Forums - a leading indicator?

Last week, the consumer advocacy blog, The Consumerist, had a couple posts of the "confessions of an X sales rep" form for wireless carriers (Sprint & Verizon). These posts [1] [2] have been featured prominently on Digg [3] [4] ( & possibly other social bookmark sites). What's fascinating is that they don't provide much new information.

Most, if not all, of this information has been in forums posts at a number of different wireless forums. In fact, one of the first Digg comments on the Sprint story is to check out the Sprint Users forum [5] (which incidentally has 871,583 posts by 110,380 members).

Thanks to someone putting the information in a bite-sized post and the good reach of The Consumerist [6] it appears this information is now being exposed to a larger audience.

• If all this information existed in forums already, why did it take so long to get exposose?
• What other information is buried in forums?

Why forums matter

With the explosion of consumer-generated/fortified media, why look at an old school technology like forums (bulletin boards, message boards, ...)? Despite the fanfare of blogging and social media, we believe that forums have a number of differences when compared to other social media:

• lower barrier to posting a thought: someone else (the forum owner) has set up the structure, all a user needs to do is login and post if they have a thought, question, or comment
• more diverse contributor base: it's not uncommon for forums to have >100,000 unique posters

Analyzing forum behavior has the opportunity to provide an insightful glimpse into conversations that are occurring. This is unlike analysis of blog, which measures the reach/influence of ideas.

Here's a purposefully vague 2x2 that briefly illustrates the point: