Kari of Go Wholesale asks:

How do you get people to talk? Our trouble seems to be that despite our
open-ended posts to try and get discussions going, no one is participating. We
have member registrations galore, but no one wants to talk. Should we ask them
for feedback re: what they want to see?

Here is what we have seen things that work. Please try these and feel free to let us know what worked for you.

1. Make the connection first BEFORE you ask for participation. There are NO shortcuts unfortunately. For e.g. if you walked into a party and asked some open ended questions of people would you get responses? Probably not. What you have to do is to first INTRODUCE yourself, then find some easy lay up questions to get them comfortable. Dont hesitate to make an offline (email, phone) connection with your community also. This helps a lot to get them comfortable.

2. Target the frequenters first and make hero / examples of them to participate. For e.g. Once you make the connection, then post a question one of them asked to them, and their 2-3 peers. Once people start to see that a question from one of “them” is being asked by “one of them” versus the community manager, things get easier and more comfortable.

3. Ask the easy questions first then go to the questions that might get a lot of debate. Every person in the community likes the question – “Here’s what we are thinking, what would you advice?” OR “Here are 3 options to increase our pricing that we are considering, which do you think causes the least interruption?” Just open questions help when you made most of the participants comfortable enough that they consider it their community.

4. Offer examples that pertain to their lives instead of just trying to get information from them. E.g. If all your questions are about things your company or sponsor of the community wants to hear from the community, that quickly dilutes the dicussion. Most participants have a lot other things going on in their lives / work than just the community. Find out how to help them with  other issues related to that and you will get more participation.

5. Think really like the user. Make it their discussions, their forums, their community. I went to your site Kari and its catalog driven discussions based on “your” thinking of the type and category of questions that you think are important. But users firedog2ks  and arbutus are asking questions not related to your categories in the forum.
Setup the categories for your threads minimally first and then revisit frequently.