Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I think a chat room would be a great idea and see the immediate usefulness, but I can see some disadvantages also.

First of all I think initially it`s a great idea but being the perpetual analyzer that I am here are some down sides that I see.  Let me know if you guys agree.

1. I feel that chat rooms usually turn into banal chit chat.  I think this factor could make the forums become less effective because of exchanging useful information and advice people will start coming to socialize.

2. This would eat away at our own personal effectiveness in our personal entrepreneurial  endeavors.

3. There are other chat services available that could already provide the service.  What would be the cost of hosting and mainting a service like this versus starting a community for SUN members on a free chat service?

If anyone has any counter or supporting points chime in because I think this idea has potential but needs to be evaluated.

Le Tutor,

I think you are right about the disadvantages, but still. Because even socialized chat rooms have rules to follow, and the most organized chat rooms hold on tight to those rules. In the event that someone broke them, they get warned, suspended, or even excluded from the community if they just can`t respect and follow the rules and regulations.

 However, I can also understand that an excluded person may show up again in the community under a different identity. And if this happens, the author will have to follow the regulations at the next attempt. Else he/she is going keep getting excluded till he/she realize that the SUN community is not the right one for him/her.

On the other hand the SUN community will have a better interaction for its members by introducing a head to head communication tools like chat or/and video conference.

 I agree that such improvement will cost more for the SUN`s owners. But, in return that will help them better acheive their goals, which if I`m not mistaken is to help and improve the startup community, as well as well as to improve early entrepreneurs` experience.

Djabarou,

Good point, but my focus was not so much on inappropriate content of the chats but the general nature of chat rooms to become more social than a utility to increase effectiveness. 

An alternative could be instead of having an open community chat room where people could come and "hang out" you could have private / invite only chat sessions available so that if someone wanted to discuss something in more detail with one or more people they could enable the feature to immediately discuss a topic in more detail.

This would avoid the potentional for loungers who all they do is hang out in the chat rooms and provide the a resource to increase the effectiveness of the community members.

What do you think?

I think that if questions and answers are posted in chat, then the rest of the community will not learn from those questions and answers because they are posted very temporarily. When they are in a forum however, they stay there and we can benefit from them even months down the road when we do a search on a subject.

Good point and I agree that the information is important to archive for future use, but some information I`m sure is left out anyway due to the difficulty of writing back in forth and time constraints.  If chat was real time those involved could get more detailed info that may have been otherwised left out.

Again, I agree that it important to keep the info for future use but maybe there is a way to choose to archive a particular conversation / chat  in the community forum if the participants feel that it would be useful to the entire community.

Hi,

I know this topic is kind of old, but I`m new here and reading all posts related to my business which is providing chat solutions. You can have a look at out site at www.geesee.com and let me know what you think. I`d love to hear a feedback from you guys.

To the topic. I think you all were right in various aspecs of chatting. It definitelly has advantages as well as disadvantages. It also has positive and negative impact on effectivness. The only thing that plays a role is the person that is using the chat. It`s possible to have functional forum along with the chat and use chat only for clarifying details in a short time. Maybe post a final note back to the forum. You can save history of the chat and paste it into the forum so all others see the solution. But you can also end up with many pervers boneheads in chat. :) Chat also sometimes uncover the true personality of people :) And last but not least, it`s also good to hang out and relax talking to strangers from time to time.

So what`s the final. Should you have a chat or not?