Possibly not as huge a demand for an Asia Forum as anticipated.  

Well - we presented the idea to the membership of BeoWorld - all 15,000, with 28 voting.. mainly against.

I'll delete this thread next week.

Lee

well, can't say I didn't try~ :) 

if you don't mind, I'll bug you about this again same time next year!  Hopefully, we can garner more support then.  :)

auclutch wrote:

well, can't say I didn't try~ :) 

 

if you don't mind, I'll bug you about this again same time next year!  Hopefully, we can garner more support then.  :)

I'm tipping that the level of interest won't increase much in 12 months time.. I certainly won't bother voting again!!

Jonathan wrote:

auclutch wrote:

well, can't say I didn't try~ :) 

 

if you don't mind, I'll bug you about this again same time next year!  Hopefully, we can garner more support then.  :)

 

 

I'm tipping that the level of interest won't increase much in 12 months time.. I certainly won't bother voting again!!

maybe you're right that the interest in an Asian regional forum may not increase significantly over the next 12 months but the increase in B&O awareness and interest in general has increased enormously across Asia over the past decade and will likely continue to grow over the next year.  According to a recent article on B&O, B&O sales in major markets in Europe and America are down significantly while Southeast Asian sales are growing at a fast pace.  This coupled with the fact that the new CEO has stated that he will place efforts on growing markets in Asia means inevitably there will be more users (or at least stores) (and potential forum participants) across the region.  Also, local B&O forums are sprouting everywhere and I am aware of websites catering to users in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan many of which frequent beoworld... and I'm sure there are more.  If Beoworld wants to maintain its status as the premier site (which it has done well at so far) it should consider catering to the larger growing audiences and figure out how to attract and maintain this broader base of users.  Forums that cater towards high-end product users such as one of my favorite sites www.ferrarichat.com (as well as numerous luxury watch, clothing, and automobile forums) have already made this move and have Asian or even sub-Asian forums where users can discuss Asian specific topics.  Just some food for thought and hope you don't consider it preaching.  

I agree with your general thrust - I am just not sure that a dedicated Asia Forum is the correct route. I would suggest that the General Forum will have a lot more Asian traffic and that the centre of gravity of the whole site may well move East. However I see this as a gradual change and I am personally against another forum as I think that the likely small traffic volume may well stifle growth rather than encourage it. I would suggest that possibly amalgamating a successful Asian B&O site under the Beoworld umbrella might be a solution in the medium term.

auclutch wrote:

If Beoworld wants to maintain its status as the premier site (which it has done well at so far) it should consider catering to the larger growing audiences and figure out how to attract and maintain this broader base of users.  Forums that cater towards high-end product users such as one of my favorite sites www.ferrarichat.com (as well as numerous luxury watch, clothing, and automobile forums) have already made this move and have Asian or even sub-Asian forums where users can discuss Asian specific topics.

Fair point of view, but along the lines of my previous post, I have to ask what's keeping these folks from posting now? In my experience, new directions of discussion never appear simply by allocating a slot for them. They need to pre-exist in some form.

We've had a few Japan specific topics, some people have needed help with Far Eastern electrics and environmental conditions (not unlike anywhere else in the tropic), and quite a few topics specific to Australia, which is just another locale in most cases. All of these have managed in the subforums we have now as far as I can see.

In my view the only real motivation for a separate subforum at this point would be to have it in some other language than English... but again, which one? And I'm not sure if it's even technically possible, given that all prospective languages have some specific character set requirements.

I've been travelling around quiet a bit in far east, alone in China they have 3 main langauges and all written in, for most of us, not understandable characters, ad to this Thai, Corean, Vietnamese, and more, the main feature of this forum is English and most of the experts and amateurs like me, seek and give answers in that langauge, I cant imagine that there is a whole lot of us able to read and answer in Canton Chineese, and as I know the Chineese, they wont take a good advise without checking with one of their own "experts".

So IMO a Asian forum is not going to be actual before 2030 if ever.