'Net Features : forums

Leveraging Forums for Customer Service and Marketing

Administrator — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 19:15:00 GMT

:: By Patrick Clinger ::

Do you remember Internet bulletin boards and newsgroups where people exchanged news, ideas, and debated topics? They haven’t gone away and, in many ways, are more popular than ever.

The modern-day equivalent to these discussion groups is online forums, which provide a place for users who are passionate about a topic to interact. Online forum users participate and read these forums daily, if not hourly, and they are active to the tune of hundreds of millions of unique monthly visitors and page views every month.

For businesses considering adding a corporate blog or a tech support blog, online forums represent a better and faster way for businesses to leverage this interaction to provide better customer service, new ideas for products, services and features, and increased customer loyalty.

Give Your Customers a Voice

We all know that companies live and die by their customers, so why not actively engage with them? Forums provide the means to secure immediate customer feedback, helping to ensure your company's long-term success.

Adding a forum to your website gives your customers a voice in your organization and makes them an integral part of your online presence. It also fosters the creation of your own unique online community. Your customers are ready and willing to engage with you online, and the information they provide can be invaluable.

By reaching out to your customers on a forum for their input, opinions, and feedback, you gain access to worthwhile business intelligence that can improve your internal decision-making process. People are more than willing to provide their opinions; you just need to provide the platform to make that engagement happen. The instant feedback that you receive through your online forum can provide you with invaluable information that can help you quickly adapt your products and services to meet their needs.

Turn Your Customers into Advocates

One of the biggest advantages of providing customers with access to a dedicated forum is the collaborative engagement that follows. Over time, your active forum members will learn more about your business through their interactions and become some of your most staunch and vocal advocates. As a result, these frequent visitors can be extremely helpful with assisting and influencing your other customers, as they have already acquired a great deal of knowledge about your products or services.

When a new member comes to your forum looking for advice or needing an answer to a question, many times other forum members will be ready and willing to answer. In this way, your forum enables you to provide customer support 24/7, even when your offices are closed. This means a better customer service experience for your visitors, without the need for committing further company resources.

To support this effort, you’ll need to provide positive reinforcement to members that can have an impact on your forum community. Publicly recognizing their contributions will not only help build loyalty towards your brand, but will also allow them to know their efforts are appreciated. This encourages other members of your forum to follow suit and enriches the overall dialogue of your community.

Increase Customer Loyalty

Those who regularly read and participate in online forums are dedicated helpers and communicators that offer companies a ready-made audience for customer service, marketing programs, product feedback and consistent engagement. Using a forum helps foster a sense of community, and leads to repeat visitors and stronger customer loyalty.

Your customers all have a common interest: your product or service. By empowering your customers to express their thoughts online, you break down existing communication barriers and encourage members to have a vested interest in your company through their continued engagement. Further, publicly engaging with your customers shows your clients that you are listening to their concerns and are dedicated to meeting their needs.

Allowing people to help each other by having an open customer support forum allows your customers to be your advocates. Letting users help each other and champion your product increases user happiness and helps customer retention rates.

Building Your Online Presence

Forums help boost your online presence and image. By actively engaging on a forum, your strong online presence shows a dedication to your customer base. This increases the confidence of your customers knowing that they can reliably get support for your product or service.

While most companies have a Facebook page or a Twitter account, social media is not the last word in customer engagement. Sites like Facebook and Twitter allow you to get a message out, but they don't encourage two-way communication. You want your customers to feel like you're listening to them, not dictating to them. By providing a more intimate interactive conversation, your organization will score you more points with your customers than simply blasting out generic messages to your entire customer base through social media channels.

Forums can help you disseminate your company's message quickly and cost effectively. By posting news and announcements to your forum, you reach your core audience quickly and get timely and honest feedback in return. Further, forums are full of keyword rich discussions that can help your site's SEO. Since forums are all about initiating and continuing discussions, you will have a never-ending supply of new content being created on your site. With search engines prioritizing fresh content, forums frequently appear as the top results for many search engine queries. When customers use search engines to find information about your product or service, you can expect that results from your forum will quickly provide relevant answers.

Another added benefit of online forums is how they police themselves. Participants gain credibility and lose it based on their contributions to the forum. Legitimate criticisms improve a company’s operations, while personal gripes are refuted by informed customers. Smart business managers can take the feedback on the forum and make changes that directly impact a customer’s loyalty, perception of the organization and the bottom line.

The Right Choice

Forums provide an invaluable resource for business, increasing customer engagement and loyalty, while providing an outlet for direct, valuable customer feedback. Directly involving your customers in open discourse can bring significant marketing benefits and an increased online presence to any company. The vast potential that online forums bring to both you and your customers cannot be understated.

:: About the Author ::

Patrick Clinger is founder and CEO of ProBoards, the world’s largest host of free forums on the Internet. ProBoards was recently named “Best Hosted Forum” for the second consecutive year by Forum-Software.org. The company boasts over 3.5 million forums created, 22 million registered users, and more than 15 million unique monthly visitors on the web.

Forum Software vBulletin Integrates with Facebook

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:30:00 GMT

Forums are Dead! Long Live Forums!

