By acknowledging that their
customers have a voice??”and that many of them are just as smart as their own employees??”
companies can be confident that their forums will grow into sprawling repositories of
information. If traditional knowledgebases are bonsai trees, carefully pruned and tended
by the corporation, forums are creeping ivy, expanding organically in all directions at once,
fertilized by the constant tides of member activity.
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Both have their purpose, but over time, a forum can prove to be an irreplaceable source
of information to customers as well as provide three key assets to companies:
1. Community building: Over time, forums often become the central hub for customers,
because of the sense of common ground. It??™s where the topmost fraction
of corporate evangelists engage in flame wars with the bottom-most fraction of
disgruntled customers, with oceans of lurkers, moderators, and curiosity seekers in
between.
2. Information repository: The most active forums have dozens of posts every hour. In
time, the community??™s knowledge becomes the definitive source of information,
and searches through the forum??™s archive can dwarf the searches in a company??™s
FAQ or knowledgebase.
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