Jason Falls: Why I Don’t Ignore Forums
Over the years, I’ve developed a great respect for Jason Falls, Founder of Social Media Explorer and Vice President of Digital Strategy for CafePress. One of the things that I respect about Jason is his honesty and his pursuit of truth. He doesn’t simply follow trends or rely on what is known or easy. Instead, he has a reasoned perspective that allows him to see the diversity of social media.
To me, the people who really understand social media understand how big it is. Jason doesn’t just talk about Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Pinterest. Or Google+. He doesn’t just talk about the buzz brands in social. He talks about it all. What he really follows is results. He wrote a book about email marketing and has written about forums time and time again. In April, he threw out a startling figure: 90% of trackable discussions around the banking industry happen in forums.
What impresses me about this is that Jason isn’t just any social media marketer or digital marketer. I consider him to be among the most visible, most widely respected in the industry. In an industry where a lot of consultants, a lot of agency people and brand people simply choose to ignore anything not named Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest (and maybe Google+ and YouTube). It’s not cool to write about forums. But, that doesn’t matter, because Jason is chasing the results, not the trends.
That’s why I respect him. To learn more about his thought process, I asked him a few questions.
If I search Social Media Explorer for “forums,” I can see that you’ve mentioned them a lot and written specifically about them many times. You have written about them elsewhere, like for Entrepreneur. You included them as a data point for The Social Habit and they factored majorly into the research you did about the banking industry. In an age where it is much cooler to talk about Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, why do you regularly talk about forums?
When you answer the question, “Where are people talking about my brand?” the answer is almost always predominantly in forums. For our research on the banking industry, we found that 90% of online conversations around banks and bank products happen on forums. I don’t have to explain to many people that 90% is a big damn number.
Simply put, if you buy the premise that social media marketing is about participating in conversations with customers, fans and prospects with the hopes of building trust and relationships to one day lead to purchase – in other words, the lifetime value of a customer, which is at the core of what all these social media types have been telling us for years – then you have to start with forum conversations. If you leave them out, you’re simply saying, “Yeah, we just wanna sell stuff.”
I also find it peculiar that marketers play the numbers. Click through rates on PPC (pay-per-click) and online media are abyssmal (less than half a percent in most instances) yet marketers will throw hundreds of thousands of dollars to get that less than half a percent to equal 10,000 or 20,000 people. But when it comes to conversations, they see 90% of them happening on platforms they ignore, yet still choose to ignore them.
In a way, what I’m doing is exposing marketers as frauds. They want to “join the conversation” as long as that doesn’t actually mean having conversations with customers. It’s either that, or they just are ignorant to the impact forums have.
You mentioned some of the research you’ve done. I am sure that your approach feels right to you, which is important, but I have always felt it was also driven by data. Outside of the banking industry, what does the data tell you, as far as forums and their place in the social web?
The notion that forums fuel much of the online conversation holds true in most industries. I did several spot-checks recently to make sure I wasn’t seeing this from a limited run of subjects and everything from panty hose to cars to cell phones and more show that forums are the top or second-most popular source for conversations. There are some variations, of course. When people talk about restaurants, they typically offer quick mentions on superficial networks like Twitter. “I’m going to McDonald’s.” They don’t tend to dive deep into conversations about brands there.
But when you look into conversations about health, you’re right back to forums as the top source. So it doesn’t always hold true, but in many and I would even say most cases, forums are where people are talking about the subject.
You’ve worked with many brands over the years. No doubt you’ve participated in forums on behalf of brands before, or at least coached someone who did. What are your most memorable or meaningful interactions with forums in that context, as far as the positive results for the brand?
In the early days of my advising brands in social… years ago… like 2006 (heh), I was working with a spirits client that was launching a new whiskey. There was a fairly active spirits forum I had joined a few months before and participated in lightly with full disclosure (via signature) as to who I was and what brands I worked with. I actually reached out to the admin when I joined and told them who I was and that I wasn’t there to sell or spam, but more get a read on what people were saying about various brands, my own and others. So we had this product launch and we thought that forum community would be a good group of people to introduce the product to.
I reached out to the admin and just asked, “How is it best to let them know this new product is coming out and we’d like their feedback on it?” He appreciated the respect for the community so much he asked me to send him the information and he posted it. Talk about a win for the brand?! The admin essentially endorsed the brand – or at least took on the responsibility of introducing it to the community. Couldn’t have asked for a better turn out.
And the response from the forum was nice. Very fair and honest feedback that I took back to the brand and they took it to heart, even adjusting some messaging to be more clear about the product.
In October, I wrote an article where I said that many social media monitoring services don’t comprehensively monitor social media, especially if they don’t monitor forums and online communities. Going back to the banking industry, if you are in that industry and your social media monitoring efforts only really track and prioritize public posts on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you are missing out on 90% of the conversation. If you “monitor social media” by only seriously paying attention to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, etc., are you really getting the full picture of social media? And are you doing a disservice to your clients?
The answer to that isn’t all that easy. First of all, if you’re using a social media monitoring service, you can only use the technology to monitor what it provides. Most say they monitor “all” or “most” of the web, even though they don’t. There are private forums, “no follow” forums and websites and, if you want to take it to a new level, there’s Dark Social – email and instant messages that drive sometimes 50% of all referral traffic, according to some testing done by The Atlantic. So let’s first establish that using technology alone, you can’t monitor all, or even most (probably) of social media.