Forums were the original social media destinations. Before Facebook and Twitter, topic-focused forums were everywhere and were an integral part of getting the word out about a product or service and interacting with others including prospective customers.

With the rise of social media however, forums have for the most part simply fallen out of vogue. The most savvy vendors of forum software however are building applications which integrate with the new iteration of social media sites including Facebook. Case in point, leading forum software vBulletin (a product WM recommends and which was mentioned in some detail on my book Web 360) has just released a customizable Facebook application that allows vBullletin forum operators to engage existing members and attract new ones on Facebook.

Community members on forums with the application activated are able to interact with the forum while logged into Facebook, and new "discover" and "explore" tabs provide content recommendations to members that analyzes interests and connections of users on Facebook. Members on vBulletin platforms can also showcase their forum activity on Facebook itself.

"Facebook is an amazing ecosystem and is a hub of social online activity for over 800 million people," said Joe Rosenblum, chief technology officer at Internet Brands, the parent company of vBulletin. "Our customers have been asking us for a solution that gets their forums in front of their members while they're on Facebook in an easy, organic way. We developed this application in direct response to these requests."

Google's Latest Small Business Resource

Mike Phillips — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:30:00 GMT

Google has launched a new forum aimed squarely at small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) called Small Business Center. Here, businesses and individuals can discuss their AdWords strategies and best practices, and share tips and advice. Essentially, the forum is just an extension of the AdWords Help Forum but considering the sheer number of AdWords publishers and advertisers, it is sure to be an active discussion.

According to the official blog post, Google hopes topics will include but not be limited to:

Choosing the right tools to measure results
How to write great ads
Finding the right frequency to sign in to AdWords

Visit the Small Business Center

Don't Forget the Forums

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:30:00 GMT

Forum community network CrowdGather announced its acquisition of FreeForums.org (one of the largest free forum community hosting platforms on the Web) for $1 million in a combination of cash and stock. This will bring CrowdGather’s network of forums to approximately 80 million monthly page views and 4.5 million monthly unique visitors according to the company's own analytics, an increase of over 500% from the Company’s last quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

What this really shows is that despite all of the hype surrounding free-standing social networks like Twitter and Facebook, forums still have their place in Web marketing - both on-site and as promotional vehicles. That means you should be actively participating in forums within your industry and perhaps even fostering your own forum community.

“This is a milestone achievement for us,” said Sanjay Sabnani, CrowdGather’s Chairman and CEO. “FreeForums.org has built up an impressive network of forums and we believe that CrowdGather will be able to successfully monetize these properties by integrating them into verticals that will appeal to advertisers.” Sabnani continued, “With this acquisition, our network of forums have grown rapidly from just under nine million page views per month in fiscal 2008 to 80 million monthly page views currently. Our goal is to continue to drive growth by focusing on the inherent value of forums and the richness of the content created by their users. We believe that forums are the help desk of the Internet and a valuable repository of answers and experiences.”

FreeForums.org owner and founder Phil Santoro commented, “CrowdGather is exactly the type of company we were looking for when we made the decision to sell. Few people today recognize that forums have not only not gone away, they remain one of the most vital, active communities online. Our motivation was to find an entity that is not only focused on forums, but also cultivates them and provides the staff and resources to continue to drive our growth. We believe that CrowdGather is the right choice, and I am excited to be a new shareholder of the company.”

Stay up to date on the latest Internet trends:
Request a professional subscription to Website Magazine,
the most popular print publication on Web success.

Online Forum Advertising (With a Twist)

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:35:00 GMT

Does advertising within social media environments such as forums sound appealing? For many marketers it does but the problem is that those wanting to actively participate in the word-of-mouth conversations occurring are often called out as spammers thanks to often poorly disguised commercial messages.

PostRelease, launched by Cie Studios today, hopes to change that by enabling companies (through advertising) to reach audiences at the point where opinions are being formed and buying decisions made - on the forums. Companies can insert posts that contain relevant content into targeted online forum discussions using the automated system.

PostRelease posts can include text, pictures, hyperlinks and links to video. The posts are clearly marked as from PostRelease, and they remain in the lead position (toward the top of the post list page) of selected forum discussion categories for seven days. Once released from the top position, the post remains part of the forum discussion. These posts are archived as forum content, so they continue to generate responses after a campaign ends.

From the release: The approach is automated but audited – all posts are reviewed to ensure the content is relevant to the discussion topic. It is this quality control that sets PostRelease apart from banner and text ads: in its year-long beta, PostRelease click-through rates averaged 33 percent, with highs reaching nearly 90 percent.

By the looks of the PostRelease forum network, over 100 publishers are using the system, although it seems to be focused primarily on the automotive industry at the moment. I see a lot of potential in solutions like these for forum owners/publishers.

“Forums are where the real product conversations happen – they’re the uncut diamonds of the social web,” said Justin Choi, founder and president of Cie Studios. “Forums are an ideal place for marketers and consumers to meet, because product conversations are not intrusive, they’re integral. We’ve created a solution that enables companies to insert relevant information, helps consumers learn more about products they’re already discussing and gives forum owners a much-needed source of revenue.”

