It gives me great pleasure to announce that AGORACOM has launched “Investor Controlled Discussion Forums” for small-cap and micro-cap investors. What does this mean exactly? It means we are smashing the discussion forum status quo we’ve all come to hate over the past 10 years thanks to unrelenting spam, profanity, stock bashing, stock hyping and all the rest of the noise.
How are we doing this? Sit down for this one because it is a game changer. We are handing control over to the people who know and love this space better than anyone – the investors. Huh? Are we now allowing the inmates to run the asylum?
Nope. We’ve been live since Friday night and here are the raving testimonials we’ve been able to pull from the site so far.
How does it work?
We’re first handing control over to those investors that have proven themselves to be de facto forum leaders on other stock discussion forums around the web. Investors that others look up to for well-balanced analysis and information about a particular stock – and there are hundreds of them.
Unfortunately, they are forced to try and operate within stock forums that are nothing more than war zones – without any cover of any kind. As a result, demented spammers and stock bashers are able to easily drown them out by posting hundreds of messages under multiple aliases…how does a civilized investor combat this? Moreover, advertising dependent websites do little to stop them because they are more interested in flipping page views than providing an environment for civilized, earnest and intelligent discourse.
We’ll we all had enough of that, so AGORACOM decided to become a provider of 2nd Generation Stock Forums in which quality reigns over quantity. If “build it and they will come” ever applied, this is it. Sorry Kevin Costner.
STEP 1: We recruit Forum Leaders to AGORACOM and designate them as HUB Leaders because our community is so much more than a simple stock discussion forum.
STEP 2: Forum Leaders announce they are leaving their decrepit discussion forum for AGORACOM and invite serious investors to follow them, which they do.
STEP 3: HUB Leaders are given complete administrative control over their HUB to do three critical things:
- Delete offending posts (According to our 6 Rules of Use)
- Terminate offending members
- Edit Company Information (Profile, Management, Shares Outstanding, Transfer Agent, etc.)
STEP 4: Participate in the kind of discussion and information exchange investors have always dreamed of. Here are just a couple examples of rocking Investor Controlled HUBS on AGORACOM:
VMS Ventures
Plexmar
The great part is that other members of the community can elevate themselves to HUB Leader status through a combination of activity points and ratings from other members. We have 4 different levels of authority that provide members with differing privileges: President; Vice-President; Treasurer and Mailroom
This is Wiki meets UGC (user generated content) at its finest. Is it working? Here is a list of 90 HUBS (Yes, 90 HUBS) that have been requested and now up and running in the first 5 days. Scroll down to the bottom as companies with full logos and descriptions represent AGORACOM clients. Not everyone has become active yet but there are at least 30 that are either cranking or starting to gain momentum.
I believe we are about to witness a paradigm shift in the world of stock discussion forums. Stay tuned for more.
Regards,
George
