Community is touted as a great way to market products and services. Is it? Well, it’s a mixed bag. First take a look at what community is before you decide whether it’s right for you and your products.

Community is any device online where people of like interest come together online to communicate. Community can be an online forum where members of the forum group send messages to the group at their convenience (not in real time). These are called Discussion Boards by eBay. They are also known on the Internet as listservs, forums, discussion groups, or blogs. Community can also be an online chat group where group members talk with each other, in effect, in real time. The talk is text that’s typed on a chat screen. Chat can be messaging (e.g., AOL Instant Messaging) when it is not open to the public and controlled by each user. Forums and chat groups have differences in regard to the cost-effectiveness of your online marketing. From your point of view, you can be a participant in a community or a sponsor of a community. Each is a different roll and each is different in regard to the cost-effectiveness of your marketing effort.

Internet Programs

There is a variety of software that supports online communities. Some of it is available from your host ISP (usually at no extra charge). Some you can buy and load on your host ISP’s server as a CGI script (not difficult to do, but not a task for novice computer users either). Some of it is provided by special vendors and works on special servers on the Internet (an easy means of use), which you link to from your website. To understand what the software does and how to use it, you have to pay careful attention to the particular software product.

Forums

Forums use email messages to communicate, but not in real time. Participants send a message to the forum, and the forum receives the message and sends it to all forum participants (members). A listserv is a good example of a program that does this. It works strictly with members’ existing email programs. It’s up to the member to arrange and keep track of the emails he or she receives from the listserv.

There are also Web forum programs. eBay’s Discussion Forums are a good example. You use something that looks like an email program to send messages, but the interface is inside your Web browser. You also look at the messages with your browser that other members have sent. The messages are in archives on the forum website and usually arranged in threads according to the topic discussed.

Since you send messages or read them at your convenience, the conversation that takes place through the forum is said to be not in real time.

Chat

Chat takes place in real time. To take part in chat, you have to be online at the same time as the other members. It is like an ongoing conversation, but it is with writings, not sounds. There dozens of different chat programs that each work a little differently. Chat programs are hosted by someone but opened to the public—or perhaps open only to those with password access.

Messaging is typically a system sponsored by a large entity. AOL Instant Messaging is a good example. Each participant configures his or her messenger program to include or exclude other people. So messaging is not necessarily public, but it can be. It’s a way to talk with only the people you want to talk with.

Blogs

Blogs are the latest Internet phenomenon. They are essentially a bulletin board where the blog owner posts his or her writings. Blog members can read the writings but cannot respond publically on the bulletin board. They can respond privately to the blog owner. And the blog owner can reveal publically communications from whomever. If you operate a blog, you will want to keep professional. Discuss only matters that relate to your products or the industry the products represent.

Many blogs are personal diaries. Make sure your blog isn’t one. If you want to flaunt your personal life before the public, do it far far away from your eBay retail business.

Passive Participation

Passive participation is not what this article is about. Passive participation is simply viewing a forum routinely, or occasionally, and observing what people are saying without making a contribution yourself. Let’s analyze this.

Passive participation is not a marketing program, because you have no visibility. So what is it? And how can it help your marketing? Well, it is a source of information. It is a jumbled mass of information, to be sure. Still, it can be a very valuable source of information. If the topic of the forum fits your products, the forum may be a great place to get consumer input. Listen to what the consumers are saying about products. Then too, the forum might be a place to learn about your products from others who know more than you know. Finally, the forum might be a place for you to ask questions about products occasionally and get useful answers. This passive participation may well help you in your marketing efforts, but it is not itself marketing.

Active Participation

The idea here is that by being a participant in a forum, you can promote your retail business. This is actually a pretty good idea. The idea assumes that the products you sell are directly related to the forum topic, that you are an expert in the products you sell (as you should be), and that as an expert you can help other members of the forum in their efforts to buy, use, and sell the products.

For instance, suppose you sell specialized digital-camera equipment and software, which enables people to shoot high-quality panoramic photographs. You are an expert in shooting panoramic photographs, a somewhat technical aspect of photography. An online forum on panoramic photography exists. As a participant, you can help other members of this forum effectively shoot panoramic photographs.

Participation Guide

Unfortunately, participating in a forum is a hazardous affair when your objective is to promote your business. It is very easy to offend someone, and when you offend one person, it has the psychological effect of offending the entire group. Without audio and visual cues, written words have a power in conversation online that seems unnatural. You have to be very careful what you say.

Some guidelines to keep in mind as a participant:

1.   Follow the forum rules. Don’t get crosswise with the forum sponsor.

2.   Never be critical, negative, sarcastic, condescending, or nasty with anyone.

3.   Never say that something is right, wrong, or better. If you advocate a better way of doing something or a better product, say it is more efficient, easier, less expensive, easier to learn, etc.

4.   Always be complimentary and positive with everyone. 5.   Be helpful as a friendly expert.

6.   Participate regularly so that everyone in the forum knows you and expects to hear form you in a timely manner on subjects within the scope of your expertise.

7.   Never openly market your retail products or your business.

Make it appear that you have a great interest in and enthusiasm for the forum topic (e.g., panoramic photography) and are happy to help people with their problems large and small where appropriate.

Signature

A signature is a line(s) of text that automatically follows your body of text in a forum message. You can use a signature to show your address, publish a quote, indicate your business, or show whatever you desire. A signature can be short or huge.

