3MR Case Study
Electric Hookups: Virtual Community for Dummies
 

With the long-awaited launch of Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds, a forum for tech-savvy intellectuals, we thought it would be a good time to focus on Electric Hookups, a startup Web site that promises to give a forum for those with a lot less to say, but who have lots of gumption -- not to mention chewing tobacco. After spending a week holed up with E-Hookups denizens, here is our exclusive report.

Overview/Design
Electric Hookups was started when Joe Bob Briggs and Bob Guccione decided that there was a lot of overlap in their audiences, yet there wasn't an online forum for people who loved bad drive-in movies, soft-focus porn, and the star-spangled banner. Using new DuctTape 1.2 Web authoring software, the pair put the site up on blocks and got down to work. The site has five sections: The Spittoon, Soap Opera Update, Building a Better Transmission, Achy-Breaky Pickup Spot, and My RV's Bigger Than Yours.
Special guest forum hosts are helping to drive traffic to the site. Roseanne, Terry Bradshaw, Jeff Foxworthy and various Miss World pageant contestants will be on-site to host high-falutin topics such as "Beer Guts or Airbags: Which Are Safer?" and "Are Sunflower Seeds Worth the Trouble?"
Chat rooms are set up with special HuntNPeck(tm) typing technology, which helps guide people not used to keyboards. For those who need background, Joe Bob Briggs has posted selected chapters from his latest book, "Virtual Drive-Ins: Homesteading in the Electronic Trailer Park."
Though much of the site seems like one long, country-hick cliche, the designers made sure not to include any farmer's daughter jokes or in-breeding innuendo. Thank goodness.

Quotes of the Week
Some selected quotes from some of the forums:
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BillyJoe134: "There's little stars shooting down on my big N!!! Help me! Someone's shooting at my N! It's gonna blow, it's gonna blow..."
FlyGranpaw: "That's the Netscape logo, Billy. Don't you worry yerself to death now."
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GeezusRules: "Budweiser really has something with those freshness dates. Now I know I have to drink my whole 12-pack by next week."
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BurpusMaximus: "Are there any chicks out there?"
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Future Money-Making Schemes
Electric Hookups has plans on syndicating its content and selling it to "Hooked on Phonics" and Mirsky's Worst of the Web. The patented "reverse publishing" system will allow E-Hookups to use content found at the site, and turn it into books, movies, TV shows, CD-ROMs, T-shirts, action figures, and ads for Skoal.
When Briggs was asked how the company would draw a target audience who couldn't possibly afford computers and were probably illiterate, he smiled and replied, "we'll get plenty of folks looking to see how the other half lives."
A planned IPO has been postponed until other half-baked Internet IPOs felt it was safe to scam Wall Street investors again.

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