Sumber:Mstar
australian small business forum
members leaving 10,000 posts a day. InTheMix: Dance music appreciation forum that grew into a company, The Sound Alliance, with division covering rock music and gay culture, along with ticketing and consulting services. Whirlpool: Possibly Australia’s most influential forum with more than 900 members who leave between 100 and 300 messages a day on issues ranging from starting a virtual assistant business to coping with working from home.
“The chat forums are one of the oldest forms of communications on the web, but many companies underestimate their power as a branding, marketing and communications tool. Kathie Thomas set up her first online forum in 1997, to support the website she had created a year earlier for her home-based secretarial service.
The site had been attracting large volumes of email from other women keen to learn about her business model, and Thomas needed a better way of communicating with them. Now her online forum, at the Virtual Assistant Network website, has more than 900 members who leave between 100 and 300 messages a day on issues ranging from starting a virtual assistant business to coping with working from home.
“The chat forums are one of the oldest forms of communications on the web, but many companies underestimate the power of online forums as a branding, marketing and communications tool. Here’s how Australia’s best forums do it – and five of the conversation, add value, and don’t be afraid to participate,” he says.
Brand management The open nature of forums however is not always easy for companies to adapt to, as an open conversation is as likely to bash their brand as praise it. Frantzeskos says this is something they just need to deal with. “Whether it’s on your forum or someone else’s forum, people are having these conversations anyway,” he says.
Most online forums have defined rules-of-conduct for participants and engage dedicated moderators on either a paid or voluntary basis to watch over the conversations. But despite the capacity for defamation of companies or individuals, forum operators report that legal threats over posts are rare. The dance music forum at inthemix.
com.au (ITM), which is operated by The Sound Alliance, uses a team of voluntary moderators to monitor posts, but does not shield the advertisers who appear on the site. “We have advertising around our forums, but we really have avoided touching or amending any of our forums,” Cruickshank says. “Because once you start to play with that you really start touching the thing that allows the community grow, which is the freedom and voice that the women have.
“What we say to advertisers is that by placing their advertising on these forums they’ve got a highly-engaged audience. Our average session time is over 13 minutes. You don’t get that kind of targeted audience on many websites.” While advertising is the most common way of generating income from a forum, it is a business builder and helping them produce more income.
” Five of Australia’s best online forums: AussieBloggers: A site for Australian bloggers to share tips and information. BigFooty: The world’s largest forum site for AFL fans, with more than 60,000 members, and also covering other sports. Essential Baby: Parenting community forum purchased by Fairfax in 2007, which has now grown into Australia’s largest online community for women, with 139,000 members leaving 10,000 posts a day.
InTheMix: Dance music appreciation forum that grew into a company, The Sound Alliance, with division covering rock music and gay culture, along with ticketing and consulting services. Whirlpool: Possibly Australia’s most influential forum with more than 250,000 members and 100,000 visitors each day.
“People never tire from discussing their telecommunications services,” he says. The capacity of forums to gather large numbers of people into public conversations has not been lost on mainstream business. Frantzeskos regularly works with customers to help them understand and participate in these conversations, but says it is important that the moderators allow conversations to flow freely, even when comments are critical of the music festivals and advertisers on which The Sound Alliance is able to generate strong advertising revenue from the traffic its forums surge to 180,000 in October, and leave more than 100,000 posts, well up on the 75,000 that were left in May.
He says the best online forums SmartCompany / Monday, November 24, 2008 Many companies underestimate the power of online forums as a branding, marketing and communications tool. Here’s how Australia’s best forums do it – and five of the conversation, add value, and don’t be afraid to participate,” he says.
Brand management The open nature of forums however is not always easy for companies to adapt to, as an open conversation is as likely to bash their brand as praise it. Frantzeskos says this is something they just need to deal with. “Whether it’s on your forum or someone
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