Do you need a forum for your blog?

It is a normal recommendation for commercial website owners to add a forum or a blog in their site.

A forum serves a lot of purposes:

• The users can interact between themselves and with the owner
• A lot of product or service related problems are solved in this process and the forum acts as an extended version of FAQ page.
• It suggests a lot of transparency in the business process and wins user’s faith easily that ultimately transfers into business
• A forum can retain the existing users as well as it can fetch a lot of new visitors who in future may turn into users
• There is nothing like a forum to understand user’s trend and it offers a lot of suggestions for upgrading your product

A good blog serves a lot of purposes too:

• A blog can provide latest product updates
• Can create a great reader as well as user base
• Can uphold the brand identity of the company
• Pulls a lot of organic visitors who can be directed to the original site
• Helps to keep the website in the news always
• A blog is a better way for successful social communication
• And a lot more

A forum offers a three way communication [user X user][user X Service Provider] where as a blog offers a two way communication [Author X User]. In a blog, you can control the directions of issues but in forum it is almost impossible. The list may move on and on and on.

But what if we use a forum to support a blog! Do we really need a forum when there is no website involved!

In the process I have just created a forum for this blog [Ning offers free forum and social network platform and hosting].

My question is very simple – do we need a forum to support our blog!

What say you?