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This is a Fios installation. Fiber comes into the box on the left. Coax comes out of that and goes to the gateway router on the right.

I haven't read the article yet, but I have seen web forums be communities of fail. I'm not convinced that this is due to unavoidable faults either in forums or in human nature.

People will complain loudly about your products. They are not always rational or right. This will remain true whether you provide the venue for the forum or not.

Customer feedback is a vital part of any business. You need to have people who are capable of interfacing with customers. The best people for this are people who enjoy communicating with people and want to do it, and who also happen to have a solid working knowledge of the product. These are often other users of the product.

If you host a forum, you need to cultivate it in order for it to thrive. This does not mean censoring complaints about the product. It does mean policing the forums to keep abuse, trolling, griefing, and spam under control. Being a forum admin is probably not the best use of time for high value developers or designers. If you have a staff, the forum admin work should be delegated to an appropriate person or team who is suited to the task and knows how to do it well.

Having a presence on the forums will make a huge difference in how the general userbase perceives your company. If knowledgeable, helpful employees take the time to read and participate in forums, users of the forums will tend to be more appreciative and sympathetic toward the company. If official participation is loose and personable, not overly corporate toe-the-line, your customers will generally feel warmly toward the company. Don't punish low level employees who participate in the forums and openly admit that the product has faults or that the company could be better. It's obvious to everyone that you're not perfect, and punishing people for saying so isn't going to fix the problem.

If your only way of getting good information from your employees is through manually sifting through forum threads, you're doing it wrong. Your forum technology sucks, isn't well integrated with the rest of your business, and is out of date. That is why it fails. You can't just bolt a forum on to a web site and consider the job done. You need a system that rewards people for investing the time in participating positively to the forum, like Stack Overflow does. Forums where people are asking questions, especially where they are having problems, need to have follow-through and resolution. If this isn't provided, then the forum is largely a waste of time for everyone involved, and a frustrating experience.

You also need to integrate your forum into your overall customer relationship strategy, and other areas of the business process, such as product design and marketing. Forum discussions shouldn't dictate your product's design, but certainly customer feedback should be taken into account when considering your priorities, and a well-designed forum that provides useful datamining tools can provide this. A customer relationship management (CRM) suite can provide this integration quite well. Check out a product like Lithium and see what it can do for you. Western Digital uses Lithium CRM in their product support forums, and it's a lot nicer than many forums that I've seen used by other companies.

Whatever you think of Best Buy, they have a successful internal community in Blueshirtnation.com. A google search turns up quite a lot of industry praise on those guys. It was even written up the Groundswell book by Forrester.

If you want your bosses to buy, make sure you give them plenty of examples of other companies being successful at it.

For me, the biggest business benefit to the call center is knowledge sharing, but you have to be careful because communities need a critical mass in members to be successful (or a highly dedicated internal resource building content and encouraging participation). Only the biggest call centers could make it self-sustaining. However, another idea might be to launch a peer-to-peer support community and invite your customers in. You can have a private area for employees, but have a larger area where customers can ask support questions. And unlike email, once a question is answered, everyone can use it. Dell, Lenovo, Juniper, Linksys, AT&T, Blackberry all have successful support forums.

On IRC, I use it at work but my frustration is that it has no real history - I've seen the same questions come up time and again. On a forum you can search and find past discussions.

Disclosure: I work for Lithium Technologies , an online community provider.

(warning, Sage over on NSider myself)

Most of them are probably completely unaware that Slashdot even exists, much less that this discussion is going on. They're doing a great job of complaining about the name without the outside influence. Just take a look at the Revolution/Wii board. And I don't think you have to worry about having the forums be affected by Slashdot linking to nintendo.com, either. The forums aren't hosted on a Nintendo server - they're hosted on servers run by Lithium Technologies.

You might want to check out Lithium Technologies. This is what they do and their customer list includes Dell, AT&T, Nintendo and a host of other big-name clients.

It may be that it was just a fan describing an imaginary TV commercial - I'd also heard that it was available online, but that may be further misinformation, hurrah. Anyhow, there's people talking about it here.