Taking on board Mr10Percent's comment in another thread "Beoworld of late has become a dull place" in a purely positive way, i'd like to help!

Being a Bang & Olufsen forum, with some dismal new products and a global downturn in sales for the company it can't be helped that theres a bit of a feeling of negativity about the brand - that's understandable. We are after all here because we have a common love of Bang & Olufsen..

However, it's the job of the mod team and myself to make BeoWorld a bit of fun as well !!  Andy and Puncher do the Wednesday thread, which is a hoot- we do the Prize Draw, which hopefully is exciting (and we try and make it funny), but if there is anything else you would like to make BeoWorld more entertaining please say. We are here for YOU - so tell us what you want to cheer you up!!

I would welcome workable suggestions to make BeoWorld a brighter place until we actually have some superb new products to chatter about!

Your thoughts please!

Lee

 

Lee,

How about a mini photo competition ?

On a rolling basis, Members submit images of the latest *new* item to be installed by their local dealer.

The system judged to be the best new purchase installed by a dealer (could be judged visually,unusual combination, vivid colour...etc,etc) wins.  A voting thread would suffice.

By excluding DIY installations and/or ebay purchases etc, a measure of the service available to customers by their friendly neighbourhood BeoDealer would be available to all. 

 

How's the gallery thing going, is it gone completely? I for one will never get tired of looking at B&O products in various - sometimes surprising - environments. I'm sure it's also a resource problem, but maybe it could be limited to a few pictures per member to keep people from spilling their entire memory cards over to Beoworld... (which makes for tedious browsing anyway).

The "what made you fall in love with B&O" thread put a lot of smiles on my face -- and I do find many reasons to be cheerful across the board.

This is a well known phenomenon - companies don't have a "Congratulate Us" department, they operate a Complaints Dept.

I am, for instance, perfectly aware that when I link to the "dealer experiences" thread on the official site, there are probably more than a hundred perfectly satisfied customers for every dissatisfied one who goes to the effort of writing a message about his or her experience. And I think it's the same here - there are more posts with problems that need to be solved, and gripes that one wishes to discuss, than there are flat-out "Kumbaya" messages. I'd worry if there was only one or the other. (As one guilty of writing a few Kumbaya messages I also notice that they tend to drop off the front page fast.)

One suggestion: now there are lots of really interesting posts/threads spread across the board, even in the other language forums. Maybe there should be a round-up of the best featured on the entry page, added by moderators or resulting from members giving posts and messages stars? Because there's a lot of gold in them thar threads ...

(And I'll let that serve as a reminder to myself that I should remember to give people stars when I come across something interesting!) 

 

 

design your own b&o equipments & spec

Join Andy and myself this evening, it's quite a relevant subject tonight

Assuming it stays on track of course!

tournedos:

How's the gallery thing going, is it gone completely? I for one will never get tired of looking at B&O products in various - sometimes surprising - environments. I'm sure it's also a resource problem, but maybe it could be limited to a few pictures per member to keep people from spilling their entire memory cards over to Beoworld... (which makes for tedious browsing anyway).

To do the Gallery properly in a way that's in keeping with our standards, we need CS2008 - the latest version of Community Server, which is frankly superb. 

Unfortunately, (as nobody has noticed - thus proving their point) Hiscox have pulled their advertising from BeoWorld as it was not effective. This has left us with a huge gap in revenue that we seriously need to fill.  I have approached several companies already on an informal basis, and all three times i was told that the reference section wasn't really the place to be for advertisers as the percentage of traffic is so low when compared to the forums.

Without asking everyone to empty their pockets to the tune of £6,000, i would welcome suggestions as to ways of bringing extra revenue in to pay for the CS2008 upgrade.  Please note that every single penny of revenue would be paying for improvements to the site - nothing else, and it never will be - ever.   

At present, BeoWorld has nothing in the bank, and to be hasn't had for a long time. Our last 'push' was to try and get members to upgrade to Gold in order to bring some money in - but a few voices were raised about people being railroaded/pushed into upgrading. This was never the intention, so we stopped immediately.

Now, we need money. BeoWorld is not an on-the-cheap budget site, it's professional, slick and extremely well run - but in order to do this we need to pay for the best available. Without membership revenue - we are quite literally stuffed.

It has been suggested that we make the top prize in the draw a Beo4 or something cheap, which would of course help immensely - but that to my mind is cheating the people who have only paid their £30 to go in the draw for 12 months. Their £30 is the same as every other members £30, and they are indeed supporting the site even if they don't post. Chopping down the prizes to next to nothing would be cheating them - and i refuse to do this.

So, how do we raise money? Advertising on the Forum? Making a Gold Membership £100? I would love to hear your suggestions please..

Lee

 

Puncher:

Join Andy and myself this evening, it's quite a relevant subject tonight

Assuming it stays on track of course!

 

As the saying goes, there is a first time for everything, but the Wednesday thread staying on track might just be the exception!

 

Simon

9 LEE:

So, how do we raise money? Advertising on the Forum? Making a Gold Membership £100? I would love to hear your suggestions please..

I don't like adverts, but if there is a need, I could probably live with a standard size banner on top of each topic page, or something. As long as they are required to have some class and taste, and not make the reader want to rip his eyes out...

