Are forums social media sites
While doing research on forum statistics for a strategy document I was authoring, I stumbled upon a discussion sparked by Tamar Weinberg. In her post, she asked the simple question -
“Are forums social media sites“
While there were good arguments in both the “for” and “opposing” camps, I felt that the views of a third camp required a response from me; the camp of “Who Cares and why does it matter?“
Before I respond to the “who cares” contingent, I’m going to weigh in with my answer. Based on the definition of social media being “platforms for social interaction and networking”, in my eyes, forums are definitely social media sites. They generally don’t have all the bells and whistles (APIs) as most social platforms. But at their core, they are a type of social media. Even Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, in their seminal book Groundswell, acknowledge forums as a social media platform, and write in length about the successes of Dell’s user support community.
Now on to you Mr and Mrs. Who Cares…
So the question is who cares? Why should we try to define if forums are social media sites? The answer is plain and simple: goals and strategy.
If you accept forums as social media sites, then it seems natural that the same goals and strategies for leveraging social media sites would apply to forums…which they do (this further supports the notion that they are social media sites).
To support this, lets look at goals that are being achieved through engaging forums.
Listening to and engaging your customers in order to gather feedback
TweetDeck, the uber popular desktop client for Twitter, setup an account on UserVoice (along with a couple of other smaller companies like Sun Microsystems, Nokia, and MySpace). I’m guessing that this is an invaluable resource for defining new requirements for their product.
Facilitating engagement and relationship building between your customers
Microsoft offers a large number of forums available to the their users. Many are the purposes of supporting each other, but Windows Home Server community is geared towards allowing customers to talk to each other about ideas and education.
Providing online tools that allow your customers to support each other
The success of Dell using forums for support is fairly wide known. But did you know that Pitney Bowes leverages forums to allow their users to support each other during postage rate changes? They’ve saved money as a result!
What camp are you in? Are forums social media sites? Why?
Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Apr. 01, 2009
Yes, no-brainer in my book. Many of the folks I follow on twitter have the same “handles” that they had in 99-00 when we first started “interacting” and “socializing” in forums. This sometimes led to “meetups”.
Sound familiar?
Posted by Jim Hathaway on 04/01/2009 06:45 PM