Subject:
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Lugnet - the talk-back radio of the world of Lego?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.loc.au
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Date:
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Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:11:47 GMT
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Viewed:
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6201 times
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I attended a very interesting symposium at work today. It was looking at
(amonst other things) issues relating to the user forums for computer games
and how games companies needed to better manage their relationship with
their users. What struck me was the possible parallels to Lego and user
communities like LUGnet.
There were no prizes for guessing that the conventional wisdom is that games
companies need to engage with their users to understand what they want.
That's hardly rocket science (although many companies do seem to have some
difficulty grasping it).
What was less obvious though was how best to do it. And it seems listening
to the users in the forums isn't the answer. Data mining of actual customer
behaviour seems to yield far more reliable insights than reading what people
have to say in forums. In fact, it was concluded that active forum users
were in fact as "a noisy minority" whose views were often in direct contrast
to what appeared to be more mainstream user opinions and that it could be a
terrible mistake to allow their "passionate" opinions to overly influence
the company.
There was also some discussion about the demographics of the forum user vs
the product user. The suspicion seems to be that the forum users were
probably more "hardcore", younger, and with more time on their hands than
the average user. There seems to be some evidence to suggest that younger
users were more likely to have unrealistic expectations of functionality
relative to price and, indeed, a frequent expectation that things could be
provided for free.
It would be very interesting to know if these insights into gaming forums
were equally applicable to the LUGnet community.
Kerry
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Message has 3 Replies:
 | | Re: Lugnet - the talk-back radio of the world of Lego?
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| (...) And, in turn, rocket science is not brain surgery. (...) Indeed. If LEGO had received a hundred dollars everytime a fan had said words to the effect "I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'll certainly be buying less of your product in (...) (16 years ago, 14-Feb-08, to lugnet.loc.au)
| | | Re: Lugnet - the talk-back radio of the world of Lego?
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| (...) This makes sense, based on what I have seen. Forums have the ability for people to express themselves freer than public,once they sit down at the keyboard. And in a rather blank space, as forums don't have people talking, but notes being (...) (16 years ago, 15-Feb-08, to lugnet.loc.au)
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