Last week Scevak and the HomeThinking clan launched sister site www.realestatevoices.com.

The site is a user-controlled list of Real Estate related news snippets. Similar sites in different topic areas have recently surfaced, with Digg being the most prominent.

I love the simplicity and relevance of community-driven content. Users of the site can trust the placement of the content - anything that makes it to the top must be worthy, because a lot of people think so.

But the most important thing to get a community site like this off the ground is to give it a rolling start. I have started thriving community sites in the past. The reality is that people don’t want to find an empty skeleton and be the first person to submit content. You need to create a handful of deliberate helper accounts and fill the site up full of user-submitted goodness. In reality, no community site is thriving with activity from day one. But if potential users think it is, they feel more inclined to contribute to something that already appears to have value or placement.

Once your community site gathers momentum, you will never need to login with those fake starter accounts again!

Tags: Friends

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 8:44 pm by aaron. You can leave a response