COMMENTS
Great post (as usual)!
Smaller social networking sites are often forgotten, which is unfortuante as they are more targeted audiences.
My favourite, with admitted bias, is the site I manage, LoonLounge
www.loonlounge.com). It is a social networking & information site focused on Canada, and immigration to Canada.
I frequently use meetup.com, the meet-online-then-meet-in-real-life site and livemocha.com, the language exchange site, as well.
Marketers would be smart to start tuning into these smaller communities.
Great post. I love finding things on the internet that is so informative. I am going to look into some of the smaller social networking sites. Thanks.
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I love message boards and have always loved them. People often forget about them and with ning communities there is an abundance of them and the right niche to reach your audience.
Even though i agree with the point you make about social media not stopping at Twitter and Facebook, I cannot help asking:
Do people still use forums? Do they still browse through all that info, read everything and then reply? Do you?(Honestly.)
Ina: 3 words:
Positioning
Demographics
Psychographics :)
Ok, fair. I would agree that, unlike FB and Twitter, message boards and forums are more transparent, more homogeneous and maybe easier "to read" in terms of pragmatics and morphosyntax. But are you sure you are not losing people from your target because you are looking into a media that is starting to be obsolete and thus attracts less and less fresh representatives of your target? Or are you saying that “the media makes (is) the people”?
Ina - do you have any research/studies that indicate that forums/message boards are becoming obsolete/losing participants / demographics skewing to older age groups? You need to consider Search. I just googled Toyota Auris and forums came up from 5th place onwards (after brand sites, wikipedia and Youtube) - no sign of Facebook or other social network groups there. You also need to consider the impact and influence determined by traffic, links and other factors (frequency of update, originality of content, interactivity)
Well, if you would trust the Forrester Research, they <a href=”http://www.forrester.com/groundswell/images/groundswell_figure_3-1.jpg”>say that the percentage of people who read online forum discussions (28%) is very close to the percentage of people who visit social media websites (25%). 18% contribute to forums and 20% update and maintain a profile on a social networking website. This is published in 2008, but I am sure the data is 2007. Taking into consideration the massive growth of social media and the overall hype, I think one could be allowed to speculate that nowadays or in the near future, more and more people are going to turn... well to themselves and be more interested in having profiles in social media than contributing to forums and message boards.
Could we say that the reasons for which people use social media are different from the ones for which they use and add content on forums are different? Maybe. Can we say forums are becoming less popular? I think so. I would also love to see recent research proving me otherwise.
And don't forget that if you will use the argument of the search you allow yourself to talk about the way the tool works and what woks better for indexing, while not necessarily proving that forums are not obsolete.
What do you think?
Morphosyntax?
C'mon, you're making that up?!
@rebekah donaldson: Nope. :)
"Could we say that the reasons for which people use social media are different from the ones for which they use and add content on forums are different? Maybe." I would say definitely. It's a point made in the article U.S. women use blogs and social media for information http://econsultancy.com/blog/3992-us-women-use-blogs-and-social-media-for-information#blog_comment_9629
The point about search is that it is probable someone thinking about buying a car will search for certain brands/models through Google / Bing etc and that forums/message boards will inevitably come up in those searches as a source of third party opinion to inform a purchase decision. That's not to say that the person in question might send out a Tweet or post a Facebook update asking their followers/family/buddies/complete strangers what they think. It's just that I'd rather hear from someone who actually owns the car...