Nowadays you can’t go anywhere on the internet without running into comment boards and message boards. With the rise of web 2.0 they’re pretty much standard. Let me give you a brief rundown on the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Comment Boards, in a nutshell, are a stream of conversations centered around the content it’s attached to. It could be a blog post, a video, or a news story for example. They are more immediate and more easily accessible than a message board. You can quickly look at all the user conversations based on that article or story and respond in a linear fashion. Such openess, though, makes it difficult to have meaningful conversations. Still, they keep people coming back and they give whatever it is attached to more substance and depth. Not to mention the added bonus of group participation.

Message boards, however, are a place for discussions around a broader topic (like your company, for example). These build a richer community than comment boards, allowing more in-depth discussions and continued interaction. Because they are their own thing, they aren’t as immediate as a comment board and often require one to register to begin participating. Getting people to register on your message board (even though it’s free and registration only takes a few seconds) can often be a little hurdle.

The good news is that you don’t have to choose one over the other. Put both on your website since they perfectly complement each other.

Jordan Brauner is an audio and video producer, comic artist, and photographer with a deep passion for finding and telling great stories. Feel free to contact him at: jordan.brauner@folkmedia.org or follow him on twitter. Article Image from Jordland.

Ah, the wonderful world of forums… a place where the brilliant minded, the average Joe, and the deeply troubled can all come together to have heated arguments about nothing of great importance. Pessimism aside, there actually are a lot of great people out there to talk to, get advice from, share ideas with, and so on. Not to mention the ways in which you can use forums as a powerful medium to connect your business to its customers. I’ll talk about that another time, though, as this article’s purpose is to make sure you avoid the pitfalls of so many others in an effort get what you want out of the forums as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Basic Tips

• Basic Terminology:
  • Forum – A discussion board (also known as: message board).
  • Thread (Sometimes called a Post, much to the confusion of new users) – A new conversation on a forum. You can create more posts within this thread to continue that particular conversation.
  • Post – An entry in a thread.
• Common Forum Functions:
  • Quotations
    • Most forums nowadays have this excellent feature. When reading through a forum thread you might see a user’s post that you want to quote in your own post in the same thread. This feature immediately copies it and then pastes it within your reply post in an organized manner.
  • Edit
    • Many forums allow you to make edits to your post for a limited amount of time after the initial posting (often 90 minutes). Make sure to make your final tweaks within that time span or risk looking like a fool and being thoroughly humiliated by internet nerds.
  • Search
    • This allows you to search the entire message board history to find threads on whatever keywords you input.
• Common Forum Etiquette
  • When writing on a forum do not capitalize every letter in your sentence in an effort to garner attention. While this might work, it won’t be the kind attention you want. Writing in all “Caps” is seen as the textual equivalent of SHOUTING TO THE PERSON YOU’RE STANDING NEXT TO.
  • Before you post, make sure you search for your topic. If you are going to talk about something that has been answered multiple times you will more than likely get: no responses or angry responses… neither will help you much.
  • If you looking for help with something (such as technical support) make sure to provide as much information as possible in your opening post. Trust me when I say that the more information you provide, the more people will help you and the better the help will be. If you offer the bare minimum in your opening post of your thread with the expectation of giving more info once people respond then you might be waiting for a very long time.

Jordan Brauner is an audio and video producer, comic artist, and photographer with a deep passion for finding and telling great stories. Feel free to contact him at: jordan.brauner@folkmedia.org or follow him on twitter.