A while back, my friend and partner Garrett French recently wrote this post about lessons learned form visits to Hard Knocks University over at the Search Marketing Standard Blog. He mentions and links to a story about a post in which he was getting flamed for flagrant marketing during some recent forum participation on behalf of a client of ours.

Well, that story was informative, but the real story was how we earned our forum participation stripes when we first introduced ourselves to that same wonderful group of fellas.

At the time, the site we were working on was still in development, we had some static pages all linking to amazon and didn't even have a blog. Furthermore, we weren't even completely up to speed on how all of the free shipping, price match guarantees and other value ads worked.

Everything we were doing was exploratory into a space we as of yet knew little about.

My goals for the forum participation campaign were as follows: (Garrett's goals may vary slightly)

• Gain access to smart people who can help us answer tough questions from our users and customers.
• Bring enough value back to those communities so that we will be seen as members of the community rather than outsiders trying to exploit it.
• Use our interactions with the community to fuel and inform valuable content for us to blog about and to bring additional value back to the forums.
• Work all of this into the rest of our marketing with high quality links and traffic.

In the beginning:

We had a nice honeymoon in one particular forum that boasts about 17,000 members. Not a small fish by any means. We had asked about 4 different questions on behalf of site users and gotten great feedback and fantastic input to take back to our users.

Additionally, we made sure to let the users know where we got the answers, urged them to join the assisting forum and made sure to let the forum know that we had done so.

Remember, we didn't have a blog yet to show them how we were using their feedback.

The lovers quarrel.

Then one day, on post 4, the trolls showed up.

It started with someone posting about how we were just using them for customer service. After some more back and forth one of the forum members went on to our site and ripped it limb from limb with a series of harsh-but-true criticisms.

Reading it, I felt like I was looking into one of those magnifying mirrors women use to see into their pores. It was not a pretty sight by any stretch of the imagination.

Denial - Anger - Bargaining

All three of these stages went by pretty quickly as we realized how true of a text lashing we had just received. We knew what was on the line and how important these forums were to us. We also knew that we would face these problems in every forum we were breaking into.

We thought about ignoring them, giving the forum time to cool off, telling them the site was still young, we would try to change it later and all kinds of other wrong moves. We even considered pulling out of the forums all together like dogs with our tails between our legs until the new site was launched and we had something to show for our effort.

Depression

For the rest of that day G an I were beaten. We didn't know what to do. Our cred was slashed and our next move had to be the right one. In order to address all of their criticisms I would have to make a couple of days worth of edits to the site as we couldn't find references to some of the advertised features on Amazon we were being ripped into over.

Additionally, this was not the only forum we were beginning to get push back in.

We slept on it.

Acceptance

That previous evening, we were both up all night and somewhere in there, time gave us back our motivation. The next morning we researched all of the feedback and made a list of way to handle or remedy each blow dealt to us.

For the rest of that day, I made site and messaging changes, added pages and made other alterations to shore up our defenses from further attack.

During this time, Garrett crafted our response to be firm, slightly apologetic but mostly to say "You were right. Look, we fixed it.".

In retrospect, that was the only wining response we could have come back with and our response informed and helped us smooth over the push back we were getting in other communities.

Victory

Our reply was well received, the site changes and apology/site response worked. We showed this community that we wanted to belong, we were willing to change, we are open and responsive to criticism and that we were serious about this relationship.

If this is beginning to sound like your marriage, it should.

The path forward

Sense then, we have tweaked our approaches, launched the new site and started blogging like gang busters. Because of our relationships with forums, we have had a steady supply of great ideas and feedback to inform useful blog posts and some killer link bait.

Mind you that the linkbait was informed and written with the input of the forum relationship we had saved through an open and honest response to harsh-but-true criticism.

Follow Up

If you would like to learn more about forum participation and how to become part of the conversation in your marketplace, check out the great articles Garrett has written recently.

The Community Correspondent - A Guide To Creating Link Worthy Content Through Forum Participation

Lessons In Branded Content Creation Through Community Participation