I was reminded today of what a double edged sword forum communities can be. On the one hand, niche related forums can be a great place to hang out and build a reputation. However, as we mentioned in a previous post, push to hard or work to fast and you will find your reputation management strategies have been totally wasted.

Forum communities have been around much longer than any of the current social bookmarking sites, some are older than the world wide web (www) itself. Used judiciously, these forums can be very beneficial, particularly if you have a highly specialized web sites.

It is quite a paradox when you consider normal bricks and mortar business communities. They tend to spend most of their time trying to outdo each other; trying to get that business edge that brings the customer to their door rather than yours. With forum communities it is almost the opposite. Rather than seeing each other as commercial rivals, members of these communities relate to each other with a true community spirit - perhaps a legacy of the traditional pre www forum days.

With this in mind, your approach to any forum needs to be on the basis of participation. Forum communities are a great source of information particularly when it comes to product problems (and their solutions), current trends and corporate gossip. You would be surprised at how many product recalls are started because of problems identified by members of a forum. Listening to corporate gossip, while generally just that, gossip, can at times give you a head start on your commercial rivals.

Whilst most forums provide you with profile pages similar to bookmarking sites, forums often also allow signatures where you can place information such as your web address. These signatures are automatically added every time your post a comment or ask a question. Social bookmarking sites rarely allow such blatant promotion.

Other major benefits include the question and answer processes. Forum communities exist primarily as information tools. They are ideal places to canvas solutions for problems you may be experiencing in your particular field. It is similar to having a team of experts in a room. Throw in a problem and sit back and watch the debate. Eventually you will have a range of solutions most of which have been tried and tested. The more reliable participants talk from experience.

Once you start participating in these debates, you will find two things happening. First, you can become hooked. Secondly, if you talk from experience and can demonstrate a knowledge of the topic, you will be looked upon as an equal who can be trusted. From there, the benefits of belonging to forum communities will truly come to the surface.

Forum communities could be considered old fashioned. The results can be slow in bearing fruit however the amount of fruit eventually gathered could be equal to, or greater than, many of the social bookmarking sites. Don’t brush them aside to readily - fruit is fruit.

The more social networking you do, the better you must get at reputation management.

“Social networking.”

The phrase sounds so … businesslike. Let’s try another one:

“Social backbiting.”

Ooh! Might be fun to eavesdrop on THAT one! Unless, of course, YOU are the one whose back is being bitten.

If you’re active in social networking, your ideas will be attacked by other marketers. You’ll be challenged by strangers. Or customers. Or even colleagues or friends.

Someone will rail against your thinking and try to intimidate you. They’ll be rude. They will try to look good by making you look bad. It’s important to have a good reputation management plan in place for these occasions.

So what do you do when you make what you thought was a helpful comment on one of the forum communities, and in return you get hostility - someone else in the community slams you or ridicules you?

This absolutely will happen if you are an active social networker. Consider yourself fortunate. You now have an enormous opportunity to bond more closely with a lot of others in the community. Because they see that you are in a very uncomfortable situation, which is OK with them, because it should be pretty entertaining. They are watching closely to see what you do.

Your first reaction may be a kamikaze scream and attack. But remember, you are onstage, in the spotlight. You know these situations will happen, so you need a reputation management plan. Here are some choices:

1. Do nothing - which means you absolutely lose face in this group.
2. React defensively or angrily - see #1.
3. Pull the ol’ switcheroo, positioning yourself above this silly fray.

It’s like jiujitsu. When the other person attacks you, the force they use and their momentum always leave them vulnerable in some way. What would be really useful is for the whole community to picture you as your attacker’s infinitely patient mentor.

The key word here is “patient,” because along with expertise, that is what your market wants from a mentor. You will probably have the words for some clever counter-attack screaming in your ear. Resist it. When those words show up in print, they will put you right in the middle of the battle, not above it.

What words can you say to achieve “patient mentor” effect?

You might start with:

• “That’s a pretty common reaction” or
• “I forgive you” or
• “I respect your opinion. Here’s what I’ve seen …”

Then go on to very patiently explain why people often go off in this totally wrong direction. You’ve seen it a thousand times before. Maybe refer to the flawed reasoning that goes hand-in-hand with this flawed thinking. But do NOT attack your attacker. Let the community see your superior reasoning ability and your your infinite patience. Let them see that you are 100% unflappable in the face of a full-on attack.

