Recently we attended the second-ever ForumCon in Chicago, IL. The conference was a one-day event that brought together almost 200 forum owners, software developers, and marketing experts to talk about a variety of topics including community growth, best practices, monetization, and trends.
The conference was one of the better ones I’ve attended due to the fact that it was so focused on the needs and concerns of forum owners. Forums have been around for nearly 30 years, and people who own them and use them have had to adjust to a rapidly changing internet landscape. The social wave of the mid 2000s brought millions of new users to the web and created a new mainstream in which people expect all sites to behave a certain way. Forums, while doing some things really well, have had trouble keeping up with the WordPress/Blog/Twitter/Facebook revolution.
Several of the panels focused on monetization—a serious concern for longstanding communities that have been run out-of-pocket as a labor of love or relied on user donations to stay afloat. There was also an interesting panel on buying and selling forums.
The generation gap
What struck me as an interesting undercurrent through the entire conference was the feeling that I was witnessing a serious generation gap. Forums and forum software are part of a pre-social generation that many times just doesn’t “get” social media and the expectations and needs of modern web users. Forum owners and developers almost derisively refer to a “Facebook-like experience”, and show reluctance or downright animosity towards the idea that users may want to share information or connect on networks outside of the forum ecosystem (the famous “Who cares what you had for lunch?” example was heard more than once).
At the same time, forums have been trailblazers long before the current trend of online community building. All of the “best practices” that the newly-minted Community Management industry are touting are old hat practices in the forum world. These guys and gals have known how to manage communities since the 1980s. There used to be a bias in the social media world that forums and their software are the old guard, a dying way of communicating, and out of touch, but that trend is changing as the new generation of community managers realizes that Facebook and Twitter are not good community tools. They’re looking for more, and forum types are saying, “Ahem… We’ve been here the whole time. Glad you found us.”
Monetization
The majority of the conference was focused on the age-old problem of monetization. In the conference agenda, one of the panels was a presentation from eBay’s JJ McCarthy called “An Introduction to the eBay Partner Network.” Matt and I derisively snorted and said “Oh goodie. Looking forward to an hour-long sales pitch.” There’s always one at every conference, right?
We were dead wrong. JJ McCarthy was fascinating, and articulated something we’ve felt deep in our hearts for a long time now: Traditional ad sales are dying. CPM and CPC are broken and outdated models. What eBay Partner Network is doing is trying to develop new quantification for effectiveness of ads based on quality of leads and other factors. It was a fascinating explanation of the lengths eBay is going to to redefine the relationship between site owner, advertiser, and interested consumer. While consumers generally indicate disdain for ads, they are also generally receptive to being connected with relevant products at good prices. It’s a paradox and a quandary that eBay is dedicating a lot of resources to.
Another extremely fascinating panel was a talk about the “Amazon tax”, or the Affiliate Nexus Tax. It was the most riveting of panels because one of the panelists has gotten so enormously screwed over by this cluster of poorly-executed legislation that she has actually decided to uproot her entire life and move herself and her business out of the State of Illinois. It was actually heart-wrenching to see. If you’re not familiar with the Affiliate Nexus Tax, a good summary written by Shareasale’s Brian Littleton can be found here. Imagine a world in which little websites who make their living with affiliate links on their blogs have to file fifty one separate tax returns. It’s actually possible with the way things are heading. While a Federal Sales Tax would solve the problem, there is obviously a whole raft of political issues involved that make this a very, very hot topic for site owners and consumers. I met with Littleton after the panel and came away impressed with how passionate he is about this topic.
Best Practices and the Future of Forums
The rest of the conference panels were about best practices and the future path of forum sites (like yours truly). Dan Gill of Huddler had a fantastic presentation about three different types of users called “Three users walk into a bar”, calling attention to the user experience (what they see and the way they interact with sites) of logged in users, “power users”, and visitors. “The Future of Forums” was a panel with developers of Vanilla Forums (which Icrontic is in the process of transitioning into), phpBB, Proboards, and Lithium. This was the panel during which the generation gap was most striking to me: Of those software packages, only Vanilla seems to be developing with a forward-thinking social media interoperability mindset. It is telling that during the entire panel, WordPress wasn’t really mentioned. At the end, during the Q&A, one of the first questions from the audience was, “I’m looking for forum software that integrates seamlessly with WordPress.” While the others were “working on that”, Vanilla‘s CEO Mark O’Sullivan looked incredulous and said, “Uh, yeah. We do that….?” As if it should be obvious.
And it should be obvious. The world has moved on; WordPress and blog sites are what people expect when going to a URL. Having WordPress and forum integration should be a no-brainer. WordPress has only been around for, oh, eight years now, and only powers, oh, 22 million websites globally. No big deal. “We’re working on it” indeed.
To ForumCon and beyond
As only the second-ever ForumCon, I think Viglink did a fantastic job putting these panelists together in the same room with forum owners and advertisers. These are conversations that needed to be had, and they are the conversations that will advance the state of our industry. I’m definitely looking forward to the third, and highly recommend that anyone with a vested interest in online communities look into attending.
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