Event Marketing in Forums

I don’t think most event advertisements in online forum posts work. At least they don’t for me, especially if I see that a conversation is not developing and an event thread becomes nothing more than a dumping ground for advertising messages veiled as event updates.

Personally I ignore these. That is unless I know who the poster is. If I have raport with said poster I may comment, especially if I’ve already heard about the event and it is interesting to me. But if those criteria aren’t met I’ll only click on the thread heading to stop the annoying blink of an unread thread and I’ll barely read a word of it.

Now I don’t think forum advertising a waste, I just think organizers are terribly guilty of a great sin, especially within the Lindy Hop community. That is attempting to call attention to, and sell oneself/event/classes/what-have-you  with out any established relationship within that community.

I think that in general consumers are relatively forgiving of self-aggrandized messages from complete strangers as long as the message is entertaining and is on a mass scale. But attempt that within a specific niche market or community (a la Lindy Hoppers) and the reaction is very different and will range from politely ignoring to outright disdain. I see it happen frequently.

So if you need to post your event announcement in a forum, don’t do it with only 1 or 2 posts in your history, you need to have an established relationship with that particular forum community to have any credibility unless you’re already famous. If you don’t yet have a report you’ll need to either find a way to build some fast or find someone who does who’d be willing to essentially endorse your event.

technorati tags:Lindy-Hop, Lindy, Lindy-events, Lindy-exchange, Lindy-workshop, workshop-marketing, forum-marketing