Forum Contest Winners

Announcing winners of our first Forum Contest
We decided on the spur of the moment the other day to launch a contest in our forum. We wanted to see who could create the best conversations. Read details here.

First of all, let me say thank you to everyone who posted forum threads and participated in these great discussions. My hope in running this contest is that we would see some great conversations emerge and some new folks joining the fray. Mission accomplished.

Now...to pick a winner was nearly impossible. There were several excellent discussions. I think we can learn a lot by looking at these threads. So before I list prize winners, I thought I'd take a second to note the characteristics of the most popular threads:

1. Strong question - the top forum threads used the "discussion title" to offer a clear an provocative quesiton to the community. Your question becomes a headline for your thread...don't bury it inside your post...as Smoosiers scan the forum, they're looking for headlines that catch their eyes. Many of the threads might have generated more replies had they written a stronger headline / question.

2. Brief but useful description - all of the top thread posters offered information in the body of their posts. It's one thing to post a question, and another to also provide a bit of context to help the reader understand what you're asking and how they might reply. It also helps to go ahead and answer the question yourself - even though you asked it - to get the conversation started.

3. Key contributors - All of the top posts benefited from contirubtions make by the community. One person posted a research article which served to shed line on the dialogue. Another thread saw a contributor add a link to an online quiz. This pretty much became the focus of the dialogue from that point on. Both Chris and Dick did a great job here.

4. Participation by moderator / originator - In most cases where a thread takes off you'll see the original poster staying involved in the dialogue. The poster can endorse the key contributors...and we saw this...where the poster praised a contributor, and others went along and took the discussion down a new path as a result. The posters also did a good job praising folks who exhibited mature behavior...acknowledging when they were mistaken, etc.

5. Creativity - One of the hardest things to do is to anticipate what people want to talk about. So don't be afraid to post a thread on any topic you really want to talk about. And you can do it in creative ways...Nicki's thread did a great job of this.

6. Post on other people's threads - Even when you want people to post on your thread, you should also take the time to read and join in other people's discussions. The more visibible you are in the community, the more folks learn your personality, and the more likely they'll be attracted to participating in your threads.

7. Link to outside resources - If there is an article, or a video or a photo or a blog that will help readers get into the mindset and encourage them to reply, the you should offer that link. Sometimes people don't post because they feel under informed and don't want to look silly. So offer 3rd party perspective and give readers a chance to come up to speed.

8. It's not about you - While all of the threads focus on topics of interest to the posters, the best ones focus on topics that have broad interest. Hence the popularity of political threads. But just becaues two political posts won this competition doesn't mean that's all we want talk about on SI. One of the most popluar blog posts ever was Kyle Lacy's definition of the word blog.

And the winners are:

First place: This was literally a toss up. I won't bore you with the various ways we evaluated...so I'll just skip to the bottom line...we decided the only way to be fair in this would be to make it a three-way tie first. The original first place prize was $100. With three winners, we decided to sweeten the pot a little bit. Nicki Laycoax , Chris Flenner and Dick Troll will each receive $50 and a Smaller Indiana T-Shirt.

Rounding out the top 5: Marla Murasko and Doug Vann will each receive SI T shirts for their winning efforts.

I've made these 5 posts the featured posts on the home page today.

So, should we do more contests like this?
We thought this was pretty fun, and we were glad to see so many folks get involved. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this contest, and ideas for other ways to improve the quality of life and fun on SI.