Posted by Tracy Record, 6/15/08
I convened this session to generate and share ideas about letting people know about your site — and serving them once they find it. We focused mostly on the former.
I started by mentioning the West Seattle Community Garage Sale Day that we took on this year — a local nonprofit started it, ran it three years running, then disbanded and looked for others in the community to take on the major projects they’d begun – we stepped in to take Garage Sale Day because we felt it perfectly melded with our mission, helping bring the community together offline as well as online. It was quite an organizational task, coordinating applications, taking entry fees (which were turned around into promotion/marketing costs), making maps, signage, etc. But promotionally, our name/URL was on all the signage, including flyers promoting registration, etc., and we synergized with a separate website we set up to chronicle the run-up to WSCGSD, and the coverage on that day, plus some postmortem notes (westseattlegaragesale.com). It was a big success — record number of sales (almost 150), and despite some iffy weather early in the day, good turnout reported by most if not all.
Other contributions:
Scott Durham, Central District News (Seattle)/Instivate (software company building community-blogging/news applications among other things) — Around the start of CDNews, they posted flyers on light poles, marketing coverage of specific news stories – “shooting at x & x, centraldistrictnews.com” — They also attended community meetings and introduced themselves to say who they were and what they were doing.
Fairlight from YourHub.com — Flashy flyers, handwritten material in coffee shops, staff members assigned to attend meetings (they have 16 people on staff and each one had to attend something at least weekly)
Mike Orren, Pegasus News — Google works best; buy search terms that relate to special coverage you have, either on a longterm or short term basis, make sure the Google ads point to pages where they will find the coverage (they built special ‘hub’ pages of coverage for some of these events/stories and made sure there was messaging to greet the visitor, ‘if you like what you see also check out …’). Mentions a “yellow bar” that greets the visitor who arrives at their site from a search.
- TR NOTE — THE “BUY SEARCH TERMS” IDEA IS THE FIRST THING I HAVE DEPLOYED SINCE THE CONFERENCE – WE ALREADY USED GOOGLE ADWORDS FOR A GENERIC CAMPAIGN “WEST SEATTLE BLOG/West Seattle News 24/7” and I made a topical campaign for a hot story that erupted in our area last week**
Mike asks, what kind of tchotchkes are really of value if you have a table or a booth at a community event? His company sponsors many of these events and gets the chance to have a booth or table in exchange, but he’s not sure what to give out that won’t wind up tossed on the ground by event’s end.
Several people suggest business cards. This segues into a discussion of buying banners that can be hung at events. TR asks how much those costs, Mike says about $200 for a banner “the size of a wall.”
Arnie Arnesen from PoliticalChowder.com talks about putting a banner on a truck and having a “where’s the truck today” (a la Where’s Waldo?) campaign.
Scott D wonders if maybe festivalgoers would find value in a one-page of timeless content – humorous, maybe? – some kind of handout.
Mike mentions a three-day promotion that centered around a sort of hoax that linked to a community issue … with so many stadiums etc. selling naming rights, Pegasus partnered with workers’ favorite local bar to announce they had bought naming rights to the bar – the bar played along – only drawback was that some audience members didn’t get the joke
Erica from Metblogs has been thinking about sponsoring public-service announcements that could be posted in places – say, put up at a park bulletin board, don’t forget to scoop, brought to you by Minneapolis Metblog, something like that –
flyers with little tear sheets with URL on them, like people do for garage sale or lost pet notices
Fairlight wonders about a question that was discussed in another, earlier session, how do you measure your site’s influence
Mike says he’s obsessed with comments, more than pageviews — he also discusses a promotion with the Dallas Mavericks that wound up not going so well, says that if you get involved with partners for promotions, “make sure they have the same standards” as you
Scott talks about the old media in Seattle being interested in the new media, featured in a recent Seattle Times article
Mike talks about old media stealing stories without giving credit — but instead of getting mad about it, they do something to let the old media source know they are aware of waht happened
Scott mentions his scanner posts – listening to the police scanner all day and posting about what’s heard in the ‘hood
Arnie says local radio needs people who can talk, she has bloggers who guest on her show and she plugs their site, she thinks it’s a promotional natural
Mike says drive time is a bad time to expect site results from appearances since nobody’s by a computer – but one time a casual reference at 2 pm brought so much traffic their servers crashed
Group talks about public-access TV as another possible promotional avenue
Mike says they have a TV partnership and the tv folks “take everything we shoot”
Arnie suggests underwriting radio or tv public service announcements
Mike talks about monthly features that tell the history of a neighborhood –
Scott asks about the metrics of video — he’s noted it doesn’t get so many clicks but takes an awful lot of time to process (TR note … we have the same experience)
Mike says the trick is to do something that doesn’t require much editing or processing
Arnie talks about reaching out to ethnic communities
Mike says Pegasus is branching out into seminars for local businesses “how to use the Internet to promote your business” promising no sales pitch, but telling info about searches, how to respond to comments on websites, etc.