Happy New Year, everyone! We had a great 2006 and hope that 2007 is going to be even better.
John had a great post right after the elections asking for our input and ideas for what we can do in the year ahead. Not very many of us responded, or gave many ideas, which is all right – we all see each other at least once a week, most of our best ideas come there. But I want to specifically talk about the website.
I’m making it a goal of mine to make sure the blog is frequently updated, with the same quality of the past couple of years. The last few months, we’ve been very busy with an election, with school, with jobs, etc. Our online presence diminished because of that. We’re going to change that in the next year.
In just a few short days, the new Congress will convene, with Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid leading a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. The new session of the unicameral will begin. And Bush will unveil his “plan” for Iraq – four years too late.
In 2007, we’re going to continue to hold our local, state, and federal officials accountable. We’re going to continue bringing attention to the issues that concern you. And we’ll continue to provide an open forum for discussion.
So, in that spirit, I’m opening up the floor here for ideas, suggestions, or anything else you’ve got. What issues would you like to see us cover?
For my part (website wise) I’m going to be working on 4 ambitious goals during Spring 2007:
1) getting an online store up to buy buttons / t-shirts and sell them & accept online payments for them.
2) writing more blogs and updating the blog more often. I’ve made this resolution to myself more than once now, but new year’s resolutions always have more teeth to them than regular “ok, I’m going to do this now” spur-of-the-moment resolutions. So I’m going to try to get myself a schedule (like 2 new posts a week) and stick to it.
3) I’ll be writing a weekly column (or bimonthly, not sure) for the gateway, which I’ll be linking to from the Blog and which will cover UNO Dems related things.
4) (and this is the most important) We NEED TO INCREASE TRAFFIC AND READERSHIP. Any Ideas folks?? These things have worked in the past:
-using facebook to promote the blog (the share feature)
-getting readers to email the blog and encourage friends to read it
-setting it as the background page on all the computers on campus whenever anyone is at a campus comptuer
-handing out flyers which mention the blog
-writing the blog url on blackboards at school
-giving out flyers to promote the blog at Democratic Party events
Does anyone have any other really good ideas? We could probably buy banner space on the Politics Section of the OWH website… that’s not too expensive.
Other ideas? Other ideas? Beuller?
I’d also like to see more commenting by those people who do read the blog. I’ve tried to make it a rule for myself to leave at least 1 comment on every post. Even if we just have 1 comment from each person who attends each meeting, we can end up with pretty good online discussions and high traffic.
Perhaps we should try another blog-a-thon type thing this spring.
Also: add something related to Tribute (TTTF) to the list of online UNO Dems things I need to work on this spring.
We did forget to wish the blog (aka chief’s baby) a happy birthday back in November. Understandable as we were all burnt out from the election, but I agree, the blog-a-thon would be a good idea to revisit.
Definitely agree, we need to get more commentary from our readers.
As far as bringing in more readers, the Facebook thing is a good idea (we could import the feed into our profiles, but it would import every single post in the history of this blog, and the idea is to bring people to the blog, not the blog to Facebook.)
I’ve tried a little to plug the blog at places like Daily Kos, but our most effective means of building a community here and making an impact will obviously be at the more local level.
I want to try and make this at least a five-day-a-week blog. Consistency of content will go a long way, I think, towards the goals of increasing readership.
-more posts
-keep the calendar up to date
-Get some conservatives to start reading it again so we can have some heated discussions.
btw I think its cool that you are writing for the paper, John. I might actually pick up a copy of it next time I’m bored in class.
-Blogs are SOOOO 2006. Now a days it is all video (video blogs aka vblogs aka vlogs) with a splash of comment at the end. If we want to get people to the site, we should be publishing videos of our events to sites such as youtube. I know from time to time we have video linked blog stories, but we could really pick up lots of hits with unique content.
For our big events, I think we should get a group of people with digg.com accounts to try to hop on the digg effect.
If you don’t know what digg is, or have not heard of the digg effect, i have gladly decided to paste the urbandictionary definition of it for you below
Derived from slashdot effect, an insane increase in traffic after a link to a news article is promoted to the digg.com front page. This is sort of like an unintentional DDOS attack, but sometimes the increased traffic (and ad exposure) causes webmasters and bloggers to post links to their sites on digg.
The digg effect will usually not have much of an effect on larger websites but small websites may be shut down quickly due to the server not being able to cope with the high amount of requests or because all of their bandwidth is consumed.
I wanted ad clicks so I submitted my copied blog post to digg. It got promoted and my website was shut down due to the digg effect.
I do some of my part by checking in to moderate posts/delete spam crap/update the calendar…
But when it comes to posts, I always wonder, “What should I write?” I wrote the one post, and it didn’t get much of a response, which leaves me wondering what sorts of things we’re looking for here.
Digg sounds like a great idea! A store would also do quite well, I think. How would we set that up? That’s something we can discuss… We still have those nine new buttons I made a while back that never went into production, too.
About frickin’ time y’all get your act together. I’m especially impressed by John’s ideas for advertising the blog guerilla-style. If I had a horde of minions and even a hint of entrepeneurial instinct, I’d lift the entire playbook for my own purposes. Absent that, I’ll just wish you all luck. It’s hard out here for a pimp, and this is one of the pimper (more pimp? pimpest?) websites around.
Word.
Jared – I sort of half-followed that, but since laura and chief probably know exactly what you’re talking about, it’s okay.
Laura – My rule of thumb is write whatever the hell you feel like writing, as long as it’s political. It doesn’t have to be long. Hell, it can be a link and a paragraph. It can be a YouTube video. It can be a funny photo. It can be a rant, or an essay. I think if we have a team effort we can have new content up (almost) every day. Readers will come if we start to promote the website again, and they’ll come back if we are updating frequently.
Kyle – Heh. Just doing our part to make sure you and Ryan aren’t the only ones ranting on the internets here in Nebraska.
*Dave-* you rock. this is exactly the type of reason you got the award. keep rocking.
*Jared-* I’m going to go find some youtube link right now. I agree we should start putting youtube content up here… like guest speakers & “5 minutes w/ John” and other interesting content. Alright, I’m not that interesting… I have a video camera, and could easily upload that stuff. The question is editing out the bad stuff & adding an ending slide that says to go to the unodemocrats blog. Perhaps our technology chair could be responsible for doing that?
*Laura-* my rule of thumb is, if I don’t know what to write, go find something interesting someone else has written, or a an interesting photo, or a video, and link to it. then add *at most* 50-100 words talking about it. Sometimes just a simple “Word.” or “Exactly” kind of statement at the end is enough. Also, see what I just wrote for Jared about video content.
*kyle-* your blog has the most readers and frontpages on Kos. But no one can deny that there’s no more pimpin a blog in Nebraska than the UNODems.
*everyone-* can we come up with a catchy new name for our blog? Like UNODB or Blue Campus? or something?
A name change would be interesting – would probably need a bit of design change to make it work, though. There’s something to say for the look we’ve got right now.
BTW, you all have to check out the Olbermann special comment in the “Sacrifice” post above. We may have to play it at our meeting next week.
I think that as we do our monthly themes we need to do blog entries on them. I plan to present the stem cell research info at the end of January and put something on the blog. Dave is researching an increase of the minimum wage and I am sure that he will do a post on that. Someone should also do a post on financial aid/ the debt hits hard info.
It should spark more blog comments because we would have discussed the issues at meetings.
Hey,
I love what you’e doing!
Don’t ever change and best of luck.
Raymon W.