MindComet

Love by association

Forums are social media and should be part of your social media strategy. For example, Pitney Bowes leverages forums to allow their users to support each other during postage rate changes. This post however is focused on using forums as part of your social media outreach and presence strategy.

Forums are ubiquitous.

Just search out your interest, and you’re bound to find a forum with relevant discussions. Want to join a forum and talk to other poodle lovers? Here’s a forum you can call home.

The question is, as a marketer, how do you engage forums? What are some best practices? What are the benefits?

The best advice in engaging forums is to tread lightly. Forum based communities are often the target of spammers and as a result are very protective. They’ve been around for years and have built great communities. Their members aim to keep it that way. So what do I mean by tread lightly?

Be respectful.

If the community doesn’t want you there as a marketer, then leave. Don’t force yourself into the conversation. If the community has a Terms of Service, read it. Their TOS might explicitly tell you to stay away as a marketer. Get the hint without ruffling feathers.

Forums are notorious for flame wars. Avoid them at all costs. They’re toxic. Don’t ever let yourself get drawn in. And please please please, don’t start a flame war. Be respectful.

Contribute value to the community

Pretty self-explanatory. If you’re not contributing value, staying relevant to the conversation, and building relationships; logout; delete your profile; Stay far far away.

If you get stuck on this one, try the educational approach. Provide links to 3rd party sites that are relevant and position yourself and the educator. Make sure you have read the TOS though, some forums frown on posting links.

Full disclosure

If you’re there as a brand or a marketer, it’s very important that you disclose it. Be careful though, sometimes the disclosure can be confused with a marketing message, especially if you come on too strong with it. Don’t spend lots of time talking about yourself and who you are. Instead, try the subtle approach of weaving disclosure into a relevant conversation.

Example: Great points. I’ve worked with [put your affiliation here] for the past year, they’ve really helped me to learn a few things about [put your relevant and valuable knowledge here]

Your disclosure doesn’t have to be in every post, just make sure you drop it in (and do it intelligently!) from time to time.

Marketing through participation

This is where the previous three pieces of advice come together. You’ve done a great job of being a respectful human who, based on contribution, is seen as a valuable, if not integral member of the community. Hopefully, you’ve also made a clear connection, in a clever and non-intrusive way, between yourself and the brand you represent.

Are you seeing where I’m going here?

The end goal is for the community to make a connection between you (the person they really like) and the brand you represent. I like to call it “love by association”.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Apr. 22, 2009

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?

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Apr. 01, 2009