The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

Back to the Beginning

Forums—often referred to as chat rooms, message boards, or bulletin boards—go back to some of the very first uses of the private Usenet in the 1970s, and some of the early public Internet forums started at the beginning of the Web’s first public uses in 1995.

The forum was the predecessor to the blog (see Chapter 7, The Ubiquitous Blog, for more information). One of the author’s own first experiences participating in a forum was in 1986, when Apple announced eWorld—its own online service for communicating with their Value-Added Resellers (VARs; see Figure 5.1).

FIGURE 5.1 Apple eWorld Circa 1987

A VAR, or Value-Added Reseller, is a company that takes an existing product and adds its own value, usually in the form of a specific application for the product—for example, adding a special computer application and reselling it as a new product or package.

A strong sense of community or trusted network develops around forums, most of which have a theme or a conversation in which members share a common interest. Some of these include computers, cats, dogs, pets, sports, a particular team, religion, fashion, video games, politics, hobbies, cars, questions, comparisons, debates, polls of opinion—just about everything you can think of that people want to talk about. A forum is intended to promote an ongoing dialogue on a specific subject, which differs from the idea ...