Keith Shirley

The Irish Business Women’s Forum is having a special Promote Yourself Week on their website. I’ve been a member of the forum for a while now and it’s always a pleasure to check in for updates and see if I can add anything useful. Like most forums – blatant advertising is normally not allowed. This week is the exception where one special area has been setup to allow the members to promote themselves without breaking the rules. For me it was a very strange experience doing a sales pitch for online backups where I normally work so hard at being independent.

The IBW forum is a great example of a supportive and informative online community. It’s certainly one of the discussion forums that I will have in mind when I’m doing work for the IIA Social Media Working Group. I can’t speak highly enough of the forum – and of course the members. There are so many other forums that fade away after a short time because there is not enough interaction or the general attitude turns negative. I get quite annoyed when someone new to the area of online forums or mailing lists makes a mistake and gets pounced on by the other members and berated for “advertising”. Yes – people should read the forum guidelines and get a feel for the style of the site – but I’d rather have a few mistakes with helpful reminders rather than a strict policing by the members. The IBW site seems to work very well in this sense – any transgressions are dealt with in a friendly and instructive way. The result is that they receive articles from people who would never dream of posting elsewhere – and many of them are quite touching stories.

So go and have a look at the IBW site – I hope you find it as useful as I have. There are few other sites where I feel morally obliged to try and post something useful having read so many helpful articles.

The Promote Yourself week seems to be quite successful – and I have no doubt it will reduce the spam for the remainder of the year. It even got me mentioned on Frank Fullard’s Blog.

Let me know if there are other online communities that you think I should be looking at – specifically Irish ones.

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