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/
Posted by Brad Fallon on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 3:21 pm 
randomly found your site today just by surfing around
my main thing out on the net is a forum:
http://www.internet-messiah.com/forums
so when I saw this it was like WOW
thanks for link and ideas
This is indeed an interesting topic and site. I will check it out soon for sure. Thanks for the ideas Brad!
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Hi Brad,
I feel the ability to track changes and posts in near real-time is the most worthwhile idea of the site. Brillant stuff.
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Brad -
Thanks for the tip,
looks like another great idea I did not think of!
Jason
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Dear Brad,
Please let me know if you figure out a way to make money off of this!
Regards,
Mike
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i’ve used google alerts, so i like this concept.
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What a great site – I have already founf a bunch of forums that I can use to promote my site. Thanks for the info.
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This sounds interesting but I wonder if it isn’t going to lead to even more forum spamming.
I put up a test forum about 8 months ago and forgot all about it until a couple of days ago. The only post I had on it was the original welcome post and there were hundreds of spam posts on it, with no promotion or linking to site whatsoever.
If spammers can find this forum with no links into it and no content, a forum search engine is going to make it even easier.
Nat
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Brad, nice one – very interesting indeed. I just ran 3 different searches and low & behold, posts from people in the last few days looking for the answers to questions I can answer, and maybe sell the right product to them. I’ve been trying http://www.omgili.com/ recently, but it only brings up threads that are months and sometimes years old.
These methods of your are very interesting.
Thanks
http://www.travel-plus-rewards.com/
signed up. another nice find, thanks.
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Thanks for the information, I really like it..
this is nice too..
http://www.idmaster.org
This looks very interesting. I’ve been thinking of marketing to forums and this would help track discussions.
I have a question. If you post to forums, and you have your site url in your signature line, is it a live incoming link to your site?
Thanks,
Tom Fisher
Brad,
Did you guys have one similar for blogs too? I read it somewhere here but can’t remember / find it anymore.
Jeremy
http://www.delonixradar.com.au
Thanks Brad for the info.
We’ll try it out right away.
Sounds like a good move. I have never had much luck with forum searches – the terms I am usually searching for seem to be elusive and need several iterations to find what I’m wanting. Maybe this search engine will be a bit smarter than most forum searches. I guess I’m spoiled by the bigger, smarter search engines.
Garnet Bailey
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Hi Brad,
I have been following you posts for a while. Thanks for sharing the good things with others.
Thanks for the good work.
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