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If a tree falls down in a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, would it make a sound? How about if a web portal goes live and nobody knows about it, is it really there? I'm not entirely sure about the first question, but in the second case the answer is clear – yes, but not for long. My name is Vedran, and my team's job is to make sure that Bumblehood takes the place it deserves among the Internet community and steps out of its current anonymity.
It requires a lot of time and effort to draw attention to a website in the vastness we like to call cyberspace,
especially one that is quite new – Bumblehood has been around a little
over a month, since February 15th (what Sasa likes to call „one night of horror“).
Since I used to be a content writer for Bumblehood during the
non-public beta days, I had good insight about what the portal was
really about, as well as the general “feel” of it. That knowledge
proved invaluable in the current mission of my team, because I could
focus my outgoing communication on the portal’s innovations and cool
aspects.
Needles to say, we were all quite excited during the
first week of our mission, which consisted primarily of brainstorming
about different means of creating buzz. Numerous ideas arose, some of
them good, some excellent and some bad, and a plan was slowly beginning
to form. We all knew that months of intensive correspondence and other
forms of communication were ahead of us, all the way hoping that people
would recognise the potential of our web. It was up to us to spread the
news, but we couldn't control the feedback, so we were quite anxious to
see Bumblehood through the eyes of others.
Since
Bumblehood is a community-driven project, it was only natural to
approach fellow bloggers first. The team sent several e-mails with
general information about the portal and BumbleMap, the engine behind
the whole thing, to several blogs which covered web 2.0 news, start-up
companies and technology. And they didn’t disappoint. I would
personally like to take this opportunity to thank Killer Startups, Startup Meme and Sociable Blog for providing that crucial first coverage, informing their readers
about the rapidly-growing toddler, that is Bumblehood. You certainly
made our job a little bit easier.
It is not just outgoing
communication that matters, however. In order to make it easier for our
users to spread the word about us, my team decided to include quick
links for every article to the most popular social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit (also known as the colorful
little buttons in the upper right corner). After a brief meeting and
arrangement of all details, the development team included those buttons
overnight, all without any sort of bribery. Now that’s teamwork!
Another
important aspect of our job is search engine optimization – a little
science in itself, and a very inexact one at that. After reading many
articles and different opinions on SEO tactics, numerous ideas about improving visibility and better keyword
targeting popped into my head. I will not go into details here since it
is just technical stuff, and we're still considering the positive and
negative aspects of all those ideas. Since the primary goal of the
communications team at the moment is to generate more traffic and
spread the word about Bumblehood, we don’t really have time to go into
much detail regarding this activity for now. It is, however, very
important, and we intend to begin tackling this giant very
soon.
That’s
it from me for now; I will keep in touch with updates as soon they are
available. And don’t forget to spread the buzz about Bumblehood if you
like the site; there’s nothing quite as reliable as a recommendation
from a friend.
Posted by Vedran Banjeglav on March 25, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's Up --- Comments on Forum
