People Want Message Boards
In February, Kerry Bodine of Forrester published a research report entitled, “What Consumers Want On Media Web Sites.” In her research, Bodine and her team interviewed 5,000 online consumers about what they’d like to see on websites. Interestingly, one out of five reported that they’d like “discussion boards and forums on media sites.” That number jumps to one out of four in the Gen X (28-41 year old) category.
You’ll recall that back in July 2007, Alex blogged about how message boards are “The Original Micro-Communities.” We see this and Bodine’s findings reflected on many of our clients’ sites today. A great example is the Stone Temple Pilots’ KickApps site. The site recently went live and as picking up a lot of steam. With almost a thousand members already, the site’s message board is hopping with activity.
Another thing that the developers of the STP site did was to use their KickApps widget as a deployment component. We talk about widgets in terms of both a vehicle for hyper-syndication and also as a means of deploying media and content and creating a gateway from the ‘editorial’ portion of the site onto the community section. In this case, STP embedded a forum widget on the homepage of the STP site. The widget lists most recent discussions and updates the content of the widget via a KickApps powered feed. By doing this, they’ve not only integrated the site’s community content but also now have fresh and dynamic content that keeps fans of the STP coming back for more. This results in greater engagement on the website itself.
Another great example of this is on Planet Orange, the Phoenix Suns’ fan community.
April 27th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Ah, I went through to the link (I’m not paying $279 for a four-page executive summary!;-) but I think you left out one key word in the description of the study – they were saying what they would like in “INDUSTRY” Websites. As in, being able to talk to other users about a product or service, to help solve their own problems, etc.
That said, I also hope it’s something we’ll be adding to our Website at KTVZ.COM, now that KickApps and WorldNow are partnering. But it took a visit to the blog to see the almost-hidden(?) option of Yuku, which I’m now playing with a forum in.
Barney Lerten–Bend, Oregon
April 28th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Hi Barney — Thanks for your comment.
I’m glad to hear that you’re a WorldNow partner. I’ll bring this up to the client service team and I’m sure someone will be in touch. Let us know if there’s anything specific you’d like to review.
Yuku is an easy-to-use community building consumer application that is based on multi-media message board technology. The typical use case of Yuku is probably a little different from what you’d use for KTVZ.com–whereas KickApps is a pure white label solution.
The report we wrote about is part of a series of reports Kerry Bodine has published that looks into her research on several industries, including Media (which we cite), Travel, Banking and Consumer Electronics. She asks consumers what they’d like to see in websites in these industries. I believe these would be consumer facing sites in each case.
April 28th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Your kind response reminded me of the differentiation I saw yesterday on a front-page visit to http://www.zevents.com – it made me go “huh?” – sounded like the same thing described 2-3 different ways. Oh well, no uber-geek am I, but I’m hoping for great things moving forward. Thanks again.
August 3rd, 2008 at 3:11 am
I’ve recently joined and wanted to introduce myself