"If they are not qualified, all the marketing, branding, social, or anything else gets
no where. You can offer the world if you have an extra one, but are you letting all the new people know what to do to be in the running?
You are so focused on the marketing side of it that you are not even looking at the helping side. Tell me, what one thing has anyone done this week to help a new member with uploading a picture, join a forum, create their own forum, or anything related that was not an advertisement, that would get them eligible for the voting platform?"
If I might say something to this Mark?
I am totally agreeing with you in that all the marketing in the world will not help a new member unless it is shown to them in simple and easy language all the steps the need to be taken to get the full benefit of belonging to this community.
So what to do and how to do it becomes the logical question.
To me it starts with the process of when a person joins the community, with the welcome letter from the admin, where it can and should be stated the steps needed to help complete their profile and recommend the forums to go to so that they can learn about the community.
When they log on, they should be given prompts with some kind of a % percentage of what needs to be done ( example images, about me etc.) 20%-50% 70% and so on....
The simple fact is that you can only do so much to help any new member and while I agree with the intent to help, it must be up to the person also.
Like anywhere else you go on the net, you will either like what you see ( window shopping) and come in and maybe the person will come back the second time, to me the real trick is getting that new member to come back the third time and want to stay or at the very least make Adland one of their top places of choice... it really is a hard call and it is even more difficult to gauge how a person will react.
I feel we can all debate semantics and even go in circles, but to me I think it is going to take your talents Mark, Jim/Dennis talents and everyone else's talents to make Adland a place for people to want to come back that third time.
While some people may disagree, Adland has been behind on many things when it comes to being a force on the net, but that is changing and all you have to do is look around and see the changes that are happening. It is all going to take time...in the meantime, while the programmers do their magic and while people continue with their daily lives, it is going to take all of us to keep coming up with ideas and working together to make things work in the best possible way.
Everything has its place and everything is a process...