Do you think THAT picture of you in their minds will create any new social networking opportunities for you? If you can keep that picture in the heads of community members, you will need to do very little active reputation management.

Effective social marketing begins long before you ever start the actual social networking, or before you ever link to a product or service.

One factor is absolutely essential for social marketing success. And ironically, it’s a step that most people just skip. The vast majority of people just decide to promote a product or service they like, or an idea that sounds exciting to them. But what they should REALLY do is …

ONLY promote a product or service with PROVEN high demand, one that people are desperate for.

You may be a master of social networking, but if you’re creating a ton of “know, like, & trust” relationships just to promote some “me, too” product, then you have wasted your time.

Or if you have to educate the market about why they need a product, or what it does, then you have a long, long, hard social marketing road ahead of you. If YOU have to create the energy inside every buyer, then you will struggle for every sale.

Life could be easy. Why make it so hard? Why not begin in a market where the prospects already have that energy bottled up inside, waiting to explode?

Best plan? Go to the forum communities that serve your market and see what people are talking about. This is the social marketing homework that can really pay off for you. Monitor these discussions for some period of time. Look in the archives. What do the hard-core widget lovers really want? What about the widget market really frustrates them? What makes them scream with pain?

Network with some of the most vocally frustrated widget-lovers. Talk with them. Get more details of the ideal solution to their problem. Get a deep understanding of what this market is looking for. Then either find or pay for someone to engineer the ideal answer to their pain.

Then go back to your widget-lovers and ask them to be beta-testers. Get them involved in your social marketing plan. Have them tell their friends about your new solution to their pain. Even before you sell the first product, you have a huge social marketing buzz.

When you know you have a product or service that the market craves AND you completely understand their pain and frustration, you have the ability to communicate with your prospects the exact points that will really motivate them. You’ll be able to really leverage your social marketing efforts. Your success then is pretty much a matter of just doing the work.

In effective social blogging, you write about your experiences which strongly connect with some picture in the minds of your readers - your target market. You share some common problems with them, and you need to keep these in mind when you write.

Who exactly are your readers? What drives them? For your social blogging success, you need to dig and really understand what problem it is that your readers are most desperate to solve. What problem do they have that they keep searching for answers to … but have a devil of a time actually finding anything that helps?

Read a lot of other blogs with the same audience as yours. Read the discussions in forum communities that draw your target market. What problems do the participants talk about over and over and over?

Communicate with your current readers. Ask them what their biggest bugaboo is, related to your blog focus … which they’ve been unable to find a satisfactory long-term solution for. Your readers are beating their heads against the wall over something. It may be obvious, it may not be. You must find it for sure. And then you solve their problem.

You can also get an idea what people really want by using your favorite “search” tool to see what terms they search for. For example, a friend in the network marketing arena says that of the top 20 search terms in that business, 15 of them involve “leads.” Do you think that getting good leads is a problem those people just have not solved?

When your reader has a problem they can’t solve, a problem that totally stops them in their success track, they get really frustrated. They post their question in forum communities. They search and search and search, but it seems like the information they want is buried someplace where they can’t find it.

And in comes you, the Knight on a White Horse. You know the problem, because you have focused your social blogging on finding problems exactly like this. You understand the problem, you can explain every detail of it (including some that your reader may not have even thought of), and you can give them the tools they need to solve that problem.

You can build a big fan club if you know what it is that your readers want, but which they just can’t find. THAT is social blogging that will build you an unbreakable network.

The aspect of LinkedIn with the greatest leverage is the ability to connect quickly (and sometimes emotionally) with powerful centers of influence whom you’ve never met. A strong social networking connection with the right person could change your life forever … maybe a lot of lives.

Bill Gates has asked a question at LinkedIn:

“How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?”

Wouldn’t it be worth your while - and fun, too! - to plan a continuing strategy of connecting with the movers and shakers in your field? Forum communities offer a lot of opportunities. Every social networking platform has its “big dogs.” How might it affect your future if your thoughtful contribution at LinkedIn Answers captured the imagination of one of the top people in your field?

It happens every day. Someone makes a quantum leap because they suddenly connected to someone who is REALLY connected. And as you make those efforts at LinkedIn and at forum communities or other social networking hotspots, you will get better and better at the strategy. As you read the responses of others who use the same strategy, you’ll get more of an idea of how to focus your response to strengthen your contribution.

Do you think Bill Gates will read these answers at LinkedIn? I’ll bet he does. Do you think a ton of other well-connected people will participate and also read these answers? I’ll bet they do. So here is just one of many social networking chances you have to leap-frog your competition. Answer Bill Gates’ LinkedIn question and REALLY nail it!

