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Communities and Forums<br />
I can’t stress enough how important it is to make friends and connections online.<br />
Websites where lots of users gather to chat about a common interest are<br />
“gold mines” for brand owners. Just don’t treat it like a gold mine and you’ll be<br />
ok. Users are people, <strong>not</strong> gold.<br />
It’s tempting to jump into a forum and drop links to your brand and expect sales<br />
to boom. What usually happens is the community members jump on the brand<br />
for intruding on their turf and spamming them. Even if the brand is legit, it’s<br />
just <strong>not</strong> cool!<br />
Emptees.com was a great site that brought together t-shirt designers from around the world.<br />
The site shut down on March 1st, 2011 and was replaced by Mintees.com<br />
Self Promotion on Forums<br />
Sigh, yes I’ve done this before too. Bad Jeff. But this was when I was first getting<br />
started and didn’t know how the world worked yet. I was trying to promote<br />
my friend Brent Simon’s viral videos of him playing and singing songs on his<br />
keyboard. One of his songs was called The Bittorrent Song so I went on sites<br />
like Mininova and Ebaum’s World, signed up, and dropped the link to his videos<br />
with a comment like “Lol, look at this dork.”<br />
THREAD’S NOT DEAD • Jeff Finley<br />
Some members of the community called me out on it and realized I was one of<br />
the people behind it. While some actually liked the videos, others bashed me<br />
for self promoting it. People can be mean, let me tell you! Somehow the video<br />
caught on anyway (the videos were actually pretty good) and it did go viral and,<br />
as luck would have it, Brent landed on the Jimmy Kimmel show.<br />
Signing up and self promoting right away is bad taste. People call it spam, but<br />
it’s <strong>not</strong> quite. Spamming would be flooding their site with your links and messaging.<br />
So let’s just call<br />
this tacky self promo<br />
“Spam Lite.” It’s the<br />
ugly cousin. Either way,<br />
there are more effective<br />
ways to promote.<br />
Forums are sensitive communities with<br />
their own house rules. Respect them.<br />
As if you haven’t learned<br />
this by now, it’s best to<br />
be real and human. Participate in a community for quite some time and get to<br />
know everyone. Let your personality shine through and then when it feels right<br />
show off your goods! Chances are people will support you if you’re a good member<br />
of their community. If you are supportive of others, they will likely support<br />
you. The more positive vibes you generate around your brand the more you can<br />
watch your sales go up.<br />
Find a website with a community of people who are interested in the same stuff<br />
that your brand is about. Is your brand about horror films like Fright Rags? Then<br />
go where fans of horror films hang out. Pretty simple really!<br />
Horror.com is an example of a community of horror lovers. If you love horror and sell products<br />
that other fans like, you should fit right in and might get some new customers!<br />
Branding & Marketing 63
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