Forum Research With Dipiti

Administrator — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:08:00 GMT

If you are researching a topic or want to keep track of what is being said about a certain product or brand, there is often no better place than an active Internet forum. While search engines are wonderful resources to help us locate information, where they often fail is in the immediacy of the content provided. Today's darling could be tomorrow's outcast, so keeping tabs on what's being said is imperative. The challenge of forums is that there are so many and engaging in those communities for the sake of research takes a great deal of time and effort.

Enter Dipiti (beta): from the Dipiti.com site: "Dipiti currently connects online users to 2,322 communities and 28,979,436 conversations. Dipiti does this by discovering, qualifying, and organizing thousands sites of all sizes across the web so online users can quickly and easily find the most relevant information, connect with others on communities and expert sites, and gain answers and support."

Dipiti only focuses on a few categories of interest (Health, Legal, Money, Pet Care). I conducted a search for "IRS audit" in the legal category and found only two site results. Another search however for "Flu" in the health category found a respectable 41 results from some good sites with seemingly active conversations happening.

While there is room for improvement in the depth of forum coverage, Dipiti could end up an essential part of online research for marketers.

Monitoring Forums with Twing

Mike Phillips — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Online forums are loaded with content - and it's not always easy to find or indexed by the search engines. As more users participate in these online communities and forums, more content is being overlooked. Twing.com (in beta) is a new search engine focused on discovering and filtering the online chatter.

“Online forums are an established medium people have been using to communicate since the early days of the internet, even predating the web. The number of users of these forums has been consistently growing year over year, and recent estimates of U.S. users alone exceeds 50 million,” said Kevin Shea, General Manager for Twing.com.

Twing could be a very useful tool for following the conversation about your industry, or even your own brand. By searching these forums you could discover what people are saying about your site - it's no secret that online discussions can spread rapidly, for better or worse. Find out what you're doing right and where you need to improve. There's only one true test for the value of your brand, and that's your audience or consumers.

Twing allows you to search by keyword, search particular forums, exclude terms, search by media or even language, among other filtering tools. You can also submit your own forum to the Twing directory to generate traffic and become part of the Twing community.

'Net Features : forum research

Forum Research With Dipiti

Monitoring Forums with Twing