Using "hype" to establish a community

I thought up this idea quite some time ago when the Cloverfield Movie Forum was growing quite rapidly when this movie still had a lot of "hype". As you can see, the forum is very large - all from one movie that can't possibly still provide a good discussion.

In my opinion the owner should turn his forum into a general chat or general movie forum and invite the many thousand members he had to come back. This means he would have used the hype behind the movie to build a large community and then converted it to the forum topic he really wanted after he "used" the movie. This can be done with just about anything that has a lot of hype, assuming you are one of the first to do it.


It's something I've thought about trying with maybe a new video game title at least a year in advance to insure I am the only first and only forum for this game, or maybe a movie that has come out of nowhere so there obviously can't be any prior forums. What do you all think?

 

That might be an really good idea if you can wait so long to create the community you really want

 

I think this is a unique approach and most likely to be successful. If one is interested in creating a General Chat or Off-Topic forum, they should wait until a movie or game, for example, is released in order for them to launch with that - and be the place to chat about the anticipation, then release, then play of the game - and everything in-between.

As you said, after the hype for that game/movie dies down, it can be converted to a general chat forum. If members established friendships and a strong sense of a community in the site's first phase, they will be sure to stick around for the second phase.

 

Something like this happened with Firefly, a short-lived sci-fi TV show. The network-sponsored boards were shut down after the show was canceled, but by then the community and fanbase was cohesive enough to move to a new forum together.