Nick Kemp Blog

I have been observing with interest in recent years the decline and impending death of many online forums and newsgroups and the rise of social networks. I first came across NLP and Hypnosis newsgroups in the 1990s and for a few years these provided a useful source of information. In early 2003 I noticed a change in trends and an increase on some quite crazy behaviour.  These trends continued and new newsgroups attempting to “promote NLP” (when mostly seeking to generate revenue for their own personal use) began to appear in 2005 and this was a big contributing fact to the decline of professional standards in the field. Many NLP trainers and other professional individuals were regularly libeled online with those engaging in this behaviour seemingly unaware or disinterested in longer term actions that might result from such behaviour. Many forum owners fail to realize that when their pages are indexed by search engines then they too have a greater liability for their actions. All of this territorial fighting and gang mentality has in my opinion resulted in a decline of interest in newsgroups and instead people have spent more time on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Unfortunately most NLP forums are simply a giant advert to promote the forum owners favorite trainings. On one NLP forum, posters are not even allowed to add to their posts the kind of trainer they are as this is considered to be “an advert” while the site points all posters to just one style of NLP training. The quality of discussion is lamentably poor and it’s little wonder why NLP has such a dreadful reputation in some quarters…

So much for freedom of choice! It seems that in these tougher economic times some forum owners are desperate enough to try to set up clone forum sites and Andrew Austin outed a forum owner who set up a clone version on alt.psychology.nlp to try and drive traffic to his own site. He registered the exact same domain with the single difference of adding hyphens so an unsuspecting online surfer wouldn’t know the difference. On landing on the fraudulent site browsers see this

http://www.alt-psychology-nlp.com/nlp/1398-nlp-ad-nlp-hypnosis-practice-group-bath-somerset-uk.html

This kind of desperation also suggests that the social networking sites are really taking over as people increasingly find forums full of unemployed rather unpleasant characters who spend a great deal of time trying to attack each other online!

Facebook in particular is far less secular than online forums and there tends to be less evangelism in the discussions. I remember in 2005 when I was working from home I was working on one laptop and had another one on my desk as an experiment noted how long some people remained online on a particular forum. To my amazement some individuals literally spent 10 – 12 hours a day online posting! With the advent of mobile communication it’s very easy to post to Twitter and Facebook and Twitter in particular has become a popular mechanism for dispensing information. Online video resources have become a major players in this new era of global communication and most marketers have realized the benefits of linking these mechanisms with their websites and blogs.

In the world of NLP with the economic downturn there is increasingly an almost desperate attempt to use old style NLP forums alongside social media outlets to promote courses. Youtube has become flooded with clips which are essentially content free clips advertising forthcoming events! Many companies have realized that employees are spending increasing amounts of time online socially networking and often employers have blocked this capability during working hours. With the launch of the new ipad, it remains to be seen if the accent of this new medium is going to change how we read magazines and newspapers and my guess is that this will also contribute to the demise of old style forums.  I was talking to a co author of a major marketing book recently and he made the exact same comments about the rise of social networking mediums and it will be interesting to see how this develops in future years.