The Construction Marketing Ideas Group on LinkedIn
Successful, established forums including contractortalk.com and remodelcrazy.com are key sources of inspiration for this blog and my business. Forum moderators are generally pretty good at weeding out the marketers from the practitioners, who offer real-life stories, ask practical questions and often offer insightful peer-oriented solutions.
The challenge in making a forum work is that you need a critical mass of leading and active participants, which a good flow of newcomers who add to the diversity and interest. As well, moderation needs to be carefully managed. Some marketers believe that forums are the greatest place to sell their products and services to forum participants and, in some respects, they are correct. If you can convince the leaders within your target market’s community to use and positively review your products and services, you win an instant “in” in credibility (not to say some great search engine marketing points.)
But if the selling effort overtakes the forum, it loses its power and value. This sadly happens too often in sales and marketing forums, where participants are sellers and marketers — and so do their thing! Sometimes, in reading through these places, you feel like you are looking at a crappy collection of pin-up notices and advertisements. Who needs it?
Linkedin.com groups offer an intriguing and relatively “quick” way to set up business-to-business forums. Our Construction Marketing Ideas group now has about 800 members and has included some worthy discussions and ideas. I think however it will need about 2,000 members before enough core participants are in place to give it real communication power. Intriguingly, about that stage we probably will need to put in strict moderating rules to prevent promotional and sales-focused posts from dominating the space.
If you wish to “sell into” a forum, you should proceed very cautiously. In this space, I advocate giving rather than pushing — and surely you should respect the forum rules regarding any form of self-promotion especially if you are an outsider pitching your services to the trade group.
