up or down, similar to a Facebook or YouTube like or dislike. In the main public sharing rooms, this then takes all the ideas and sorts them, with the ones with the most positive votes at the top. This also works on comments, which is where the real magic happens. Now, when a user posts a question, like in a forum, and they receive the same 200 post responses, instead of a big, long thread to wade through, any comments that received thumbs up votes automatically display right below the question, with the most highly voted response at the top. Now, this not only helps the user asking the question, but also those that may answer. If 30 people that were planning on responding, all know the correct answer, instead of having to read the entire thread to see if they need to respond or not, then spending another 10 minutes responding, they can simply see that the correct answer is displayed right below the question and just like Facebook, click the “like” thumbs-up icon to provide their supporting vote, saving tons of time for everyone. For our second example, we will use competing ideas. Let’s say your company wanted to find out which of two venues to hold this year’s company picnic at. You could easily post two separate ideas, each proposing a venue, and all your employees could quickly vote up or down for their choice. In a matter of less than one minute per employee, the whole company could easily see which venue is the more popular trending choice, during the voting, all the employees can see the winner when the voting is closed. 4 Reasons Why You Should Utilize DNN Social to Share Information Better Quality Information – users quickly vote down bad ideas, comments or answers Reduce Clutter – yahoo, repetition and “bad” data is pushed down in the threads Reduce Upkeep Costs - easily allow self-made moderators Incentive for Positive User Behavior – voting, user feedback, user rewards through gamification and administrative privileges. Instead of you needed to monitor every post, idea, comment and response, your power users (after earning enough points) can take over and share that responsibility. The best thing, which we’ll cover in more depth in an upcoming article, is that you can award or take away points for users whose ideas get positive or negative votes. This allows your power users that provide a lot of ideas that garner many positive votes, to accumulate points quickly. What does this mean for you? Every administrative function within DNN Social can be assigned a threshold of points that are needed to be able to perform that function (i.e. like becoming a moderator, or deleting responses, or creating groups, etc.). This is where the community can rapidly become self-managing. Instead of you needed to monitor every post, idea, comment and response, your power users (after earning enough points) can take over and share that responsibility. So if you're thinking about building a community whether internal or external, DNN Evoq Social is a great platform that you can afford. Give Clarity a call and ask about a community demo.