Comments on: Nontraditional PR

By: Mark Nebesky

Mark Nebesky — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 22:08:21 +0000

Yes, I completely agree with that.

By: David J Edery

David J Edery — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 21:46:54 +0000

Right. This is all very situation-dependent. I’ve observed several situations in which an extremely negative thread was salvaged by a candid, patient, respectful corporate representative (they still get attacked by people, but other people speak up to defend them, and the overall tone of the thread starts to shift.) I’ve also observed defensive reps get shot down. And, of course, there are some situations that reps should stay out of entirely.

By: Mark Nebesky

Mark Nebesky — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 21:37:19 +0000

I partially agree. On the one hand you are correct and I have done this to some positive results. On the other hand, I have gathered so much useful customer and competitive analysis from just sitting back and observing. Some malicious users have been very blunt about their methods, that I feel that if I had intervened they would have posted somewhere else on the web. Now we know what to look for and how to curtail such things.

And, I would argue that if you are patient enough and you trust your service/product, an unknown brand champion may emerge and do more good for you than you could have done. This just recently happened on two forums and it really makes your life as a marketer for a start-up that much easier.

By: David J Edery

David J Edery — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 21:11:12 +0000

There are other ways to interact with forum members, beyond promotional activity. For example, say that a thread discussing your product has been started by a consumer. (Assume that the thread is drawing a lot of attention and is part of a popular website.) Further, let’s say that the discussion is turning negative; people are concerned about an issue of some kind, are expressing confusion, etc.

It might be appropriate to pop in, identify yourself as an employee of the company, and candidly answer a few questions. This is different from promoting your products, and if you handle it right, cannot be labelled as “spam” by any reasonable moderator.

By: Mark Nebesky

Mark Nebesky — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 19:39:35 +0000

I would say that the issue of spam has been my biggest barrier to overcome with regard to forums. Generally, I have had success when I approach the forum admins on a “corporate” level. By that I mean I’m not posting as some “noob” on the forum about this great site that I found, but instead write a professional email reaching out to their admins. The emails typically say that I am interested in advertising on their sites with a banner ad and forum thread. Ad and forum rate negotiations can be tricky, but I often use a benchmark site and Alexa to lower their sometimes unreasonable offers.

By: David J Edery

David J Edery — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 15:49:09 +0000

Hi Mark — Thank you for sharing your experiences! And thank you as well for mentioning promotional activity and how it is generally treated by forum members (i.e. as spam.) That’s a really important issue that I forgot to address.

It can be easy to cross the line from “informational” and “responsive” to “inappropriately promotional (aka spam)”. This probably deserves an entire article of its own!

By: Mark Nebesky

Mark Nebesky — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 23:58:55 +0000

David,
I’d like to share my own recent experiences with nontraditional PR on blogs, forums and digg. After months in development, my partners and I launched an online platform for trading video games, Goozex. Like most startups, the budget for the all important marketing rollout plan simply isn’t there. I have been directing the marketing efforts and one of my main strategies has been to make a presence in online nontraditional PR channels. The first place I had some success was to spend a little to post a classified on Fark.com that yielded mixed results. I was able to moderate the forum there, but the life cycle was too short, only a week. We had an ROI of about $3 per user on that. I posted on forums left and right, offering signup coupons and majority banned me for life (spam is not appreciated – bottom line).

Then something funny happened. A user on his own submitted a thread on the Over Clockers forum about our site. Immediately we were getting users from this unlikely source. Then another user posted a Digg message. We attempted to moderate that message board, but users reacted negatively to our presence and so we left a Digg post to quickly fade away.

We finally hit the jackpot with a highly active forum on cheapassgamer.com. And just like you said, from the hundreds of users coming from that site, there are only a handful that are vocal and critical of our service. We have since then made a special coupon for their readers and the admin of the site has agreed to work with us.

I have also tried to reach out to prominent writers on Joystiq and other popular video game blogs, and only one person has shown interest. I am working carefully on building that relationship and hopefully creating a brand champion.

In summary, tread carefully through forums and blogs because the life cycles can be lightening fast and if you’re not prepared you can actually damage your brand image. Be professional on the forum posts and be honest with members. Also, be clear and understanding that not everyone knows what you know and you may have to answer the same question time and again. Forums can be a great place to do some customer analysis, but you must be able to weed out the perpetual complainers. Address their underlying point and move on. Finally, the ROI on forums and blogs is unbeatable if managed properly and you must have a system in place to record where new users are coming from.

There’s more to say, but I should leave it at this.