DETROIT, MI -- Tecumseh Group, Inc., unveiled a new Message Forwarding Service (MFS) for its popular Tek-Tips Forums (http://www.tek-tips.com), which are independent online discussion groups for information technology professionals. The new service enables marketers to e-mail their own personalized message to subsets of the 18,000 Tek-Tips Forums participants. MFS effectively provides marketers with a reasonably priced focus group of professionals who can provide feedback on products and services.

"Tek-Tips is probably the best place for marketers to find high-quality computer professionals who use their products every day in their jobs," said Dave Murphy, president of Tecumseh Group. "Tek-Tips prides itself on being a safe, confidential place where computer professionals can discuss technical issues, rate products, and exchange ideas without vendor intrusion in the forums. But we also recognize that Tek-Tips members can provide a valuable resource for marketers, so we instituted a message forwarding service to give vendors, associations, and recruiters a chance to communicate with members who opt in to receive messages."

Dave added: "MFS allows us to keep our members' personal information confidential, and at the same time, gives marketers access to serious technology professionals. As an incentive for members to accept marketing messages, we allow them to turn off banners within forum pages if they opt into the Message Forwarding Service.  They can restore banner delivery at any time."

Easy Targeting.  MFS's easy, step-by-step format allows companies, associations, usersgroups, and recruiters to select forum members by broad categories, including network administrators and programmers.  The selection can be further refined to include professionals within specific forums.  For example, a marketer can send a message to all Novell administrators or further refine the search to include only Novell's NetWare 5 forum members.  Similarly, a member selection could include all Visual Basic (VB) forum members or only VB 5/6 forum members.  Or, within the Hardware forums, a recruiter might target professionals within the Cisco Router and Switch discussions or narrow that down to members of only the Router forums.

Once a marketer makes a selection, the Message Forwarding Service presents the list of member categories selected and the price of the selection based on a per-member charge.  The marketer can then further refine the member selection by interest or redo the entire selection criteria.

After the marketer has selected a member group and accepted the price, he or she then composes and edits the message, selects a credit card payment method, and submits the transaction.  The message is sent to users within 24 hours of submission.  Senders are notified when the transaction is complete.

Early User Comments.  Dave Murphy said that marketers who have tried the Message Forwarding Service have praised several particular features:

• Marketers can perform "what if" scenarios when selecting member groups without having to commit to a transaction
• MFS automatically presents the exact price for a selected member group
• Marketers can revise a message sent to one group of professionals and tailor it to subset groups, as long as each group selected meets the minimum number of members

About Tecumseh Group.  Tecumseh Group, the largest independent forum management company on the Internet, maintains Tek-Tips Forums for IT professionals and Eng-Tips Forums for engineers in all fields.  All Tecumseh Group forums are designed for professionals to engage in free and confidential discussion groups on products, technologies, and strategies, without the intrusion of marketers and recruiters.  Tecumseh Group's hundreds of forums give its thousands of users access to the best technology information available on the Web.