Most forum sponsors have rules about signatures. Typically signatures can’t be over a certain size and they can’t be blatantly commercial. Follow the sponsor ’s rules. Keep your signature short, and don’t try to make it an advertisement for your business.

Nevertheless, there’s nothing wrong with stating the name of your business. You want people to know you’re in a business that’s related to the topic of the forum. In other words, make sure that you use a signature and make sure that the signature makes it clear to everyone that you’re in a business related to the topic of the forum. For example, the following signature will work well:

Jason Smith

Panorama Photo Supplies

However, if your business name doesn’t depict what you sell, you may have to elaborate:

Jason Smith

Smith Equipment & Supplies

Specializing in Panoramic Photo Supplies

Keep in mind, the longer and more commercial your signature seems, the more chance it has of offending forum members or violating sponsor guidelines.

Time Requirements

It takes time to write carefully worded messages for participation in a forum. And if you don’t take the time to be careful, surely you will offend someone. Don’t underestimate the time you will spend as a participant, and remember that only ongoing participation is worthwhile. Occasional participation probably won’t support a reasonable marketing effort. With that in mind, only you can decide whether your participation in a forum is worth the time for your particular business and your particular products.

Every retail business is different with different opportunities. Perhaps the more specialized your products, the more it makes sense to participate in a forum(s), particularly a specialized forum(s). If multiple forums exist on the same topic or if you have several sets of products each related to a different forum , your potential time requirements for meaningful participation will increase. Thus, you will have to set priorities. You can’t do everything.

Keeping in Touch

There’s another reason for participation in a forum. It helps you keep in touch with your customers. You know what they routinely talk about. This can be very enlightening and give you useful insight into your retail business.

As mentioned earlier, to do this, you don’t necessarily have to be an active forum participant. You can be passive and read all the messages without ever writing one.

Non-Marketing Participation

Nothing in this article should be intrepreted as discouraging you from participating in a forum that enhances your professionalism. Do I think you should participate in a forum about operating an eBay business? Absolutely. But that’s not marketing.

Sponsorship

When you operate a forum, you have another set of considerations to face in addition to your participation. Establishing and operating a forum is difficult, and you cannot assume that you will be successful.

Critical Mass

The first objective is to get a critical mass of participants. That appears to be easy. The typical successful forum appears to have about 50 contributors with perhaps a dozen of them more active than the others. But it’s what you don’t see that’s important.

I had a discussion with Margaret Levine Young, author of Poor Richard’s Building Online Communities (Top Floor Publishing, 2000) about critical mass. She estimates that most forums have about a 10:1 ratio of passive participants to active participants. That means to get 50 active participants, you have to have a forum membership of 500 people. Without a critical mass, a forum just sputters along and doesn’t do much or draw much attention. Lively discussions are few and far between, and often long periods (e.g., two days) go by without any messages at all. Without at least a dozen messages a week, a forum is dead.

Administration

Someone has to administer the forum. You can do this using software, and you can set up most forum software to be self-administering. Nonetheless, you still need to devote some attention to making sure everything runs smoothly. If you try to do this without self-administrating software, you will have a big job on your hands.

Management

Managing a forum means managing the participants. More specifically, it means policing the participants. First, you need to set up forum policies and rules. A forum is a community, and like any community, it needs guidelines to help it function well.

Second, you need to set the topic for the forum. This seems self-evident. Nevertheless, you need to establish rules that keep the discussion on topic (i.e., enforce the topic). Otherwise the forum discussion will digress into a general discussion (e.g., politics), and eventually the forum will disintegrate.

Third, you need to calm and regulate disruptive participants. People sometimes get mad at each other on forums, and it’s up to you to keep things peaceful. Sometimes that means kicking unruly participants off the forum. Managing a forum properly requires sensitivity, fairness, and firmness. Experience in the diplomatic service is helpful.

Employee

Can you have an employee (or independant contractor) operate a forum for you? Sure. Obviously it can’t be just anyone, however. It has to be a person with the maturity and skills to make it work. The forum will be perceived by the participants as your baby. If you don’t manage it yourself, you need to find someone you can trust to do it well and do it professionally.

Archives

One of the advantages of operating a forum is that the ongoing record of participation can become content for your website. In other words, you need to archive the forum messages. The discussions of various topics will be valuable to future readers who search through the message archives looking for specific information.

Participation

And what about participating in your own forum? Nothing wrong with that. However, you will have to be extra careful. Because you are the forum sponsor (manager) and a participant too, you will find that your words are magnified considerably. Everything you say should be measured carefully to avoid offending anyone and to avoid miscommunications. See the Active Participation section above.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

My view is that forum participation is most useful when your business serves a specific specialty that coincides with the forum topic. That is, exactly what you sell fits a forum representing a niche large enough to support profitable sales but small enough to be uninviting to competition. Under such circumstances, participation can constitute a good marketing campaign. It’s also a way to keep in touch with your customers.

Having said that, I am skeptical that participation in forums is generally cost-effective. Forum participation takes time. You have to write well-thought-out messages and be sensitive to other forum participants. You can’t be in a hurry and do a good job. If the forum’s topic is broader than the spectrum of your products, your participation may not generate significant sales.

Nor is sponsoring a forum a quick or easy path to success. It will likely take considerable time, effort, and promotion (of the forum) to get your forum participation to a critical mass. Without the critical mass, your forum is not likely to be an effective marketing tool. All things considered, forums are probably not the place for you to spend your time and energy most effectively to generate sales. Unless you’re in a narrow niche without competition, your priorities are better placed elsewhere.