Improving Decision Making: Using Internet Newsgroups for Online Market Research

This project will help develop your Internet skills in using newsgroups for marketing. It will also ask you to think about the ethical implications of using information in online discussion groups for business purposes. 

You are producing hiking boots that you sell through a few stores at this time. You would like to use Internet discussion groups interested in hiking, climbing, and camping both to sell your boots and to make them well known. Visit groups.google.com, which stores discussion postings from many thousands of  newsgroups. Through this site you can locate all relevant newsgroups and search them by keyword, author’s name, forum, date, and subject. Choose a message and examine it carefully, noting all the  information you can obtain, including information about the author. 

Hiking Clubs

By joining hiking groups, you would get such benefit:

1) Networking

2) Friendship and Bonding

3) 15 to 30-mile hikes -- lots of exercise -- fat burning

4) Outdoors

5) a one to three-day vacation

6) Weekend camping trips

7) apparently some of the groups have thousands of members

8) no competition and can do it until I am 80 and older

9) plenty of activities and can pick and choose to fit schedule

10) relatively cheap

Reason to Celebrate On a Mountaintop

Untamed and Untamable: It's about this time of year that the hardy hikers who started walking months ago in Georgia are finishing up the Appalachian Trail by climbing to the peak of Mount Katahdin in Maine, some 2,174 miles from where they began.

They are tired and haggard after a jaunt through 14 states, with 20-mile-day after 20-mile-day behind them. They've slept out in the rain, twisted their ankles, gone miles through dense woods without saying a word to another human being. But for this last, triumphant stretch of trail they've tucked a champagne bottle in with their sleeping bags, and are going to uncork that baby at the mountaintop. It is an amazing sight, which I'm happy to say I've witnessed, these campers cum celebrants at the end of their long, long journey. It's almost as delightful as the wilderness of Baxter State Park fanning out below them, which still looks very much as Thoreau described it: "primeval, untamed and forever untamable."

Thankfully, you don't have to travel to northern Maine to find a slice of untamed wilderness. The Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, one of the largest hiking clubs in the region, sponsors hikes virtually every weekend. On Saturday, there is a 16-mile hike up the Blue Ridge Mountains in Shenandoah National Park. There also is an effort to repair part of the AT near the Blackburn Trail Center in Virginia on Saturday and next Sunday. For more information on either outing, visit http://www.patc.net/ .

Outdoors Extravaganza: The Hudson Trail Outfitters in Pentagon Row is hosting an outdoors fair Sept. 16 from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. Many of the region's outdoors organizations will be on hand to enlist new members. Some of the groups scheduled to be there include Trout Unlimited, the Maryland Outdoor Club, the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA), the Northern Virginia Hiking Club, the Capital Hiking Club, the Washington Women Outdoors Club and the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club (PATC). For more information visit http://www.hudsontrail.com/ .

Author: G.R. Bryant, a google group user who just move from Southern California or Louisiana to Washington DC, and just found a constructive outdoor activity for the DC area which is hiking. Previously, when he was living in Southern California, he was into beach sport hobbies, and when moved to Louisiana, he was into football, lafayette, bayou trips, and french quarter.

Message Source: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/hiking/omnisport/YfvN9q6CLqQ/9k9A-_QC08EJ

1. How could you use these newsgroups to market your boots?

In these kind of forums and groups, there will be many people who have same interest especially in hiking. As we know, as a sport, hiking is very attentive about safety of the participant. And to ensure the safety, every hiker should prepare all necessary equipment, especially boots, to protect their feet from the extreme arena of hiking. And by joining the discussion and promoting the boots cleverly, it will attract the readers who participate group discussion and buy the boots.

2. What ethical principles might you be violating if you use these messages to sell your boots? Do you think there are ethical problems in using newsgroup this way? Explain your answer.

Yes, actually there are some ethical principles that we might have violated if we use these messages to sell our boots. First, the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” By using these messages to sell our boots, of course it will violate the author’s rights to protect the information content originality. Next is Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative, “If an action is not right for everyone to take, it is not right for anyone.” If we take this information without quoting the author, it’s just the matter of time that the author will sue you for stealing information from his or her message. It’s not right to be done if it will make significant problem to our organization. Third principle that we may be violating is Descartes’ rule of change, “If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all.” What if we keep noting the information from these group discussion messages and use it to sell our boots? For the first and second time it will bring no issue to the organization. An action may bring about a small change now that is acceptable, but if it is repeated, it would bring unacceptable changes in the long run. Last principle is ethical “no free lunch” rule. If something someone else has created is useful to you, it has value, and you should assume the creator wants compensation for this work. If we use someone’s message to make revenue to our organization without give any compensation to the author of the message, we obviously have violated this rule.

3. Next use Google or Yahoo search the hiking boots industry and locate sites that will help you develop other new ideas for contacting potential customers.

In present days, the interest and hobby in outdoor sport seems reducing due to environmental factors. The trouble is, it will take a long time for the hiking boots industry to develop and agree on standards that are simple, reliable and meaningful enough to present them to consumers. We take Timberland company development for example. Actually it is hard to measure it because its performance can't be compared to industry norms. During the second quarter of this year, the company's average score was 6.91 on a scale of zero to 10, where lower scores mean a lighter footprint. "It ain't so good, and it's slightly worse than it was this time a year ago," CEO of Timberland said. Partly that's because fall and winter products, which are heavier and therefore have a greater impact, are shipping earlier this year. Not until the end of next year will Timberland reach the point where it can apply the Green Index to all of its footwear. "It's very perplexing if you're a consumer," Swartz. Even more discouraging, there's not much evidence that most consumers care all that much about the environmental impact of the things they buy.

Sites that will help you develop other new ideas for contacting potential customers is social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Line@, forum and group discussion websites such as Reddit and Kaskus, online selling websites such Amazon and Alibaba, also other kind of websites like Quora for question and answering, and Google Docs to conduct survey and collect customer’s information.

4. Given what you have learned in this and previous chapters, prepare a plan to use newsgroups and other alternative methods to begin attracting visitors to your site.

In order to attract potential customers to visit our site, what should we do first is to make attractive design which is eye-catching to see. Create not only a branded “featured image” to share with your post, but also create separate images for each of the main points in your content so they can be shared when you repeatedly post them to social media. Next, write good headline so that will grab customer’s attention to read the content. Next step is considering right social media platform to share the content with. Since different sites serve different purposes and audiences, it’s fundamental to familiarize yourself with the major social media platforms your target audience uses. Concentrate on the platforms where you have the highest chance to engage with your audience. After sharing the content at right social media platform, share the content in right time. For maximum engagement, the content you’re sharing needs to reach as many people as possible, so the best time to share is when potential customers are online and active. Then you can compile a posting schedule to ensure you post during a certain time of day. Last step is, ask questions to the potential customers. Drive social media users to communicate with you and increase the chances they engage with your content by asking for questions and feedback. Because social media was made for people and not for businesses, you should always be striving to create a human connection with social media users.