Forum marketing
Have you guys heard of Boardtracker? It’s a search engine for forums, but they have a couple of features going for them that can make them a great tool for marketing research.
1. A lot of smaller topic-based forum sites have to disable their search functions to conserve bandwith and server resources. If you own a forum, boardtracker will let you use their engine on your site in exchange for crawling your forum.
2. They track changes and posts in near real-time.
3. They allow people with accounts to set up keyword alerts, similar to Google News alerts. When anyone makes a post using your keywords on the 30K+ boards indexed by Boardtracker, you get a notification and a link in your email.
The possibilities for this are pretty exciting to me. Are people talking about your company or product? Do they have the kinds of problems that your product can solve? This is a great tool not only for market research, but it’s also a great for PR and marketing.
I’ve only begun to scratch the surface with this site, but I’m definitely going to spend some time with it to see what’s possible.
Boardtracker is here:
http://www.boardtracker.com/
Fatal error: Call to undefined function akst_share_link() in /home/bradfcom/public_html/wp-content/themes/bradfallon/single.php on line 18