Lijit

Last week I had the pleasure of being on a panel at the Forum and Communities conference in San Francisco.

Since the inception of Lijit we have worked with publishers who have amazingly engaged communities of readers. Many of these publishers are in the mid- and long-tail. They have highly niche and conversational sites which encourages readers to engage by returning often, leaving comments, etc. My personal theory is that it’s because blogs tend to surface more of the personality of the author. Over time this personality acts as meta-data that the reader uses to form a bond with the publication, resulting in higher reader engagement. Lijit’s services were designed to help publishers foster this engagement.

Participating in the Forum and Communities conference introduced me to a different kind of publisher. Forums or message boards are places where extreme enthusiasts come to together online to share information about their deepest passions. For example, I regularly browse car forums to find information about the cars I own. I recently dug up some facts on the Camaro5 forum about how to install an aftermarket part. Forums are an amazing wealth of information. Many call forums the original social network.

Forums tend to get a lot of their traffic from Google and other horizontal search engines. That makes sense given all the original user generated content (UGC) that appears on forums. Interestingly, forums tend to receive very few referrals from social network services such as Twitter of Facebook which probably has something to do with their makeup. Forums tend to focus on the community without having a clear central personality. This makes it difficult to leverage a personality-based service like Twitter to drive traffic.

With a little creativity, however, forums could easily leverage these social tools. When I look at sites like icanhascheezburger.com, the CEO Ben Huh has done an excellent job with Twitter serving as a single personality who represents a curated site where content is created by the community. Ben highlights various posts and general information about the site which helps engage the community and keeps readers coming back for more.

I really enjoyed the time I spent with forum publishers and am committed to finding ways that Lijit can work with them to provide the same great business partnership we have with mid- and long-tail sites!

Tags: events, Lijit publishers