DeLurking Cadillac Fans

I popped over to the post office to mail off a free CaddyInfo.com Hat and a few site postcards & magnet to one of our new CaddyInfo Forum Community Members, CarlaValentine.

CarlaValentine

Carla was the first recipient of our new CaddyInfo New Member Who’s Doing it Right Award.

On Forums the majority of our audience — Cadillac fans who came to the site to read about Cadillac Automobiles — never register or log in to the site.  They ‘Lurk’ as Guests, read the site, but don’t comment or post.  This is not unique at the CaddyInfo Community.  At most forums in the membership listing you can observe 70-80% guests and 20% registered users online.

Guests are always welcome at CaddyInfo of course, but the strength of our Cadillac Community is the shared knowledge and experience of all of our participants.  So the more people who come into the light of Registered Member and out of the darkness of Lurking, the better our conversation is.

One of the points to having the “New Member Who’s Doing it Right” Award is to recognize Carla’s participation.

Caddyinfo.com New Member Who’s Doing It Right is a new concept intended to recognize relatively new arrivals to our CaddyInfo Cadillac Community who are fitting right in, participating, posting new threads or ongoing posts to topics. Carla also filled in her profile correctly, with Avatar image, car details, personal photo, and personal info that help members understand her questions or comments in context.

The award also helps to communicate to new Readers (or experienced Lurkers) that Caddyinfo is a new-participant friendly environment.    Pretty much the only things to avoid are open, hostile attitude toward Cadillac Automobiles (them’s fightin’ words), and advertising without a relationship with the Caddyinfo Forum (PM me on the Forum about advertising).  Otherwise I find that our Membership is very tolerant of almost any style of discussion about Cadillac automobiles.

My Lovely Wife suggested that we have a De-Lurker Award — as a way to recognize people who have Registered and begun to participate.  That might be slightly different from our Doing it Right award.   Do you have any other suggestions on how to encourage Cadillac owners to participate at CaddyInfo?

Online Success Hints over Dinner

I had a nice dinner at Mimi’s Cafe in McKinney with Sweetie Berry of She’s So There and her traveling crew last night.  Sweetie was in town as part of the Thelma Wells Ready to Win Conference in Grapevine, Texas.  Luckily, she is also my younger (as she points out frequently!) sister, so she was kind enough to slow down for dinner on the way out of town.

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L to R: Les, Bruce, Sweetie, Madison, Merrill, Robert

I’m afraid we bored everyone with website/networking talk, but I wanted to hear about the exciting things she has been up to in marketing and branding, and to get her input on some things I have been considering here at CaddyInfo to try to reach more Cadillac owners.  She had some plain talk about things I already knew but had not gotten around to fixing (so I went home and got started on those!).  But some of the things that she is consulting/coaching/enabling right now — marketing, branding, image, product development — are things that I need  to learn to do better to help Caddyinfo.com develop more ‘reach’.

I am ALL about talking to people who know how to do stuff you need to know how to do.  Especially if you know them lol.

Sweetie also some suggestions about how to organize and energize regional get-togethers for our CaddyInfo Readers.  I hope to put some more thought in on that and try to do more in this area.

One of my resolutions this year was to get our forum ‘up to speed’ — we had simply outgrown the hardware we were on (yay).  So the new hardware setup is a leap more expensive, but it was well past time for us to upgrade in order to match the 125+ simultaneous Cadillac lovers we are running lately on the forum.

I should also mention that my brother Robert also joined us for dinner.  Robert is an accomplished blogger.   He is a great model of how to maintain a consistent ‘voice’ across multiple media & platforms.  He is also doing some interesting things at ccmixter.

Mimi’s Cafe was good as always, and the service was excellent.

Re: Auto Alphabet Soup: What’s in a Car Name? – WSJ.com

From the Wallstreet Journal “Opinion Journal”:

A long time ago, almost all cars had evocative names—the Cadillac Eldorado, the Pontiac Bonneville. In that automotive galaxy far away, there was even the Ford Galaxie

via Auto Alphabet Soup: What’s in a Car Name? – WSJ.com.

1915 Cadillac Type 51

Of course, our CaddyInfo readers recall this article and that Letter or Numeric names are actually old-school for Cadillac.  The stylized names did not pop up until after WW II.