Having a presence on the web, whether it is via a website, Facebook, Twitter, some other social networking medium, or a cominbation of the above, is all about being able to communicate with your clients. Thanks to the nature of the internet, this also means that for the first time in the history of advertising and promotion, your clients have an equal opportunity to communicate back, not only to you, but to their fellow consumers, a prospect that, at times, can be daunting indeed.

That said, it is at times definitely in the best interests of a business or ogranisation to encourage the growth of a community amongst your customers and users, and perhaps one of the most powerful tools to this end is the internet forum. These are interactive websites, or portions of a website, where users can start conversations (known as forum threads) and leave replies to threads made by other users, and most require the creation of a user account in order to contribute, a step that allows members of the community to easily identify and relate to each, as opposed to more anonymous methods of communication. They are quite similar to comment sections found on blogs (such as this one), except they do not necessarily require the input of the sites owner or administrator to generate content, instead relying on the forums userbase. When properly cultivated, an enthusiastic and involved userbase can create a great deal of information and public interest about your site, with minimal time investment from the sites administrators.

And therein lies both the power and the danger of the forum. An active community that is interested in and positive about your business will generate good feedback about your product, service, or hobby, thereby encouraging others who stumble upon the forum to investigate and perhaps become involved themselves (for a good example of an active forum community, see Seabreeze). A forum made up of mostly negative, confused, angry or irrelevant comments is of course no help at all, although there is always the option of moderating the forum, which means to delete, remove, or edit posts that are disparaging. This is of course a sure way to generate even further negative feedback if the userbase is still active, or to drive your potential community away, leaving a barren forum behind.

Speaking of such, barren, unused forums (and comment sections!) should be avoided where-ever possible. At best they mean wasted effort in setting them up, and at worst they can put off people who come across them, as visitors may take the lack of feedback to mean a lack of public interest in your content. Some forum operators will tackle this issue by generating fake threads and posts, a tactic that is at best dishonest, and at worse blatantly transparent.

There are many forms of new media available to internet involved businesses nowdays, and the list expands yearly with services such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LiveJournal, various blogging tools, YouTube, Flickr and countless others competing in an oversaturated market. With all these tools available, not every business needs a forum. So who would benefit most from one?

If your business involves a hobby, then you are already on solid ground. Hobbyists enjoy sharing their enthusiasm for their activity of choice, and will bring acquaintances into your community, hopefully generating a self-sustaining system. Another winner in the forum area are businesses that work in highly technical areas; where the forum can be used to seek out and provide advice on issues that may be hard to solve alone. Finally forums based on already existing communities, such as for a region, city, suburb, or profession have the benefit of potentially bringing together people who already know each other and share interests under your banner.

And one final piece of advice, often overlooked but applicable to everything Web 2.0, advertise! Communities do not build themselves.

AP

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Posted in: Tips and Tricks