Get Your Gravatar On

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:03:00 GMT

As a web professional, you have to make a conscious decision about what appears on your website. With so many many widgets, gadgets, and ad networks vying for the virtual real estate of your site, it's easy to see how quickly you can lose sight of what's really important - those visiting your Web property. One way to bring some soft features (those which add value while not distracting at the same time) into a Web property and give back a little to users is to reward them for commenting, sharing, etc. through the use of avatars. One way to do this is to use Gravatar.

Gravatar (an abbreviation for globally recognized avatar) is a service for providing globally-unique avatars. They're global in the sense that users can use them wherever they are online. On Gravatar, users can register an account based on their email address, and upload an avatar to be associated with the account. Gravatar plugins are available for WordPress (provided natively in WordPress as of v2.5) and are available as a third-party module in the Drupal web content management system and many others. As of late, I'm seeing more commercial CMS and blogging systems making Gravatar (or at least avatars) support native - and that's a good thing.

How It Works: When the user posts a comment on a blog that requires an email address, the software checks whether that email address has an associated avatar at Gravatar. If so, the Gravatar is shown along with the comment.

For WordPress users, there are actually quite a few gravatar plugins that might come in handy to add some virtual punch to your WP installation. The most popular seems to be WP-Gravatar, which lets bloggers use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with comments and allows publishers to set their own CSS style to use with the comments section and the author about box. It's been downloaded nearly 25K times, but there are some great alternatives including Easy Gravatars, Wavatars, and Gravatar (and userpics).

Learn more about Gravatars here.

Other options for creating a stronger sense of community might be to use the newly released Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect. Do you enable users to display avatars or gravatars? Do you feel it has provided value to your online community? Let us know by commenting below.

SimplePress Forum Plugin For WordPress

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:20:00 GMT

Web-based forums provide a wonderful opportunity to connect with both new and existing users. For those running WordPress and looking for quick and easy ways to build out their sites and improve the relationship they have with visitors, a plugin by the name of Simple:Press might just do the trick.

Simple:Press, which can be integrated into any existing WordPress site, uses the same user records and database and displays forum content on a single WP page. The plugin is customizable, coming out of the box with a number of skins and icon sets to get bloggers started. There are many other noteworthy features of the plugin including a Private Messaging sub-system, the ability to link blog posts with forum topics, the capability to extend the forum display with custom code, a number of template tags for use outside of the forums, extensive online help that explains every option and full language support.

While Simple:Press is suitable for those who want to run private, invite-only specialized forums, it is capable of accommodating open, public forums that allow guest posting. Current users have shown it to be fully scalable, whether your site membership numbers in the tens or the thousands.

Resources For Building Links Through Forums

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:34:00 GMT

Posting on forums is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your websites. The ability to insert signatures in posts, links to specific web pages and network and communicate with those that might be interested in your products and services is well worth the investment of time it requires. But with thousands of forums, discussion boards and mailing lists to get through, you need the right tools for the job. Here are a few essential resources for finding opportunities to build links on forums.

Read Four Essential Resources For Building Links Through Forums

This article appeard in Website Magazine's Web Success Weekly email newsletter.
To sign up for this newsletter or others, please visit the Website Magazine e-newsletter page now.

Low Hassle Web Community Building

Pete Prestipino — Sat, 24 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

When you say "online community" to a marketer, most immediately think of a forum site, bulletin board, or possibly the latest flavor in social media. While those are all possibilities that businesses should at least discuss as part of their communication objectives, there are some small and easy things marketers can do to add "community" online without a ton of resources or hassle.

Read Low Hassle Community Building by Joe Pulizzi now

Forum Posting Services - Do You Dare?

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

If you're just getting started promoting you forum and pulling you hair out trying to figure out how to fill up the categories with quality posts and threads so that visitors feel comfortable enough to drop a few posts of their own, then you should probably know that there are services out there that support this practice. While marketers could go around and around about the ethics of hiring paid forum posters, it definitely happens. Here are a few services you might want to look into to get your own forum off the ground or back to life.

ForumBooster.net Pricing ranges from $22.99 (for 75+ posts, 25+ threads and 2-4 registered users) to $149.99 (700+ posts, 70+ threads and 7-10 registered users).
PostingDirect.com A little confused on the pricing. $139 for the service, but now available for just $39. There is no information or guarantees on how many posts will be made but I will say that you can usually trust a guy that puts his real phone number on the site.
Forum-Posting.info Pricing is similar to that of forum booster but this service ranges up to 2,000 posts, 250 threads and 150 users for just under $300. Interested parties can even sample the service with a special trial offer of 10 posts for $4.95.
ForumWizards.com Certainly one of the least descriptive sites I've come across but the rates are the most reasonsable. A sample package (10 posts, 2 threads) starts at $2 and the full-on Monster package runs just $90 for 11 users, 500 posts and 100 threads.
ForumAdvantage.com Well priced tester package (7 posts, 3 threads) for just $5. A wide variety of packages all the way up to the Total Package for $525 that includes 1,500 posts and 500 threads, 8-16 users).

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.