Your corporate Web site offers your customers product information, purchasing opportunities, and technical support. But one of the best sure-fire ways to generate loyalty is a discussion board. An online community can serve as a backup to your tech support department.
Users tell each other what works, and how to avoid potential problem areas.
Plus, a community keeps your customers committed to your product, which is a benefit that's difficult to quantify. Online community building can involve message boards, real-time chat, and file sharing. In this article, we'll look at the issues involved in setting up a Web-based discussion forum. Computer nerds have always liked to get together and talk about their projects, hobbies, and outside lives. As a result, discussion software has been around, in some form, for about 30 years, dating back to teletype printouts from primitive mainframe-based systems.