A little less than 30 days ago we upgraded our site from AF 4x and AS 1.1 (yes 1.1) to 1.3.  Not one to keep things simple; we also implemented a bunch of other changes at the same time; completely redesigned the site navigation, developed a new custom skin all an attempt at moving the emphasis from "us" to our "groups", then we migrated all of the forums (which were separate module instances) into their corresponding groups and auto added members who posted form those forum into the same groups.  This was a huge risk to us as our membership has proven to be change resistant in the past. 

Then we turned it on and waited.

This is a 30 day (slightly less than 30 days to be accurate) report of what has happened since then:

Statistics:

Pageviews up 26%
Pages/Visit up 53%
Bounce Rate down 16%
Avg Time on Site up 64%
Overall Traffic is steady - but that has a lot to do with the time of year and the fact that I still need to manage some 301 redirects for old links and bookmarks to older/moved pages.

Some personal observations (less scientific):

Membership - increased 3X per day.
Group joining - was almost non existent before hourly now
Overall journal activity - homepage (just for my groups) rotates 2X to 3X times per day with paging set to 30 items per page
Friend Requests - non existent before - hourly now.

What has been really interesting is that the traffic has moved dramatically to the homepage (up 169%).  The Journal Summary is now "the" place people go to get info (before the biggest entry points were bookmarked on a specific forum for one or two big groups)

Additionally, we're seeing more and more cross pollination between groups daily.  People see their friends joining groups, they follow and join too.   

Overall this was a huge improvement in the "networking" side of our site.  I believe without AS 1.3 we would still be a good but simple forum that had groups and profile pages that no one completed or used.  We're now actively working to improve and integrate more parts of our site into the journal.   

Most importantly the attitude of our membership has improved dramatically.  We used to be the "also ran" site (competing with yahoo e groups mostly).  Now people post on our site first.  Stakeholders are actively using the site to get the word out about events or ideas. 

What was most satisfying recently occurred in three meetings I had last week with two of our largest groups and one new group that if they come on would literally double our membership.  I all three cases it was apparent that we have become "the" place for them to communicate with their membership as well as attract new membership.  Previously we were viewed as hard to understand and use - now we're in meetings talking about the advantages we have for local groups over tools like Facebook. 

Our focus now is turning from attracting new members - to attracting new groups and helping them grow and manage their communities on our site. 

My conclusion: at the end of the day - the risk was well worth it and AS is truly the enabler of all of this interaction.

Oops. I had this all organized but the forum stripped out my breaks.

Using chrome?

Thank you for sharing... Very inspiring!

Posted By Will M on 01 Feb 2010 09:40 PM
Using chrome?

Yes.  Just edited with FF.  Strange.

wow, your old site was good but this one is really, really nice!

and thanks for the report card, good idea, I expect we will go live within 2 weeks and I will share as well.

Steven I love the new site too and would love to discuss how you achieved some aspects of it.

Do you think your site would benefit from a geographical search facility, say when people wnat to find groups/cliques in their area?

If so please let me know and I would be happy to work with you on this.

Thanks guys. George - feel free to PM me questions/ideas.

Great feedback Steven! Congratulations on the development :-D

How did the Journal summary assist with increasing friend requests? For us, most members have zero friends, and as such won't see anything on the Journal summary. Were you able to remove the friends only filter in AS, and allow the journal summary to display information from the whole community?

... We are in the exact same position as you were 30 days ago, so I hope to be able to share similar findings soon too ;-) Dying for the API documentation for the Journal summary to come out, so we can get our games results, etc there ...

Frank,
I see one of my friends "friend" someone else on the journal summary...f I know the new friend I follow the link and request their friendship as well. I'm looking forward to the new update where we can begin to set journal default preferences so friends can write on each other's journals by default.

This has been a complaint from users - they friend you and want to write something on your profile journal.

Again - this peer to peer networking was completely unexpected. It's now spilling over into groups. A good example is a new group we've created for the 2013 Worlds Cyclocross Championships (they are coming to the US for the first time). I created the group for the promoter. My friends saw that I created it and joined. Then their friends saw that they joined and so then they joined too.

It's like social networking or something.

Posted By swebster on 11 Feb 2010 09:33 AM

It's like social networking or something.

