Plan de bataille

Arriver à avoir dans le future environs 600 utilisateurs pro. Au moment nous n'avons environs 50. Mais, est-ce que c'est réaliste?

Ajouté.

i am not a marketing person. not at all. however, i watch developments on the internet and make my own conclusions. here my thoughts.

generally, hikr is a web 2.0 application. user generated content as the driving force. there are hundreds of webpages with this general approach. a few of them have become famous (and potentially rich), but i think most of these sites do not generate a lot of money.

what are famous web2.0 applications? i name just a few: facebook, myspace and all their clones, flickr, youtube, etc.

they all have some things in common: no restriction on a topic, possibilities to communicate, a large community and being international.

the main "disadvantage" of hikr is the restriction on the topic. one has to love mountains and stuff to lose oneself here. this makes it harder to reach a lot of people. (on flickr, youtube, facebook, everyone can post whatever he likes)
this cannot be changed, as hikr just is a specialised community.

the point with a large community and "being international" is probably the same. as developer of a web 2.0 application, you have the control over almost everything but not over the users. as an example:
meinbild.ch provides some webspace to put pictures online, to communicate with other users, etc. nothing special. the only remarkable thing is that this webpage was "conquered" by 16-years-old teenies. it could have been different, like a place for older people, but the developpers had no influence there. once a community starts to build, it can hardly be stopped or changed.
what is the point here with hikr?

well, hikr started as randonneur.ch. when i found this webpage some years ago, it seemed to me as being a french webpage for mountaineers. i think that the first users were all from the french part de la suisse.
then came the first power-user with cyrill. he has put hundreds of reports online - most of them being in switzerland and all of them written in german. this is not to blame, not at all. however, this made the site more interesting for german users. as a result, nowadays there are several power users on hikr - all of them (expect 360) write in german. fortunately, there are also some few users from austria and germany. this hopefully could break the dominance of swiss-content here (but still is a restriction on the german speaking part).

here is the main question. shall hikr be restricted to a mainly german speaking part of europe or shall hikr go international? at the moment, if i were a french/italian/spanish/english speaking person, i probably would not find this site and if i did, i would not open an account as it seems to be a german speaking site (with main focus on swiss alps). eventually, the dominance of german should not be obvious to foreign language users.
unfortunately, you cannot force the community to go international. all you eventually would need is a new power-user from somewhere completely different. someone, who posts hundreds of reports including all his waypoints, etc. this *could* make the community grow in an international sense. (perhaps there will be more users of iceland on hikr when delta has marked every waypoint over there ;) )
this would mean more users and hits. some sponsors would appreciate this by advertising on the site. however, i could imagine some "local sponsors" as e.g. bächli sport which have just few interest in an international target group. oh man. its not easy ;)

if hikr shall be a site mainly for "german speaking middle european alpinists", then the potential of a real large community is much smaller. i dont know what the largest site on this topic is. gipfelbuch.ch? they have a lot of entries there although hikr provides much more cool features (and more space for pictures).
perhaps, most of their users do not know anything about the existence of hikr.org. however, this would be strange, as hikr has an excellent position on google when looking for mountains. i dont remember having seen a gipfelbuch-entry on top of google.

well... the whole thing is kind of a lucky game. either you get real big or you dont. in my opinion, there is nearly nothing you can do to influence this. communities grow because users tell their friends to become new users...
of course, some publicity, perhaps an ad in "the alpen" or just a link to this site on every sac/cas-section-page could generate some impact. but all this does not makes the site explode in an international direction as it is very local advertising.
even putting some links on wikipedia does not help a lot for an exponential growth of users, as most of the summits on hikr are in german middle europe and the wikipedia-entries also. these links just give a better pagerank.

i am sorry i cant help you. i know hikr.org since randonneurs.ch and i love this site. i watch the development with great interest and i really wish you two a break through with this site. you have a good "starting point" with the community here but noone can tell in which direction the community will develop.

i promise, if i ever moved to new zealand for living, i surely would climb every mountain there and post a report here to make the community grow. in the meanwhile, i just try to find a job there and convince my girlfriend to move over ;)

Hi phono, thanks for your comment! We both are fans of some web2.0 websites, especially reddit and dogster (and I also read some lj blogs in Russian, but don't write).

