Forums – Day 1 – What is it?
Nov 23, 2009 Social Media & Network Challenge
Week 3: Forums
(Being Thanksgiving week and because Forums are pretty simple and well known, today will be the week’s only post for the Challenge. Now go enjoy your turkey. And if you live outside the United States, go enjoy one anyway.)
Photo by victoriapechham on Flickr
Forums have been around for a very l0ng time. They are mostly used in a ‘question-answer’ scenario. One person may ask, but it isn’t like an email where the answerer is one person or a small group. It is whomever has access to the question and can read it.
My clothes washer was leaking. In order to skirt the Maytag repairman coming out, I went online and found a forum. It not only led me to the problem, but let me to the solution which was detailed by multiple people, all adding their insights. I followed the steps and solved the problem. In the steps it said that one task would take two people. I figured out how to do it by myself. That is something that I can give back.
Why a forum? Not only can multiple people answer, but, even more importantly, there very well may be more than one answer given the situation. The different answers may have varied perspectives which will help you find the exact answer you are looking for.
Sure, when we have a question we can Google it. And we can get back one expert’s opinion. But we can also get back many others’ opinions. Are they all experts? Maybe, maybe not. But most questions asked do not need an expert’s opinion – they may just require new perspectives. Just having the question previously and either working out the solution or learning from others is enough to provide others the answer. (I fully realize, of course,
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Tags: forum, social media challenge
