Advertising work around

[Michael Biglen]

My Boss wants me to be helpful on forums to establish a reputation and drive traffic to our sales web-site.
If I put an advertisement in my signature, and helped people out, would that be an acceptable way of advertising, since my boss is willing to pay me for that activity?

 

[pirateghost]

I'm inclined to say no, but I will let @jgreco, @cyberjock, and @dlavigne weigh in on this matter.

 

[jgreco]

WEIRD. The forumware isn't letting me post here. Anyways.

Looking at the statistics, I think it's easy to say that I've helped a lot of people out here in these forums for many years, including having a variety of authoritative stickies credited to my name.

We sell IT services here. I don't think we see any crossover in the form of lead generation. The people who show up on a forum running FreeNAS are usually hobbyists, who won't be buying IT services, or cheapskates who were attracted to the "Free" in "FreeNAS," and who don't have money to pay for services.

I recognize your company as having been active in some other forums and, if memory serves, having a good reputation for offering good deals on hardware. That might be a somewhat more difficult question. FreeNAS's sponsoring organization, iXsystems, is a specialty server manufacturer in Silicon Valley that sells FreeNAS and TrueNAS systems. I don't know what the official iX position would be, but do be aware that while it's probably just fine for an individual hobbyist to come on in here and start selling random spare parts, several of us would probably frown heavily on any effort that involved trying to sell competitive products such as prebuilt servers. It isn't clear exactly where that line is.

 

[cyberjock]

I can't post here either.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm with jgreco. It's not an easy cut-and-dry answer. I'd say if you want more info PM me your phone number and I'll call you tomorrow so we can discuss it.

If you're planning to sell something that competes with iXsystems though, it'll probably be a pretty confident "no". ;)

If its worth anything, I sold some services a couple of years ago. FreeNAS was much less popular, and the stuff I was selling wasn't really impacting iXsystems business. In fact, I'd only mention selling services in 1 out of 200 posts (or even less frequently than that). So I'm not sure how useful it would be to promote your company. Likewise, if every 3rd post is "that's paid services through my company!" you can expect some of the regular users to call you out for being a scumbag. Forum posting is supposed to be about donating your time to help others. There's a point where a question asked in the forums is answered with professional services aka paid services but that's far from the norm.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

my boss is willing to pay me for that

Try getting your boss to pay you to write blog articles.

 

[Michael Biglen]

I am not selling IT Services. I just have a ton of used servers/RAM/CPU's that would run FreeNAS nicely.
It would be competing with iXsystems only in the new category, I don't have anything new.
They are just nice rack systems that would be decent for making a NAS system.
Maybe even iXsystem would want them.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

If your signature said something like "we sell used servers and parts" and included a URL, it wouldn't bother me. In fact, the URL you have in your profile will probably generate some traffic on its own.

If you posted messages about specific items for sale, that would bother me. Individuals sometimes post items for sale, but that's different.

Of course, I speak for nobody else.

 

[Michael Biglen]

I sent one of our sales guys the information for iXsystems for him to try to sell.
I'll make up a nice signature, I'll learn all there is to know about FreeNAS, and I'll start helping everyone out.
I'll also blog my efforts and get it all going!
Thanks for the great suggestions and information!