Additional information about the Rodman & Renshaw Annual Global Investment Conference can be found at: http://www.rodm.com/conferences.

Why Lefora?
Lefora is to forums what WordPress or Blogger is to blogs. It allows users who are not tech savvy the opportunity to easily start their own customizable forum community. Lefora also supports new media capabilities not found in many free forum solutions, such as the ability to embed YouTube videos. In addition it has a feature where it will show the most actively discussed topics or the most recently posted topics on the font page.

By making the creation of forums more accessible and by integrating feature sets that make forums more relevant, Lefora has become a large and steadily growing company. As of today Lefora boasts over 100,000 communities.

About Lefora

Lefora was founded by a core team of Internet and games pioneers who got fed up with the lack of features available in online forums. Lefora’s mission is to transform one of the largest and most active parts of the Internet, forums, by letting anybody create their own forum in under a minute. Lefora is a privately-held company based in San Francisco, CA, founded in 2008.

Read More: TechCrunch Article

About PubCon
When it comes to creating marketing buzz online, webmasters pretty much invented the concept. PubCon is four days of leading edge education and networking in over 90 sessions featuring 200 expert speakers in Social Media, Affiliate Programs, Search, and SEO/SEM. In its 8th year, PubCon was founded out of the rich and diverse base of WebmasterWorld forums. These aren’t people who just talk about this stuff - these are people who do this stuff.
The A-List alpha attendees to PubCon are among the most highly pursued demographic in the online marketing world. Highly educated and computer savvy, they’re early adopters of the latest Web technologies and trends. These are the folks that any forward thinking company wants to reach and network with.

Memes are by their very nature mass market concepts. It stands to reason that targeting the sites where these memes are founded could have a profound influence on target demographics.

About Christopher "moot" Poole

Christopher "moot" Poole is founder of 4chan, an online imageboard whose anonymous denizens have spawned the web’s most bewildering — and influential — subculture.

Watch it here

Or we are reading an article on CNN and before we are done we scroll down to the comments to see what other people think about the article. Do other people disagree as adamantly as I do?

But then there is your company. How do you keep track of the tide of opinions that are being formed about your company. Message boards, user-generated videos, and comments can dictate the reputation of your company. It doesn’t matter if these message boards are endorsed by someone professional or that the video was made in someone’s garage — people are listening and your company should listen as well.

Keep your ear to the ground.
The first thing that I recommend is actually taking the time to listen. Start regularly doing searches on your company name. If you are searching in Google you can restrict your search to only viewing blogs or message boards (go to show options this feature is labeled as "discussions")

Communicate
Talking to your consumers and clients is one of the best ways to restore your reputation. One of the best examples of this was seen in 2007 when JetBlue CEO David Neeleman took an apology to his customers in their space: YouTube.

Another way to communicate with your customers is by commenting in message boards. We recommend stating up front that you represent the company. Be honest about your mistakes, clarify any misconceptions and be willing to listen. You don’t have to just roll over and accept what people are saying but there is a lot you can be learning from people that are taking the time to review your product or company.

Message boards and product ratings can dramatically affect a company’s reputation, and consequently its stock price or valuation. You can’t afford to not listen!

In the last two years, we have seen our numbers expand from 9 million page views monthly to over 80 million. We celebrate that growth. But mostly we want to celebrate the crowd. To celebrate all the unique personalities that make up the CrowdGather network. We want to celebrate the diversity of relationships that are formed in our forums.

Here’s to more connections, deeper relationships and to stimulating conversations. Salút!

Our emphasis on growth comes from seeing the power of forums. Every day, millions of people discuss topics ranging from electronics to gaming, and look for guidance from other members. Because they are in many ways structured around people supporting each other, forums continue to be the best help desks on the Internet. We believe in cultivating forums because they reflect a quality of community and service that social networking sites have not been able to provide, and that has been steadily disappearing from the web.

Today, we announced our acquisition of FreeForums.org. FreeForums.org was founded in 2007 and has established itself as a leader in the free forum hosting industry, providing a dependable forum hosting solution to millions of users around the world.

They provide marvelous service and a customized software solution that meets the needs of their forum members. Mostly, we are glad to have them in our mix because they, too, believe in forums and they have millions of members that would agree.

We are proud to have them join our network!

Click here to watch the video interview.