Usenet newsgroups
There are over 25,000 Usenet newsgroups and they may be updated by up to 3 million messages each day. These can be thought of as an electronic bulletin board that is read by a closed community. Questions or statements are posted by one person who is looking for further information and the others will reply and lists of related questions will be held together in what is known as a ‘thread’. Usenet is mainly used by special interest groups such as people discussing their favourite pastime such as fishing or archery. They are not used that much by businesses, unless it is as a means of studying consumer behaviour. There are some newsgroups for announcing the introduction of new products or staff vacancies. Newsgroups tend not to be used extensively by business people or consumers, since they have to be aware of them and have the technical know-how to set them up. Setup can be difficult because a special piece of software known as a newsreader used to be required to read and contribute to newsgroups. When web browsers were developed, additional newsreaders were developed as extra modules – however, it was less clear how to access these in comparison with a web browser. Today, it is much easier to read an add to newsgroups since specialist web sites and search engines such as www.altavista.com enable users to access newsgroups without the need for special software. The best known web site for accessing newsgroups was dejanews.com, but this is now part of Google. Go to www.google.com and type in one of your interests with the option tab set to ‘Groups’.
The marketing applications of newsgroups usually involve obtaining marketing research in the form of feedback from customers. For example, a company manufacturing cat food may find comments in the rec.pets.cats newsgroups. These may be positive or negative comments about a brand, but each will be useful. Another example might be a pharmaceutical company who monitors the sci.med.pharmacy to find news about new drugs that are being introduced by its competitors, or perhaps unofficial information from clinical trials.
Newsgroups are named in a particular format, broken down into several parts, the first part usually indicating the type of information or country it refers to and the last part the specific topic:
• alt – for ‘alternative’ e.g. alt.comedy.british or alt.music.kylie-minogue
• rec – recreation includes the largest number of groups eg. rec.climbing or uk.rec.climbing
• talk – discussions, e.g. talk.politics.tibet
• biz – business, a surprisingly small number of these e.g. biz.marketplace.investors is used to offer new investment products
• comp – computer queries solved e.g. comp.virus
• sci – range of scientific discussions and opinions e.g. sci.med.cardiology
or documents
• soc –social issues e.g. soc.geneaology.misc