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What can a Message Board Do for your Business
by:
Aycan Gulez
6/13/2004 6:41:26 PM
What is a Message Board?
A message board (also called
a discussion forum or bulletin board) is a web-based tool that allows a group of
users to discuss topics of interest with each other. Message boards have been
around for quite some time, but their commercial use have been limited until
recently. In this article, I will briefly explain what a message board can do
for your business.
Stronger Connection with
Customers: Better Feedback
The most important function
of a message board is to create a stronger connection between you and your
customers. You may have the best product in the market, but if you cannot get
enough feedback about your product, you will never know what your customers
really think about it. A message board can provide you significantly better
feedback about your product by allowing many-to-many connections
(you-to-customers, customers-to-customers), which can be several orders of
magnitude powerful than conventional one-to-many connections (you-to-customers
only) such as e-mail.
Good Public Relations
A message board can show
everyone that not only you really care about your customers, but your customers
care about you and your product. Your customers share a common ground: they
either bought your product or are interested in buying your product, and there
is a very good chance that they want to discuss your product with other
customers. Which is more effective for answering a skeptic's queries on your
message board? Your word or your customers'?
Public Customer Support -
Help me Help you
Customer support can consume
huge amounts of time and money. Why not let your customers help each other? A
message board can easily act like a user group, and unlike conventional user
groups, its members can communicate with each other 24/7. You could be
pleasantly surprised to see that some of your customers actually do a better job
of supporting your product than you do, and best of all their support is free.
Private Customer Support
Not all aspects of a product
can be supported on a public message board. Your volunteer support force may not
or will not answer all questions (remember, you are not paying them).
Furthermore, not all your customers want to publicly reveal information about
their problems. Therefore, it is important that the only people who can view a
customer's support request are you and the customer who made that request (note:
only some message boards offer this functionality).
A private customer support
board can make a great addition to your existing support channels. In comparison
to e-mail and phone support, it is easier to track all previous correspondence
with a particular customer, and everything is searchable.
Monetize your Community:
Paid Subscriptions
If you are offering premium
content such as custom stock picks, you can ask subscription fees from your
customers. Some message boards have built-in payment gateway integration (e.g.
PayPal) that automates the process.
Internal Communications
A message board is not only
for your customers. You can use it as a collaborative tool to make your internal
communications more efficient. Your employees can either start a discussion or
reply to existing discussions started by other employees. If your message board
supports it, you can even attach files to your posts for others to see.
One Board for All
If you have come this far,
and decided to launch multiple message boards for different purposes such as
product feedback, public customer support, private customer support, paid
content, and internal communications, you may be thinking that managing all
these message boards can be maintenance nightmare. If so, I have good news for
you. Some message boards let you have all these separate messages boards under
one roof, so there is only one board to manage. This is accomplished by dividing
the users of your board into different groups each with its own set of
permissions. For example, your customer user group can see everything in the
public product feedback and support forums while they can only see their own
posts and your responses to their posts in the private support forums. Finally,
they are not aware of the existence an internal communications forum because it
is not visible to them.
Closing Comments
I am sure you can find other
ways to use a message board to help grow your business. However, keep in mind
that it takes time to build a real-world community, and an online community is
no different. If your message board is small in the beginning, do not get
discouraged, this is completely normal. Once your message board takes off, it
will become mostly self-sustaining. According to Metcalfe’s Law, the power of a
network increases by the square of the number of people connected to it. For
example, a message board with 10 active members has a power of 102=100
whereas a message board with 50 active members has a power of 502=2500.
In short, every customer is valuable. Help your customers and they will help
you.
About the author:
Aycan Gulez is the lead
developer of WowBB, an innovative message board software. WowBB supports
unlimited forums and users, a rich text editor with integrated spell checker,
polls, attachments, private messaging, search engine friendly URLs, and paid
subscriptions. WowBB is available in both standalone and remotely-hosted
formats. To learn more about WowBB, please visit
http://www.wowbb.com.
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