How about a verticle banner underneath the "Most Active Users"-box
on the right-hand side of the screen ?
(in a matching color scheme) 

 

Ignace:

How about a verticle banner underneath the "Most Active Users"-box
on the right-hand side of the screen ?
(in a matching color scheme) 

 

 Beaten to the punch - exactly my suggestion too. It wouldn't bother me there as it's currently dead space at the moment in most of the forums (below the "browse all tags" link). I imagine this space, in the general forum especially, is worth a bob or two!

I'll qualify it by saying I don't expect to see pictures of bright red, battery operated fish with flashing eyes

edit: forgot to mention that a prize draw is not requirement for me personally, although I can see it would be all but impossible to ensure you have the support of all gold members to drop it.

Puncher:

I'll qualify it by saying I don't expect to see pictures of bright red, battery operated fish with flashing eyes

Drat.. back to the drawing board it is for me then..

 

Hi Lee

Several comments

I too would love a bigger / better picture Gallery

I think a half way house with the prizes might be prudent given the current hole in the accounts - a £500 voucher instead of a £1,000 voucher shouldn't upset the apple cart too much I would have thought.

I would personally flinch at £100 for gold membership.

Have you appproached Audi UK or large Audi dealerships re sponsership ?

Come on guys - good ideas for £6k worth of sponsership can't be that hard!

Cheers

Nigel 

 

I wouldn't mind ads in the forum sections -- it's used by many enthusiast sites without being intrusive in the least. Have a look at The Truth About Cars, for instance -- or even major broadcasting corporations. They manage to make it work excellently - and I find it actually adds to the experience. (And then they are easy to ignore if that should be a priority.)

With the number of page hits BeoWorld gets that should be a very nice source of income.

 

Well, to be fair i'm really very pleased about the initial reaction to advertising in the forum.  I know it has always been a real bone of contention in the past, and it's taken some courage to ask you all as i've been holding back for about two months (sice Hiscox gave notice).

I can assure that any adverts on the forum will be from premium brands that are in keeping with Bang & Olufsen, and if the general opinion is that it's ok - i will approach Van and ask if/where/how we will display the adverts.

At the end of the day, you all make the forum and it's basically yours - so i would never do anything like this without asking.  I'm sure the sensible ones amongst us realise it's not cheap running this site, and for us all to enjoy all it has to offer it needs money. Vulgar subject, sorry.

Lee

Things that flash on and off or pop-ups are an absolute no-no.

Puncher:

Things that flash on and off or pop-ups are an absolute no-no.

 

Lee won't let something like that happen...

...if he has a good taste, and I believe he has. 

The advertising aggregator sites you work with could be instructed to deliver contextualized ads, that are relevant to each forum, if you wish, and that are even relevant to the country of origin of BeoWorld members.

Top banner:

http://gramophone.co.uk/ 

Contextualized content: 

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/

Sometimes it's just a little ad:

http://www.ssa.org/

Or too many:

http://avsforum.com/  (here it gets too intrusive.)

I visit this site daily, and am rarely bothered by the ads:

http://dailykos.com/ 

 

The prize draw must be one of the biggest drains on the site.

I agree about making the top prize a little smaller and , personally, I would love to see more unique/unobtainable items in there such as immaculate examples of Beolits or old Beomasters or the candlesticks rather than mainstream products that cost a lot of money.

For example an immaculate Beosystem/Overture/Century/Beosound 1  would be an excellent first prize, I don't think it's necessary to spend more. I was very, very happy to win the phones last year but felt a little uncomfortable about how much they must have cost, The Beocom 6000's on their own would have been enough.

 

Simon

how aboot animated avatars ?

 here's my current fave

  

Lee

Re sponsership - have you approached Lintronic or Soundsmith? Beoworld have given them free (presumably) links to their websites which must generate them some income. Also what about the guy in the Netherlands who sells on ebay foam speaker rings and is it Recone that do the re-foaming?

Cheers

Nigel 

Lee,

I think the prize draws are very generous at the moment. When they started, I expected the prizes to be quite small but to gradually increase in value as time went by - in other words, as BeoWorld's bank balance became healthier.

Of course, the bigger prizes go some way to attracting members so I understand why you don't want to have smaller prizes.

How about this as a way forward - have notably smaller prizes each month (e.g. a beo 4 remote or A8 earphones) but each quarter have a super-draw where the prizes would have even greater value than they do now (e.g. the top three prizes all have a value about £1000-£1500). It should be possible to balance this in such a way that we can still offer great prizes but the total cost of all prizes over 12 months is less.

Michael

9 LEE:

Taking on board buranteks comment in another thread "Beoworld of late has become a dull place" in a purely positive way, i'd like to help!

 

well, i may write a lot of things -esp in another rather "heated" thread... but i can't take credit for this comment.

one thing beoworld is not, in my opinion -is dull.


at any rate -i love the gallery and would like to see it mature.

I don't think either were keen to contribute - Lintronic were offered their own forum but wanted this for free. To be fair, these are both small companies with small advertising budgets no doubt. They are also useful links for members as they offer services that are not otherwise available. A bit of sponsorship from B&O might be nice though!

Peter :

I don't think either were keen to contribute - Lintronic were offered their own forum but wanted this for free. To be fair, these are both small companies with small advertising budgets no doubt. They are also useful links for members as they offer services that are not otherwise available. A bit of sponsorship from B&O might be nice though!

Ooohh................. you're a glutton for punishment. You do realise that all of the "not independant" brigade will renew their revolt now