Answer Bill Gates’ Question

Discussion Forums give you the opportunity to place your thoughts and skills in front of a large community of people who are really, really, really dedicated to a niche. In other words, the right active niche forum could turn out to be a very, very good group of targeted prospects for your business. And for every person who is active in the forum, there are probably 10 who just lurk, reading everything, looking for the right people to connect with, never saying a word.

You have a chance to connect with ALL of that forum community. It can be a wonderful opportunity for you.

On the other hand … do you remember when Harrison Ford got tossed into the snake pit in the first “Indiana Jones” movie? He hated snakes, and he was thrown into a hole with hundreds of them. That could easily be you, if you aren’t careful about approaching a new forum.

Don’t believe me? OK. Search Google and find some active forum in your niche. Sign up and jump right in with a new post about the wondrous things you can do for everybody. Then listen to the background “hum” in your new community. Oops! That’s no hum. Those are RATTLES! Can you hear them?

The snakes are there for the same reason you are there: to find prospects and to cultivate customers. If they think you may be a prospect, they’ll be polite and helpful. But they’re still a rattlesnake. None of them wants more competition. If they see you as a competitive threat, they’ll gang up and swarm you, and you will disappear in a hurry.

So approach any discussion forum with care. Practice common-sense reputation management. If you moved into a new community, you wouldn’t stand on your rooftop and start screaming about what a great new neighbor everybody has just gotten. Don’t do it in a forum, either. Never introduce yourself by making a claim. Watch the forum for awhile, get an idea where the snakes are, and start your participation by asking for advice here and there.

Your best plan is to hang around and ask a thoughtful question or two and let the community get to know you. You can usually include a signature file with your post, linking to your website.

While you are there, keep a list of the questions other forum community members ask. What is their biggest problem? Write a report, or record an mp3 file, or a video. Solve some common problem for them. Offer the information for free to all the other community members. This time, you definitely want to include a signature file linking back to your website.

By now, you are an accepted, welcome member of the discussion forum community. You can fully participate in discussions without being flamed … so long as you know your stuff. Anytime you get too big for your britches, the snakes will come after you. So make it a point to always know and be able to prove what you are talking about.

And it never hurts to grow your own big rattle, either.

One often overlooked form of social media marketing is visiting forums. An active membership in two or three forums is enough to help your business along. The key to social media marketing through forums is to build relationships with the other forum members by entering into dialog and conversation and being of general help. It really doesn’t take a lot of time.

In just 1 or 2 hours per week you can build solid relationships with other forum members and drive traffic to your website.

Most forums require you to sign up with a user name and password. After doing so, fill out the profile information about yourself and create a signature link that links to your blog and company website. I prefer sending new traffic from forums to my blog because a blog is less threatening. You are not necessarily trying to close the sale on the blog. Your blog is there to drive traffic to your website where you’ll close the sale. But the key to getting other forum participants to visit your blog is to be of some assistance to them.

There are three general levels of forum interaction:

1. Experienced Veteran - These people have been around a long time and probably know more than you do. Don’t step on their toes. Be respectful. You can disagree, but don’t make waves, especially if you are talking to a forum moderator. Remember, what comes around goes around.
2. Newbie - Also called noobs. These people are not only new to the forum, but may also be fairly new to the Internet. They may slip up from time to time so go easy on them. They are potential customers, but they are also so human so they deserve respect and kindness. Be a big help to them by sharing what you have learned through your experience and you can develop relationships with these people over time.
3. Adolescent/Young Adult - I’m not talking about actual adolescents or young adults. This personality type may be new to a forum or may have been around longer than the noob but not as long as the veteran, or they may be somewhat experienced with Web interaction and be totally new to the forum. Don’t assume that because a person has just a few posts on a forum that they are totally new to the Internet. They may actually be a seasoned veteran who does a lot of lurking. Be respectful. Share your knowledge, but also be willing to learn.

Forum interaction is a form of social interaction. People join forums primarily for the community. Many forums have taken strict measures against any perception of spam or blatant advertising. For that reason, you’ll want to be subtle. If you have events or specials you want to promote, find out if a forum has a special thread set aside for that. If not, don’t push it. Many times you can drop hints about certain things if it fits in well with the topic of a thread. Be careful that you don’t overdo it or come across too pushy. Just hang out and make friends.