Forums
Besides blogs and social networks, one must not forget forums. Forums are another way to communicate through the internet. As opposed to social networking where the interaction is live and blogs where the author is in control of everything, forums give a sense of equalness to all of its users. Users can post new topics, comment and ask questions to all topics. In forums, focus is not given on the user but on the topic being discussed. Forums bring many benefits such as, a better interaction with users, an increase of traffic on your website and you are able to get personal information such as name and email from the posters. Open source forums that are free and available to the public are vanilla, phpBB and bbpress. Bytemark a consulting firm based in the UK makes the use of vanilla forums to provide troubleshooting solutions. As for the phpBB forums as previously mentioned, forums are a social mix of topics and the open source forums phpBB is mostly used in the online gaming sites. For example, space trace is a forum powered by phpBB. In this forum, users are able to exchange information on the games such as secret passages,tips on how to reach a level, game updates or just simply to discuss about their gaming interests.
As you can see, forums provide a wide range of utilities. Forums are a perfect way to get to understand the users and their needs.