Groups related to your keywords and your market

The two big providers of free groups are Yahoo! and Google. Spend some time on each site, searching for groups related to your keywords and your market.

Join the most active groups, read the message archives, and follow the daily threads. Verify that the people in the groups are your prospects. Resist the urge to do any selling in these groups. You’re at their watering hole, remember? If you start pitching your product or services, or contribute comments that are off-base or self-serving or unhelpful, you’ve just identified yourself not as a zebra, giraffe, springbok, or wildebeest, but as a crocodile! If you want to come back and sell to these groups later, after you’ve mastered their jargon and understood their concerns, they’ll freeze you out if you pushed too hard at the beginning. 

Yahoo! Groups

Begin at http://groups.yahoo.com. To join Yahoo! Groups, you need a free Yahoo! account. If you don’t yet have one, you’ll be prompted to create one. You can start searching for groups without an account, but you’ll need to create an account before you can join a group. If you have a Yahoo! account, log in and start searching. You can apply to join groups right away. After you’ve done some searching, you’ll discover why Google, not Yahoo!, is the preferred search engine. Yahoo! focuses exclusively on keywords, and ignores meaning and context. When I typed Juggling into the Groups search box, the first two groups listed were a support group for work-at-home moms and another for Christian homeschoolers with more than two children. 

They were in the top positions not for relevance, but because they were the two largest groups that had the word juggling in their description. Both groups, of course, used the term juggling metaphorically. So neither is a particularly useful watering hole to learn about your prospects’ views on replaceable wicks for juggling torches or the proper weight of a silicon stage ball. The next three groups, however, are closer to the mark: a group dedicated to Contact Juggling, a group of Christian clowns, and the main Yahoo! juggling group. The Contact Juggling group’s archives are public, while the other four groups require membership. In addition to the keyword search, Yahoo! also gives you a directory of categories that may be more useful. You can see the categories Hobbies & Crafts > Hobbies > Juggling. 

Click Juggling to view 192 different juggling-related groups. The first two groups look familiar. When you click juggling2, you’re taken to the group’s home page, where you can read a description of the group, see how active the members are (by viewing the message-history chart), and decide if it’s worth your time to join this group. To join, click the Join This Group! on the right. On the next page, select the e-mail address you want linked to this group, choose how you want to receive messages (individual e-mail, daily digest, or Web only), select the e-mail format, copy some text to prove you’re a human and not a software program, and click Join. I recommend choosing the daily digest over individual e-mails if it’s an active group, you could easily spend your entire day dealing with off-topic threads about whether other threads are off-topic, and nonsense like that. You can always change your preferences after you’ve joined, and you can also quit any group easily. Once you join, you can read through the archives and view profiles of group members. If you wanted to launch a competing product to the Dube Airflight Clubs, you could gain valuable insight into what people like and don’t like about them. If you wanted to (say) sell against Airflight, you could create thinner clubs less likely to bang into each other, or softer clubs that wouldn’t hurt so much if they hit people in the head. And you would save this post in an idea file for when you started writing AdWords ads.

Google Groups

To search Google Groups, go to http://groups.google.com. Google Groups hasn’t been around as long as Yahoo! Groups, so you won’t find Google communities as established as the Yahoo! ones. But Google Groups get direct feeds from many of the independent “usenet” groups that have existed since the late 1980s, and so provide much more comprehensive coverage of the market. When you search Google Groups for juggling, you don’t get the irrelevant listings that Yahoo! served up. The first groups Google shows you are a unicycling group, a non-Google group called rec.juggling (which I talk about in a minute), and a discussion list for the Vancouver Juggling Club.

To join a Google Group, click Apply for Group Membership on the right. If you’re logged in to your Google account, you get taken to a signup page where you choose your e-mail delivery schedule, provide a nickname, and apply. Once you’ve been approved for membership, you can read and reply to messages, search the message archive by keyword, and post new questions. Google formats its group messages on the Gmail template meaning that replies are kept next to the original message in chronological order.