We're looking to add a forum/online community area to our website. Previous attempts of encouraging comments and interaction have failed and the community tends to die a death eventually.
So, I've sat back and had a think of how to encourage people to comment and interact within our forum/community (heavily influenced by the stack style!):
1. Ease of signing up: People are lazy in adding new accounts etc so just like stackoverflow, I would use the "sign in with facebook, linkedin, twitter" etc etc.
2. Encouraging people to comment/interact: A points/score system that would reward users for commenting/interacting with the community (a more basic version of stack). An addition would be if a user reaches certain milestones they would receive a % discount on services.
3. New content from us: As well as users commenting, I think a strong presence from us in posting new content/threads/comments would be needed.
Has anyone got any suggestions to add to the list above to encourage interaction within the community?