| Hey Motobabble- Disclaimer: I used to manage ad sales & operations at CarDomain.com, the largest social network in the automotive space. I browsed your site but didn't create an account, create my own car page, or upload any pics. Your site looks great: very nice photo browser, look/feel. Some hopefully constructive criticism: a) having to login to read comments posted on a vehicle is a major barrier to users spending time on your site, and is going to limit the SEO value of your content => why not just show what people have to say, and provide more engaging content to the folks who happen to find your site via search? By showing this I think you'll increase both your SEO and likelihood of converting browsers => registered members. b) what's the value of membership? what's your "club?" CarDomain, while it doesn't have the glossy look/feel of your site, has a very large membership (850k members/cars profiled last i checked), and vibrant sub-communities of conversation around trucks, donks/boxs/bubbles, tuners, etc etc -- what's your community, your niche? who are you catering to? where's your beachhead? You may want to consider catering to a specific community to help increase your traction, and expand outward once you're rolling... c) are you going to police your content? browsed and noticed a couple fake-y looking profiles, e.g. http://motobabble.com/bearx/2012-a4 which is listed as an Audi (i <3 audis btw) & it's actually stock/OEM photos of a VW... if you're building a community they'll appreciate accuracy & authenticity. The blog staff @ CarDomain invests a lot of time doing this, and their community really appreciates it... nice to know if you ask someone about how their Bugatti Veyron handles that they actually know. As @dif points out
i) one reason CarDomain & others remain so strong is the amazing amount of content and membership they already have. How can you quickly build a community? Hmmm, if only you could... be the car-talk/car-photo-share app on Facebook... integrate with some existing auto sites to make photos "easier"... many, many angles to pursue. ii) foster / cultivate specific communities: truck folks like trucks, Chevy/Ford truck folks like similar, and Scion folks will like to converse with Scion folks, etc etc... not that they won't talk to each other, but birds of a feather def'ly flock together. Perhaps this ties to the 'beachhead' point above. And actually, reach out to CarDomain/Streetfire -- they're great folks. They'll be difficult to steal traffic from too because they're amazingly good at building fostering their own community, but I'd be surprised if they weren't pretty cool frien-e-mies to talk to. Good luck-
--JeffC |
As far as specific communities, we are currently pushing to specific markets and are making our way to some influential content producers.
We are currently working on increasing the policing of spam type content and profiles. We also have a few ideas that will revolutionize the industry in cutting down spam.
And as far as cool frien-e-mies... we play well with others :)