My friend and I built an investment site, http://www.ValueWiki.com It's a Wiki, so investors collaborate on research (like Wikipedia). We currently have stubs for all 53,000 publicly traded U.S. securities. We've added features to the Wiki that we would like feedback on; live chat, message boards, blogging, groups, and user voting. *Are these features usable? *Is the site clear/understandable/accessible? *What can we do to encourage users to login and contribute? *Any general comments to improve the site? The clear hurdle for any new site is attracting those first early adopters. Any comments or advice on this is much appreciated. Thanks for checking out the site!
I have not dug into it yet - but it looks great. Dang it - I was going to do that! Encouraging users to login and contribute - ain't that the Holy Grail?? That is a tough one. Most likely, 80% of the "users" will not be actively contributing - make that 90%. But then you will get super users from the other 10%. Perhaps a contest of some sort? Those are hard, because most contests encourage bad behavior unintentionally. When did you guys launch?
Thanks for the great comments and the digg. We launched the site about 2 months ago, but we've held off from publicising until we're sure we're putting our best foot forward. We'd love to hear more advice on how to attract content creators. Contests are a good suggestion. We should start to work on some ideas. Maybe give away shares of companies with excellent contributions?
The poster above me is Zach - he built ValueWiki's custom features, like our voting. Thank you Col for blogging us on http://our-needs-and-wants.blogspot.com/ And thank you Phynder and Trichnosis for the encouraging feedback. So let's say you randomly stumbled on ValueWiki. What would prompt you to login or begin writing? Are there stronger callouts we can use? Is the goal of the site clear? Can we make the site more accessible? Thanks again for all the encouraging comments!
We had another idea for a contest. What do you guys think? Every day for 31 days (1/1 - 1/31?) we'll give away $50 to the contributor who writes the best new article. At the end of the month, we'll give $500 to the best of all the winners. We've toyed with the idea of paying contributors, but have avoided it before since it segments the community. This idea rewards the best efforts of or users and inspires some healthy competition. What do you guys think? Obvs, we'll need to promote the contest extensively over the weeks before it starts, but assuming we get some good exposure, it could give us a real shot in the arm. FYI, thanks in large part to our research here, our google traffic has trippled in the last week. This is a great resource.
$50 a day? You guys are made of money! Sounds like a great idea. Would the same person be able to win every day? I would suggest that you don't allow that - to give 30 different people a chance to win - helping to build a bigger community.
Zach and I incorporated the suggestions on this thread, and we're launching the $100 Daily Contributor Contest. We are awarding $100 every weekday in February to our top wiki contributors, with a $500 grand prize on March 1st. Feedback *Does anyone have ideas on publicizing the contest? *How does ValueWiki.com look now? Is the site usable/understandable? *Any ideas for improving the ValueWiki blog? Thanks!