One of the first projects I ever built for myself was a wiki website for the Motorola RAZR v3m cellphone. This particular version of the phone was sold by Verizon, and had been locked down at the firmware level to prevent the addition of third party applications that could run on other, unlocked version of the RAZR.
There were many customers who were unhappy about these restrictions, and lots of talk on various forums about how much it sucked that Verizon locked down the phone. There were also other forums where people shared their knowledge on how to unlock the phone using various software applications and a < $10 cable you could buy online.
However, most of the talk about this subject was spread across a variety of forums, and not well organized. There were golden nuggets of info spread amongst posts about how various techniques didn't work or how the user couldn't figure out how to complete the process. The bottom line was that it would typically take a new user hours just to compile the information they needed to successfully unlock their phones.
So I decided to build a wiki website to aggregate all this data. I put up an instance of my favorite wiki variety, and added a couple placeholder pages. I then added one page that described all the steps in detail to unlock the phone, from my own experience. This wiki page could then be changed to incorporate other people's experiences and tips.
I went to all of the forums where I had learned this info in the first place, and pasted links to my wiki, saying that we should collaborate and create an easy to follow set of instructions all in one place. The community thought this was a good idea, and effectively built the site for me.
Within 3 months, the site had gone from being nothing, to having 4000+ registered users and sometimes getting 50k+ hits per day. I ended up having to move the site from Bluehost to a VPS because my BH account kept getting turned off due to excessive traffic and CPU load.
The reason I tell this story is that I think it's really valuable to target a community that has a specific pain point, and then go where that community hangs out on the Internet. While social networks will work, it may be even better to go to a place where you can dialog a bit more with users (i.e. a niche forum), and tell them why your solution is better than what they are using now. Of course, it actually has to be better than what they are using now. But if it is, you should be rewarded with adoption. This method also happens to be free in most cases.
There were many customers who were unhappy about these restrictions, and lots of talk on various forums about how much it sucked that Verizon locked down the phone. There were also other forums where people shared their knowledge on how to unlock the phone using various software applications and a < $10 cable you could buy online.
However, most of the talk about this subject was spread across a variety of forums, and not well organized. There were golden nuggets of info spread amongst posts about how various techniques didn't work or how the user couldn't figure out how to complete the process. The bottom line was that it would typically take a new user hours just to compile the information they needed to successfully unlock their phones.
So I decided to build a wiki website to aggregate all this data. I put up an instance of my favorite wiki variety, and added a couple placeholder pages. I then added one page that described all the steps in detail to unlock the phone, from my own experience. This wiki page could then be changed to incorporate other people's experiences and tips.
I went to all of the forums where I had learned this info in the first place, and pasted links to my wiki, saying that we should collaborate and create an easy to follow set of instructions all in one place. The community thought this was a good idea, and effectively built the site for me.
Within 3 months, the site had gone from being nothing, to having 4000+ registered users and sometimes getting 50k+ hits per day. I ended up having to move the site from Bluehost to a VPS because my BH account kept getting turned off due to excessive traffic and CPU load.
The reason I tell this story is that I think it's really valuable to target a community that has a specific pain point, and then go where that community hangs out on the Internet. While social networks will work, it may be even better to go to a place where you can dialog a bit more with users (i.e. a niche forum), and tell them why your solution is better than what they are using now. Of course, it actually has to be better than what they are using now. But if it is, you should be rewarded with adoption. This method also happens to be free in most cases.