Marketing for SQLRelay – two weeks in
Further to the last post introducing my trials and tribulations, and a hectic week or two we’ve made excellent progress on the Relay. I’ve enlisted Mark (@tsqltidy) the chair for the Relay and others to assist with the twittering and other activities which has really held me reduce my workload substantially.
All ten venues are going ahead:
| Location | Date |
|---|---|
| Reading | Monday 11th Nov 2013 |
| Southampton | Tuesday 12th Nov 2013 |
| Cardiff | Wednesday 13th Nov 2013 |
| Birmingham | Thursday 14th Nov 2013 |
| Hertfordshire | Friday 15th Nov 2013 |
| Newcastle | Monday 25th Nov 2013 |
| Manchester | Tuesday 26th Nov 2013 |
| Norwich | Wednesday 27th Nov 2013 |
| Bristol | Thursday 28th Nov 2013 |
| London | Friday 29th Nov 2013 |
So what’s been done so far?
What have I been doing to try to make this a successful marketing channel:
- [The previous stuff]
- Added milestones
- Posted photos
- Increased committee participation
The result: From 48, we’re now at 76 likes and some comments have gone up on the photos we’ve seen more posting activity (still too much is me though!). One of the challenges I tried to tackle was the lack of visibility of other people’s sharing and posts, however, this is simply not possible and the creation of a group at this point would negate the traction I’m trying to get going. I need to start pestering some folks to post more on there.
https://www.facebook.com/SQLRelay2013
What have I been doing to try to make this a successful marketing channel:
- [The previous stuff]
- Increased committee participation
The result: We’re up to 101 members! We’re mainly using this as an announcement channel so far but it seems to be doing quite well and growing steadily. http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4153765
What have I been doing to try to make this a successful marketing channel:
- [The previous stuff]
- Posting announcements about speakers and name dropping them
- Targeting tweeting times to when they’re most likely to get retweeted
- Scheduling tweets to relieve the burden
The result: So far we have 158 followers, which is an excellent improvement. https://twitter.com/SQLRelay2013
The website
We gave the website a quick facelift which I think has really helped it
We integrated eventbrite into it so we can take registrations directly through the site (as well as on eventbrite) which has been excellent.
Other channels
We’re generating some blog activity (mine doesn’t count!)
We’re playing around with Pinterest and Google+ to see how these can contribute to a wider strategy.
We’re on sqlserverfaq.com which has given us 27 extra registrations.
How’s it going?
I found this neat site which compiles information from different sources to compute some statistics. I twill be interesting to see how this matures over time along with key social media KPIs and attendee volumes.
http://socialmention.com/search?t=all&q=sqlrelay&btnG=Search
Aside of how the marketing is doing, how the Relay itself is doing is much more important. We are on target for filling spaces (aside of in one or two individual events which needs addressing) to even have a substantial waiting list closer to the actual events.
