Online Forums And Twitter – Put Your Experts On Display And Curate The Conversation

I spent a few days in Dallas a few weeks back working with a Telligent client on some community strategy stuff. As expected, a lot of the conversation focused on the effect third-party social networks have on website traffic.

But more importantly, we tried to hone in on how social networks can stimulate online conversations. One of the things I’ve noticed is the relationship between forums and things like Twitter. I grabbed the screenshot from TreeHugger to show how they’re using Twitter to “lubricate” content that exists within some of their other online properties.

I put lubricate in quotations because it’s a word that Twitter’s Ev Williams uses to describe how Twitter excels at delivering multiple pathways to existing information. In that context, I don’t think  there’s a better way to describe it.

As far as my client work, the way I articulated it was to package your experts and present them online as visibly as possible. It’s not just about linking to your existing content, it’s also important to catalyze the opportunities to engage with your customers. Many describe that last piece as market conversations.

As I mentioned to my client, what better way to have your expertise on demand than having a Twitter List or widget displaying one of your brand’s experts ready to respond to forum posts or FAQs? It’s really a matter of augmenting what you’re already doing with your forums. Forum MVPs or purists will always stay close to some of their old habits, but increasingly users’ methods of interacting with you (and your content) is more free-form. In other words, your customers’ clicks aren’t always tied to your core brand content.

Today it wouldn’t be unusual for one of your customers to visit your site and quickly be whisked away to one of your employee’s Twitter accounts.
If that’s such an increasing use case, why not bring that closer to where your brand’s conversations originate? In a sense, I think this points to an increasing expectation on companies to have some level of curation expertise.

I’d even go a step further. Is it that far-fetched to hear that one of the deciding factors in selecting a vendor was how many of its employees were deemed as industry influencers or luminaries? Of course not, it happens all the time. But nowadays, the variables for how our customers come up with their observations are much more visible. With things like Twitter Lists, blogs and Facebook fan pages, expertise has never been on such public display.

A big part of my argument in citing the “Forums” use case has a lot to do with curation. What fascinates me the most is bringing curation closer to the business. It seems like Forums are one of the obvious candidates.