Message boards – a primer

By Dana Schwartz on May 22, 2009 | Comments

A message board or online forum is the digital version of an old fashioned bulletin board.  You know those cork bulletin boards, the ones you still see in coffee shops, covered with flyers about yoga classes, apartments for rent and community events?  On the Internet, community information sharing happens much more quickly and easily via message boards that become forums for people to post ideas, ask questions and share advice.

Some message boards focus on topics of shared interest such as sports, health, beauty and fitness. iVillage.com, Yahoo, and Craigslist are three Web sites that host message boards covering a variety of broad topics.

Other message boards host more specific discussions. Some of our favorites are: The Emperor’s Star Wars Board for Star Wars fans, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure for women with breast cancer, and the Pet Adoption and Rescue for people looking for advice about adopting animals.

The bottom line is that message boards are useful in identifying and engaging with others who share your interests or are knowledgeable about topics you’re looking to learn more about.

Check out this featured blog post on SmartBlog on Social Media written by Patrick O’Keefe, owner of the iFroggy Network and author of the book “Managing Online Forums.” Here he wrote about the 4 simple rules for generating traffic from forums.

Photo credit, iStock


Related posts:

  1. FriendFeed – a primer
  2. Crowdsourcing – a primer
  3. Blogs – a primer

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  • MichaellaS
    tks for the effort you put in here I appreciate it!
  • janiceenberg
    A warm greeting to everybody! Hello to all,i am a new member of this forum and hope to have a good experience here
  • I just read the 4 rules and realized this past month I have violated each one about 3 times a day, asometimes managed to violate all 4 in a single sentence.

    But I am old and expierenced at writing and publishing but new at the crazy spider web tangled world.

    So good advice. But you got a great website, you think people
    will have fun when they see it, you want them to have fun,
    what do you supposed say? The sites name is posted on the
    wall at the starbuck at 2nd and M in Washington D.C.?

    Or I well give you the site name if you send a postcard to
    an officeshore mailbox I have?

    Really? How about having a list of comments in one column
    and Urls in another and readers try to match them.

    The winner gets to go on the radio and scream his or
    her url adresses for a whole day.

    I'm lucky no one else goes by the Name odac snarler

    except my other self which re-arranges the letters into
    a half normal name.

    Odac Snarler
  • Thanks so much for the mention, Ms. Schwartz.

    Patrick
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