You absolutely right about this international expansion. We actually tought about this for a moment, and it would be interesting to try. There are actually some problems. For example it is clear that we should somehow split the website in sub-sites, or even create a separate website. It seems reasonable that those "sub-hikrs" should be region and language based. It is not exactly clear how to do it right. As you wrote, is it not clear how to get the community, and especially how to get the right "spirit" (I mean, we wouldn't like to work for a project if we don't like users and content)

I don't know if this will work, for example language sub-reddits don't work, even if 50% of their traffic is from outside US. But also, hikr.org is somehow unique, it is not an all-purpose web2.0 website, so probably, if we can split it the right way and then find some initial contributors it may work.

i agree completely. a splitting of the site is the crucial point.

if i remember well, you had once some kind of a splitting. when i was choosing another language like french, then on top of the list were some french reports. the problem was probably that the site seemed to be somehow "out of date" as there were just few reports in french (or another language).

a simple splitting-idea would be an approach like wikipedia. there is one unique site "hikr.org" (with all reports) with subdomains like de.hikr.org, en.hikr.org. etc. like this, the user can choose his own subhikr. the reports have to be sorted somehow by assigning them their subdomain.
this *could* generate some new communities in other languages/countries. all you need is one or more poweruser which put online hundreds of reports and waypoints ;)

another crucial point is the difficulty-scale. every country has its own definitions. i think this point was also already discussed much earlier. it surely would be great for e.g. spanish users to have *their* scale and not the swiss one. if only the conversion between all these scales was easy... that is another hard task.

Actually, "national community" is still here, but in order to not to look too outdated we set it to max one week old, then it disappears. However our french-language users like Bertrand don't use it.

I think just language will be not sufficient and probably even not necessary (for example in Switzerland people usually understand many languages). This is the difference between hikr and sites like wikipedia. Hikr is more a community website for people who come from and/or to same places, at least it seems that it works better like that. For example, we even don't have so much users from Wallis or from Graubünden, but so much from Zentral Schweiz! I'm afraid if we just put it in English it will probably be hijacked by some local community, like hikers from Montana :))

We think it should be something like upcoming with their notion of "metros". Problem is how to define those things? Upcoming is for events, and they suppose that you are interested in events in your area: that makes sense for events. But how to define it for hikr?? No idea yet. Probably use the regions and then let the user to choose a list of regions which the user want to watch?...

Hi phono,

Thank you very much for your accurate analysis.

I want to add a small observation, in addition to the more complete answer from Stani, about this sentence:

>if i were a french/italian/spanish/english speaking person, i probably would not find this site and if i did, i would not open an account as it seems to be a german speaking site (with main focus on swiss alps).

In fact, we even have some people who don't mind to be a minority and write their reports in other languages than German. For example, ale84 and Gianluca write in Italian, Galdo in Spanish, Bertrand, gurgeh et al. in French. Maybe we should find a way to put their reports in evidence for people, who speak the same language.

yes, i have noticed that with joy. this could be the seed for new subcommunities. now just a few more and the site will explode :)

I don't really know where to append my comment so
I made a new one.

I completely agree with phono's analysis.
I think hikr.org has the potential to grow internationally, but it will probably need some more time in particular for other countries than Switzerland.

If I read the comments above I think that it might make sense to introduce a language property for hike reports. Then you could implement an option so users could choose to only see reports written in a specific language.

Re sub-sites for different countries: If a user adds a waypoint and/or region to a report, you know in which country (countries) the hike took place. Therefore, you could implement an option for the user to only see reports from a specific country and you wouldn't necessarily need to split anything up into sub-sites. I actually would not like it if you split up the site, because then my reports from different countries would be on different site.

360