Subject:
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Re: 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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Fri, 15 Feb 2008 02:32:53 GMT
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Viewed:
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6708 times
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In lugnet.loc.au, Kerry Raymond wrote:
> 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.
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
passed, there is a lot of room for 'noisy' people to congregate.
> 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.
I think somewhat differently - unrealistic expectations come not from age, but
on the perception of investment in the hobby. Many of us act like shareholders
of the LEGO Group, and holding them to a standard that is based on what we
invested in terms of money into our hobby - we are more hardcore and spend an
extraordinary amount on LEGO, so we are 'entitled' to some unrealistic
expectations.
I also think that because of our general age, we look back at the LEGO product
and compare it to our younger days and expect things to stay static..same
colors, same parts...but the products change. They have to.
> It would be very interesting to know if these insights into gaming forums
> were equally applicable to the LUGnet community.
They appear to be on the surface.
Joe Meno
> Kerry
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Lugnet - the talk-back radio of the world of Lego?
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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 (...) (17 years ago, 14-Feb-08, to lugnet.loc.au)
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