-
Other Sites
-
Admin
Search
Blog Bling
Mar
8
Forums Add Community for Retailers
March 8, 2007 | Anita Campbell
Forums are an attractive strategy for some retailers seeking to increase sales.
This strategy is all about building community. The community attracts people who turn into regular customers, operates as a place to conduct market research, and helps improve natural search results.
Internet Retailer has an excellent article about forums to increase online sales. Although most forums are targeted toward consumers, and most of the examples in the article are B2C forums, many of the principles would seem to apply to B2B forums designed to attract small businesses.
Consider these tips from the article about how to make a successful forum:
- A subject that inspires passion. Wine, yes. Coffee, maybe. Milk, not so much.
- A subject for which there’s plenty to discuss: the subject itself (especially ones involving collecting or connoisseurship); equipment and supplies; and common problems where multiple heads are better than one. Anecdote-friendly subjects (pets, children, sports, travel) also supply fertile discussion ground.
- A sponsor that makes itself scarce. While forum participants are happy to buy stuff, generally they don’t want input from a sponsor. It’s important to avoid both overt commercialism and the temptation to censor negative comments about the retail operation.
- Volunteer moderators to keep discussions on track and avert flame wars. A forum that doesn’t need oversight probably is one that’s not getting enough traffic to justify its existence. Retailers can enlist a strong community member in addition to or instead of an employee.
Finding forums where small business owners and staff congregate can be a challenge. One hint is to search by the type of information being sought. For instance, there are B2B forums for various industries (coffee shops) and also for certain functional areas of expertise (webmasters).
Some product-focused forums also exist, most notably Intuit’s QuickBooks Community and Monster Small Business.
And then there are a handful of general small business forums, of which the Small Business Ideas Forum is perhaps the most active.
