Evening all! sorry I missed my Sunday afternoon slot yesterday but I didn't make it to the library. Working from home was the more appealing, but not quite as productive, option that won!
Anyway. So I'm working on my interactive assignment and proposing for an online community to be facilitated at http://www.mothercare.com/ for everything pregnancy and baby related, as I have seen how successful other communities like this are online. However there is only one identifiable direct competitor http://www.babyworld.co.uk/, which offers visitors both an online shop, and forum facility. All other pregnancy forums identified did not have a shopping facility.

And as Mike rightly pointed out today, why would consumers use my empty forum, when they could just Google "pregnancy forum", and find a better one. I still think the idea and proposal will be valid, however will have to take into account that this may be a limitation to the idea.

BUT, from the resource centre present on the mothercare website, mothers could be redirected to these other forums and the value of information would still be added by mothercare, however the potential of return to the site would be much lower ( I imagine).

Oh dear I'm not very articulate tonight! yer but, neoww but, he said she said yer but! Forgive me, its nearly bed time but I wanted to leave a note.

So, topic at hand. Today's seminar task was to email a company with a fictitious complaint, or comment to see what kind of automated response was sent back. We also discussed the idea of ganging up on one company and all sending numerous emails from numerous addresses to see if we could cause some kind of crisis. The ill-fated company is yet to be decided upon, as is my personal complaint. And its because I thought if I made this comment on the forum, others might think me a little crazy.

But I couldn't help it, in my research, Iv been reading pregnancy forums all week!!! So the thought that came to mind was that we could all email a condom company (e.g. Durex) and for everyone to say their condoms broke and everyone is pregnant, 300 people all at once! And we are demanding them either to pay for child support or a hefty sum of hush money! I don't know, I imagine they will have had complaint's like this in the past and therefore might have an automated response all ready for it! Who knows!?

I don't think I will do it tonight as I think my craziness has peaked for one day. So I will say goodnight now, and hopefully have a more interesting, not baby related complaint to talk about tomorrow!

Sweet Dreams!