...or something... *chuckle*

Hello Steven,

I would like to take a look at your website. What is the URL? Is it the overlootechnologies.com? I went to that one and it says, "Coming Soon".

@Steven:
Understand the principle of both friends of friends adding each other or friends of friends joining the same groups. What about the scenario where people have zero friends, though. Isn't that the case that you experienced with your site as well?

How did you manage to increase the friend request amount through the site summary without people being friends in the first place :-) ?

Keep sharing,
Frank

Frank,
That was one of the more surprising activities for us. We didn't expect this level of "friending" going on. In fact - if anything - we have deemphasized peer to peer relationships and focuses on group relationships. Part of it might be the nature of our users. Our networks followed real world networks (like Facebook) so our members actually do know each other in real life.

That said - for a brand new user we're still working on ways to "guide" them through the process of getting connected. I haven't implemented the auto friend feature (I don't want that many friends)...instead we encourage them to join a group. I wrote a little intro module that shows up for five days that is designed to welcome them to the site and give them things to do. Ideally I'd like to include a short intro vid and some next steps for them based on their profile completeness...but for now it's just an HTML module.

Hey Steve,

Your Intro Mod you mention - is it the DNNStuff Welcome Mod or home made? I use the DNNSTuff Welcome mod to show tips and welcome messages (maybe for 5-10 times or until the user clicks Hide).

One thing I do on PokerDIY (please sign up to see) - is have a Welcome Wizard with 1-3 steps after sign up. It shows Invite your Friends (From Gmail/Htomail etc), then Roles for Newsletters and your assigned profile pic (I randomly assign them one so it's not blank) etc. etc.

Posted By Smart-Thinker on 12 Feb 2010 11:53 AM

One thing I do on PokerDIY (please sign up to see) - is have a Welcome Wizard with 1-3 steps after sign up. It shows Invite your Friends (From Gmail/Htomail etc), then Roles for Newsletters and your assigned profile pic (I randomly assign them one so it's not blank) etc. etc.

Rod, what are you doing to randomly assign a profile pic? I have been wondering is AS would have this as native functionality anytime soon. I would like to upload several androgynous profile pics and have one randomly assigned if the member doesn't upload one.

Cliff

Rodney - what's funny about this is that I remembered someone wrote a module that showed a welcome message for X days. But I could not remember who it was....so I wrote my own. I'll check this out again (and your site). I'm finding that we really need to guide new users....especially older users as to how this all works.

Posted By Cliff Hammock on 14 Feb 2010 04:02 PM

Posted By Smart-Thinker on 12 Feb 2010 11:53 AM

One thing I do on PokerDIY (please sign up to see) - is have a Welcome Wizard with 1-3 steps after sign up. It shows Invite your Friends (From Gmail/Htomail etc), then Roles for Newsletters and your assigned profile pic (I randomly assign them one so it's not blank) etc. etc.

Rod, what are you doing to randomly assign a profile pic? I have been wondering is AS would have this as native functionality anytime soon. I would like to upload several androgynous profile pics and have one randomly assigned if the member doesn't upload one.

Cliff

Cliff; I use a custom module (I took the ST UserProfile random image pool pic and changed it to support AS) - I won't be release it as it's too much overhead to maintain - I'm hoping this kind of stuff will be in the AS core one day and then I can remove all my triggers and hacks!

Posted By swebster on 14 Feb 2010 04:18 PM
Rodney - what's funny about this is that I remembered someone wrote a module that showed a welcome message for X days. But I could not remember who it was....so I wrote my own. I'll check this out again (and your site). I'm finding that we really need to guide new users....especially older users as to how this all works.

Yeah, the DNNSTuff one is good (Richard always works in my change requests quickly which is nice

One thing - I want to put a Welcome mod at the top of each tab on my profile - if you log on to PokerDIY.com and go to your Dashboard you'll see what I mean. I am in the process of consolidating the Dashboard and Profile and need to try and replicate it as much as possible.

Basically I need to load multiple mods per tab instead of just one per tab - have you figured out a way to do this? Maybe putting them into a Wrapper mod (ZLDNN?) in a page behind and then loading that module using the Module Controller.