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.