Use of forum posts for product testimonials

Hello Forum Folks;
I have a request to post and open to discussion as need be.
Up to now I have never used materials posted on the forum for marketing purposes. I get quite a bit of e-mail praising this or that product or the customer service (pat pat on the back), and I have been using some of those as testimonials for advertising purposes (removing last names or converting to initials to protect the writers identity), but I have never done this with forum posts. What would you folks think about my doing that?

This would probably mean snipping out a couple lines praising a particular product, and publishing it on the website or any number of possible ad materials with an initialized version of the writer\'s forum name. If everybody is pretty much cool with that, for legal purposes, I would probably put a notice to this effect in the forum FAQ somewhere for future reference. If the general feeling is that this would be an invasion or otherwise sleezeball thing to do, I or some other authorized person might privately write to forum members asking individually for permission to use part of a particular post, but otherwise it would not happen. One other possibility would be to form a list of forum members who don\'t mind having their posts quoted for commercial purposes and limit the snipping to their posts.

What do you think?

Bruce

Bruce,

Thanks for asking. I\'ve always thought that anything I post is up for grabs--and it generally has been in other discussions/ on list-servers/ etc. I\'m somewhat surprised that you have not already made use of my posts and the posts of others, without permission. But no, I shouldn\'t be surprised, since your business ethics are far superior to any others. In any case, feel free to use anything I write at your discretion. Though this presents the opportunity for words to come back and \"bite me,\" to be anymore reserved would be to indicate that I have no convictions about human pheromone science and its applications. Besides, your efforts in maintaining The Pheromone Forum should be rewarded; it is an invaluable resource.

Bruce - Feel free to grab any testimonials you like from my posts.

Sounds like an idea. I don\'t mind what you do with my posts.

I think if I person posts on this forum, it\'s a given that it\'s public knowledge. None of us would post our testimonials or opinions if we didn\'t want others to know about it so it\'s all cool.

I agree with what has been said about the topic. Perhaps you should ask folks to respond if they are opposed to having their words used. The Forum is already public access, so I guess it would be a nice gesture on your part to anyone who doesn\'t want to be quoted. Needless to say, you can use whatever I have posted (I never thought that I was all that cutting edge in the first place, but if you wanna use it, my ego won\'t mind [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img] )

[ April 22, 2002: Message edited by: Walter Mitty ]

Yeah shoot why not, i guess you could ask for website appraisals on a certain thread where those praising products could post their responses and then use that as the basis of customer testomionals or send emails asking for the same thing. Although the forum is already public reading material maybe more links into it from the website etc.

Go ahead and feel free to use any of my posts.

No problem here. Use whatever you like of mine.

Sure, go for it... Once it\'s out there, it\'s out there.

R.

I just wanted to add something. The main reason why I first started purchasing pheromones from Love Scent was because of the forum. It added an air of legitimacy when a lot of other sites seemed quite shady.

I shoot off my mouth, I make rash statements, I (on rare ocassions) use profanity, I misspell words, I make mistakes.

I write under a pseudonym...

So I don\'t care.

I agree with all the previous comments, especially jamesdeanmartin\'s re: purchasing because of the forum. It was only because of the forum, and seeing what other people--ones without a vested interest in my purchase--had to say that I purchased in the first place. Now, with $250 spent on pheromones and nearly another $50 on equipping my lab, I\'m most pleased with the results.

It would be good form to attempt to contact the person you\'re going to use the comments of. Perhaps they would want a different attribution than the one you\'d come up with. Even further, you might want to modify the registration page to include a blurb about posts entering the public domain, or at the very least, being fair game for use in advertzing/literature/propoganda.

I don\'t mean to be the lone spoilsport, but copyright law states that everyone\'s post is their own and you can\'t use anything without specific permission from that person.

So what you should do is to ask each person before using any quote from them.

I know that in my case I would want to approve the specific quote you\'d use (although probably there isn\'t a quote of mine you want to use anyway).

Well Bruce, now that The Squad\'s back you\'ll have a lot to choose from.

-The Bat

Bruce,

You can use any post of mine as long as it is anon. It is fun to know when you find something interesting enough to use though.

Elk [img]images/icons/laugh.gif[/img]

I actually think the legitimacy of \"full forum discussion\" is much more convincing than quoting a few \"positive only\" comments from the forum. We hear outrageous testimonials about every other product out there, and I we\'re large immune to this type of marketing.

Truth,

I agree 150%. I am constantly directing newbies into this forum. It is vastly more convincing than a few testimonials. In fact, there are a couple of posts right in this thread that support your point, but convincing testimonials still have their own place in the marketing world. It is difficult to insert this entire forum into a 3 line ad for one thing. :-)

Take a look at your own post right here. If you don\'t mind my putting on my marketing hat for a moment, what I see is a VERY honest/convincing testimonial for this forum. If I were to splash that on to all the testimonial pages with a direct link over to the forum here, what do you think would happen? At the moment we are getting an average 5,300 page views of traffic per day at this forum. I\'ll bet you $100. worth of product I can double that in a week using only your \"testimonial.\" If I win, all you have to do is admit that testimonials can be effective. :-) What do you say?

Bruce

No need to bet, Bruce. I\'m sure testimonials will help. The forum provides another type of lure that can lock people in even if they\'re not getting great results themselves. With testimonials and no forum, people would give up fairly easy if they don\'t see immediate results.