If you wish to add some human analysis and monitoring to that equation, you’re looking at a ton of human resource hours committed if you want to keep up with ALL conversations, all forums, all blogs, etc. The smallest bank on the planet could put a team of 100 people on social monitoring and still not keep up with all the relevant content out there.
So to think that a company is doing a disservice to its customers by not monitoring everything is, I think, a little strong.
But it is imperative, in my opinion, that a social marketer pay close attention to where the customers of his or her brand are participating, whether forum, blog or social network, and actively monitor those communities however the technology best allows. To not seek and prioritize monitoring and participation is a disservice, but not just to customers – to the community and the brand itself. You can’t be everywhere, but you can be in the most important places and you can establish that expectation with the audience so they know where to find you.
Interesting read, but it seems a bit conflicting. For example, if you’re primarily participating in online forum discussions to convert people, how is that not fraudulent as well? I’m a bit confused by this article in that sense among others.
I’m even more confused on where these numbers came from, especially the conversions from registered forum users? Can you shed some light on those conversions by chance? It’s very interesting to me having worked in the video game industry managing large-scale online forum communities for some mega-hit brands. It’s even more interesting to me to see that conversions are being managed from online forum communities that you don’t own. How is that? Please due go in more depth here.
Hello Mr. Swan,
Thanks for the comment.
This article really wasn’t about conversions or converting people and those words aren’t used. It is about how influential forums are when it comes to conversations online and why a marketer like Jason, who is widely known and respected, hasn’t ignored them when many of his peers do.
As an aside, having managed online forums for 12 years, I’ve had plenty of brand representatives try to spam my forums. My goal is to help them engage in the right way because I feel like there is an opportunity to do so, in a way that is beneficial for both them and for the community. I’ve written about this numerous times. Here are some examples:
http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/how-to-engage-in-online-forums-for-your-brand/
https://www.managingcommunities.com/2011/01/13/quick-and-easy-guide-to-company-and-brand-engagement-on-communities-you-dont-own/
http://smartblogs.com/social-media/2009/04/27/4-simple-rules-for-generating-traffic-from-forums/
It’s about participating in a genuine way and offering value to the community, not injecting links in your contributions. If it is about “primarily participating in online forum discussions to convert people,” I advise them not to. Jason is aligned with those beliefs and that is why I respect him as much as I do.
Thanks,
Patrick
Thanks for the response!
The reason I brought up conversions is because that’s the reason it’s primarily ignored right? I could be mistaken, but if there was a way to track value there, then it the 90% of those online conversations wouldn’t be ignored right?
If you’re going to to go out there and claim something is not worth forgetting, then you somewhat have to prove it’s value. Online conversations, especially when it’s much lower than 90% in other industries, is only one slice of the bigger pie. Therefore, conversions kind of tie everything together in terms of that tangible value that you can actually use.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say that participating in a genuine way and offering real value to a community is bad. I’m just trying to find out why it all really matters to a online marketer if they can’t honestly trace that effort to a return? Online conversations happen every day. You can spend years building a robust online community and still have nothing to show for it other than online conversations in a online forum. That doesn’t exactly prove that spending more effort in online forums is worth the effort, thus still giving you a clear answer on why so many ignore forums.
I only say this with 7 years managing large-scale online forum communities myself in the video game industry. Then 5 years outside of the industry in a more independent fashion. That’s why it kind of struct interest for me when I read this very interesting article.
Cheers!
I should clarify something too being I can’t edit my comments here. When I mean show something for it, I mean something you can track like a purchase, a mention, a something outside of the actual online forum. You know, something that shows that effort paying off in the long-run. Such things are still in development, especially in social media. In my humble opinion, forums will only become more relevant when tools like that start to exist.
I would love nothing more than to prove my forum engagement to a community helped retain X amount of existing consumers to a product I represented. Unfortunately, we simply don’t have the tools to show that impact in one good example of what I mean. :)
Cheers!
Thanks for that, Mr. Swan. I think that, in large part, what you are saying applies to conversation in general, online or off. There are always things you can track, but even the things you can track are limited in scope. While there are things you can point to, at the end of the day, the impact of most of your efforts just aren’t trackable, no matter where you are conversing. At some point, you either believe in the value of engagement or you don’t.
Thanks,
Patrick
Here’s a post that explains more depth in tracking, Glen. The systems are there. They aren’t cheap, but you certainly can genuinely participate and track value return. The example involves me but wasn’t done or run by me. Coincidentally, this post ran today on Shift Communication’s blog.
http://www.shiftcomm.com/2012/12/measuring-earned-media-impact-with-marketing-automation/
Thanks for that, Jason.
I don’t understand what you mean Patrick. The whole reason online forums are not taken as serious is because of that mere fact. It’s hard to track the return on your investment whether it’s engagement, events, or whatever inside that online forum community. Regardless of what you believe or what excuse you may have to why you can’t track everything, is the primary reason why it’s overlooked by the majority. Unless you can prove that wrong and greatly advance how our hard work pays off, it will continue to be overlooked regardless of where majority of the online conversation lies on the interwebs.
I don’t mean to step on any toes here, but I just wanted some clarity on the conversion because of how much it impacts the reason on why online forums are not as serious.
Take care!