Hi Sara,

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I'll make this short & sweet ...

SOUNDS GOOD TO ME!

I like the idea Bogdan. If the commuity was social ideas, information, fun. If it for business ads etc, well that is like Adland is it not?

Pat

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Hi Roger, Sara, Luis and friends,


I had this flash of ideas today which I want to share with you.

What do you think of a community in which members own it?

Through working towards development of new features and support of existing functions they earn ability of using the system for their own sake.

Things like seniority, amount of time spent towards community earns them access to the developed functions.

Let me know what you think.

Bogdan

I saw your post on Facebook, Sara, and decided to come back to add to the conversation.. mostly because I still feel a strong bond of friendship with many former and continuing members of Adlandpro.

I've been around the block long enough to know what issues Adlandpro is most likely facing. Declining active memberships, declining community involvement, probably declining site revenues.

These are really the problems you're seeking to solve aren't they Bogdan? Memberships, earnings, community involvement and how to foster more activity. You're hoping that by answering some "WIIFM" for members you can increase involvement.

That's going to require a lot of changes to work, but in a major way.. I'd have to say that relevance is badly needed.

Adlandpro lost relevance with many of it's original members because of the irrelevant purposes people used the site for (blasting ads at each other).

There were some who tried to maintain some community relevance by promoting the POTW and other similar "non-commercial" pursuits, but overall.. I think the majority of people have voted with their feet, and moved on to more relevant pursuits.

I'm certain that Adlandpro has seen blasted ads from every marketing scheme known to man (a thousand times over), and this is the main reason Adlandpro has lost relevance with anyone who became serious about creating a business online.

It also lost relevance with people who just wanted to dabble a bit.. earn maybe a bit.. and have fun and community online. Who can have fun with anyone just blasting stupid matrix ads all over the place? Do these people even know how to have a conversation online?

So what is relevant?
Social Media in all it's forms. Social sites, blogs, video sites etc..

That isn't to say that Adlandpro can't be seen as Social, but things that go on here simply aren't accepted on other communities.

Most web users have become banner blind, are deluged by text ads, Google ads.. people are very wary of any kind of advertising.

Coupons, special advertising in context of what people are doing, and the like.. are mostly out of the reach of your typical affiliate marketer promoting Internet Marketing systems. From Prepaid Legal, to Herbalife, and the many Traffic Exchanges, or any other of these MLM, Matrix, Powerlevel, Split infinity payment systems.. etc.. ad nauseum...

This is what Adlandpro became and what many people have simply walked away from, and it's unlikely that once voting with their feet.. will anyone ever return for much more than to say hello to some die-hard friends unless it's very clear that things have totally changed here.

There was a comment that maybe you could try to make Adland into a kind of "Facebook" and to that I would say.. it'll never happen. Creating a new and more relevant community would be extremely difficult but far easier and stand a better chance of some success than ever trying to develop another "facebook".
I don't even know if you can "create" something like Facebook by design. The very nature of fads is that the decision is in the hands of the "internet community" at large. Believe me.. there are wannabe's popping up daily!

Having said that.. there are many many thousands (probably millions) of internet marketers, bloggers and the like.. all working online.. striving to make money from home.
In a way.. Adlandpro became a place where people could "cut their teeth" in Internet Marketing. A place to make mistakes that were easily forgiven, and a place where they could watch and learn from others. Maybe it can recapture some relevance for this group of people...

I don't have any suggestions as to what might be successful in turning Adland around (if I did.. I might decide to build my own..lol) but for all of you I do wish continued success, good health, and happiness.. in all your pursuits.

Like quite a few of you, I also started out with Adland and in the beginning, this was very active community that had a more "social" aspect to it and as @mistrtim stated this was a place to "cut your teeth" in the field of Internet marketing.

I am unsure if for me the issue was I outgrew the marketing racket, that I grew more and more fed up with the" spammy" messages, the "new" features which seemed to encourage people to not talk but to "broadcast" the same BS messages.

The fact is this is a marketing forum and people come here in the hopes of selling something and they will buy the advertising packages and they will continue to do as they always have and there is little that can be done to change this.

Creating a Ning style platform as one person has suggested is a waste of time as many of those owners are facing the same style of issues of spam, spammers and bots, with little to no active engaging of conversations.

I am going to correct that last statement... most people are under the impression that glitter graphics, platitudes and no meaningful dialogue is the way to conduct themselves on this kind of venue and that is just plain sad!


Bogdan? I have loads of respect for you, in many ways I consider you one of the grandfathers of social media and marketing as a matter of fact, but somewhere, somehow things have gone wrong or maybe I should say that times have changed and forums are not what they used to be.

The giants of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have taken over and the world of social media are now the rulers of the day.

Now that I have managed to get people probably up in arms in what I am saying, let look at a couple of solutions..

1. Creating an application which uses mobile as a way to communicate is valid. For example "Announce your event, party, or celebration to people on the internet, or just your friends?
Got an important meeting, reunion, party or other event coming up? Register it on AdlandPro Community and get it promoted to everyone, or just your friends if you prefer.

2. Creating a timeline for people to be able to keep up with topics that are being talked about is a way to provide a valid interest ( like a twitter feed, which by the way Facebook is going to be implementing)

3 Creating a way for people to curate content that will be of interest to others, would be useful to get people to talk to others.

4 In some ways you have created so many features that I wonder if it is not causing confusion and more important are they even being used to their optimum ability?

I am sure there are many other solutions.

One last point, I note that the group on Facebook is more active than on this site...could it be that on Facebook the format is easier for people to follow?

Have I helped, not sure, but this is how I feel.