Forums Guide For Marketers – Introduction

If you work around forums and communities long enough, it’s easy to begin to believe that everyone knows what constitutes a discussion forum, how that fits into a community, what differentiates an active forum user from the general population and how to tap into the power of some the bigger forums.  In my experience, this rarely turns out to be the case.  I therefore thought I’d kick-off the New Year by creating a guide for marketers wanting to get an overview of forums in general and how they can be leveraged to accomplish general marketing goals.

This is intended to be a seven-part series with the following parts:

1. What makes up a discussion forum?
2. How big is the audience for forums?
3. How are forum members unique vs the general Internet population?
4. How can marketers create their own forum?
5. Where does a forum fit in an overall community strategy?
6. What are the opportunities for marketing through external forums?
7. What are some of the best practices by successful forum marketers?

If you think more should be covered, pipe up! Otherwise, stay tuned…