ÿþ<html> <body> <b> The Ultimate e-Fed Community</b> <p>Roughkut, eWzine, Prime Time Central, E-Fed Knights, WfWA, etc, etc. There are a lot of E-fed communities out there all with the motto or goal to bring the Fedding culture together. They all claim to have what E-fedders crave most in an online community. But& how valid are those claims? Pull up a chair and we ll look this over shall we?</p> <p>E-fedders are online geeks and geekettes, that have decided to devote a ton of their online time, to the game of fantasy Wrestling. But, this online time is not simply broken down into RP ing, results reading and character page tweaking. I d venture a guess and say those things only account for about 1/2 of the average gamers time spent online. I arrive at this figure by considering& </p> <p> If Johnny X gets off work at 5:00pm, goes home, eats supper and chills with his wife until 7:30pm he s freed up a bit of time after spending some with the loved ones. Now, if he goes to bed at 11:00pm he has time to spend 2 hours online each day and still have extra time for the outside world. Other s with no family life to speak of, would have more time, but the vast average have about 2 hours per day for online gaming. Now if you times those 2 hours by 7 days you ll get 14 hours per week.Then subtract 3 hours per Rp, at 2 Rp s per week and you ll have 8 hours left. But then subtract ½ hour to read results and another ½ to update your character page& that still leaves 7 whole hours (50% of your total online time) unaccounted for. </p> <p>Where am I going with this? Well, it s obvious that gamers have more time on their hands than the basics of RP gaming. So, where do they spend their online time? Most, are elsewhere around the web, be it Facebook "!, Twitter "!, e-Music sites& etc..etc. But some spend those extra hours visiting e-Fed communities.</p> <p>There is a huge market for these people s time and attention. E-Fed communities must recognize that they have to employ marketing strategies in order to bring the faithful to their doors. The reason people go to  ANY website is because there is something on that site that interests them. There is a solid and valuable reason they clicked by. Present day e-fed communities do offer different things, but have come about this in an indirect manner& they have done it more by accident than by purpose.</p> <p>People that used to go to the old X-Net e-fed community did so because their friends were there and they could post thoughts, ideas and other material for those that knew them to comment on& not because X-Net purposely created events, discussions and ideas themselves. People came, because everyone was  known to go there. But when people slowly started to drift away, and less and less people found their friends visiting, the mere fact that X-Net was a place to stop by just wasn t a good enough reason to stop by any longer. That s when X-Net actually tried to cater to the needs of their visitors. But they had relied so long on the egocentric notion of simply being  THE spot for e-fedders, that they did not know how to market themselves and died off.</p> <p>Other present day communities seem also to be relying on a backwards sort of marketing in that they opening recruit and cater to the masses, but only until they are up and running. Then the site tends to get a core group of regulars whose preferences seem to dominate and those ideas become the philosophy of the site to which you either fit in, or go you are encouraged to go elsewhere. And in the rare cases when these core-dominated sites do try to attract new members, what do they do? They advertise what they are already doing and how things are run, again with the philosophy of  This is how we do things here, like it or leave! </p> <p>A true e-Fed community is one that does not revolve it s essence around the idea of  This is how things are done , but more of,  This is how we are doing things& right now. And if you would care to suggest another way of doing things or would like to add to the site, we ll do that too. A long motto but an accurate one. That is what people want to read and how you ll get the lion share of an e-Fedder s extra time and attract them away from other web sites (Fedding and non-Fedding alike). But that is just one aspect for creating the ultimate community& next you need marketing.</p> <p>If you want to bring these people with free time to your community, you have to give them a reason to stop by. Simply giving them a place to post ideas, thoughts and opinions is not creating a true community. You, as an ultimate community owner have to go beyond this simplistic model and think bigger. There is no way to give everyone what they want in an E-Fed community, but if you think big, you can at least promise to be flexible enough to change from time to time, making your community a place people will feel comfortable coming to. If you can boast three things for your customers to do, other than post comments, you have succeeded in the first step of marketing& getting people in the door. Once people are in the door, it s your job to keep them there.</p> <p>But, back to the first step, getting three items for them to do while at your site. Games, graphics, RP critiques, tutorials, youtube "! videos, Character databases, e-fed databases, classifieds and contests are all some examples of forum areas you can use in order to attract people to your site. These areas are more informational as opposed to opinion based and may be of interest to e-players.</p> <p>No one really likes to be told what to do. Even less like to hear that tired statement,  If you don t like it here, leave. Community owners should never have the attitude of  this is my place and I ll run it as I see fit. If an owner was truly making a website for  ALL they should consider  ALL opinions, views, and ideas, cater to the masses and even do things that they personally may not even like. The bottom line of a community should always be& keeping the members happy. If owners can not do that then their website ceases to be a  community and becomes more like a private club. Nothing wrong with that really. But come clean with it and stop pretending your site cares about the e-wrestling community when it prefers to exist for it s own ends instead.</p> <p>I think that is why some sites die off, because once the core members of these private club attitude sites begin to fade away from the site, there is no reason for anyone to come to the place any longer. A true community can and will always attract new members on a constant basis because it will be constantly changing. Stagnant things get left behind, but evolving things march onward with time.</p> <p>Where does your e-community fit in?</p> </space> </body> </html>