Category: VoteTheSite

• The Success of Our Microsite Marketing Strategy

  Nov 12, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Microsite, New Media Campaigns, Social Media, VoteTheSite, Web Marketing | Comments (0)

  We launched our microsite votethesite.com exactly 7 days before election day.  We had grand ambitions of gaining thousands of visitors and thousands of votes to the site, hoping to be able to figure out the correlation between a successful online campaign and an actual election victory.  We knew that this was a bold undertaking that had a chance of failing, but we were excited about the prospects of the project and thought it could gain some traction.  Also, before launching the microsite, we put together a comprehensive strategy on how to successfully market our microsite and reach our traffic goals.

  We adhered to our strategy and were able to accomplish our goals for the site.  My original goals with votethesite.com were to have 2,000 unique visitors and 10,000 votes.  I thought these were lofty goals that would both achieve a significant sample of data and also gain our company some recognition.  By the evening of the election, we had over 3,000 unique visitors and 14,000 votes, exceeding both goals by more than 30%!  Beating our goals was extremely exciting, but it would not have been possible without our original microsite marketing strategy or a group of others that helped spread the word about votethesite.

  We first sent the site to our friends and family, encouraging them to check out the site and make it their Facebook status, Tweet about it, etc.  This was a great first step - it got us around 300 initial visitors and 1,000 early votes.  This group was even more rock star than we ever expected when it came to discussing the votethesite on social networks.  In the end, votethesite.com was the Facebook status for more than two dozen people (leading to 155 unique visits), tweeted about more than 50 times, and linked to from various other profiles and away messages.  These friends and family were able to help us get off to a quick start, and they demonstrated the importance and reach of the individuals in your immediate network.

  From there, it was time to engage strangers and see if they liked the idea as much as our friends.  We sent the site out to all of the campaigns that we featured on the site.  We didn't expect much out of this and were surprised when we immediately got emails from candidates thanking us for featuring them and for having us update their screenshot.  When anyone asked us to update their image or include different information, we were quick to oblige, because we knew that if we took care of them, they were more likely to pass it along to others.

  The strangers that really helped us take off were news aggregators and the blogosphere.  We submitted the site to Digg, Reddit, and Hacker News.  Digg never really caught on - a visitor of the site submitted it without us know and didn't insert a descriptive name, just the link to the site, so people weren't really pushed to click it.  However, we made hard pushes on the other two networks.

  We submitted the site on Reddit under the title "Vote for Politicians Based on Their Web Design" and got more than 30 ups.  One important thing is that we submitted it in the Web_Design thread, making sure that it was in front of the most relevant audience that would be interested in the topic.  More than 7,000 people subscribe to this feed and it shot to #1 in their feeds, which was a great push for us.  In the end, Reddit pushed almost 500 people to the microsite and engaged them to the point where they spent more than 8 pages/visit on the site.  Similarly, on Hacker News, we referred people to our blog posts about the site and pushed them to go directly to the site.  It's hard to know the exact number of views that HN generated views, but I would estimate it was around 1,000.

  Finally, we were fortunate enough to get some love from the blogosphere.  None bigger than being featured on the homepage of Download Squad, which ended up driving nearly 400 visitors to the site.  Also, several other, smaller blogs picked up the site, accounting for around 100 visits.

  I know this doesn't add up to the 3,000 unique visitors, but the majority of the visits came directly to the site - I would wager that most of them saw it on one of the news aggregators, a social network, or a blog and just typed the URL in rather than clicking on the link.

  We had a great rush of pride after accomplishing our goal, but it was accompanied with a sense of graciousness for all of those that passed our site along.  It just goes to show that if you create something interesting or continue generating good content, your idea can get traction on the web.  It's good to approach every marketing situation with an executable strategy, but the most important part is that you really believe in the idea and how it could help/entertain different people.

  Thanks again to everyone and stay tuned for the final voting results from votethesite.com!

• Votethesite.com Featured on Download Squad!

  Oct 30, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Microsite, New Media Campaigns, VoteTheSite, Web Marketing | Comments (0)

  

  The friendly team over at Download Squad featured our microsite votethesite.com on their homepage.  They also are holding an impromptu poll on their site asking visitors "strictly from a geek perspective" which Presidential website they prefer.

  We really appreciate the shout out as it has driven a fair amount of votes to the site - we're now over 8,000 votes in just 40 hours!  Also, it helped us fulfill one of our goals in marketing a microsite by getting picked up by a major blog.

  For those of you not familiar with Download Squad, they've got some great content and contributors - I definitely recommend checking them out.

• Why a Microsite Can Help Market Your Company

  Oct 29, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Microsite, New Media Campaigns, Politics, VoteTheSite, Web Marketing | Comments (2)

  My last post was about how to successfully market a microsite for your company, and it outlined the current steps we're taking to market our recent microsite votethesite.com. However, I realized today that in that article, I didn't put forth the basic tenets of why a microsite can be a very good choice for many businesses.
  
  I think the general philosophy behind a microsite is one that Jason Fried articulated in his keynote at Northwestern (if anyone has the video, leave a comment):

  "Out teach, out share, and out contribute"
  

  Fried was describing how the marketing of celebrity chefs demonstrated to market online, and I think that quotation is nearly identical the goals of launching a microsite.
  
  Perhaps the biggest reason to build a microsite is to drive traffic to your organization's main site. Due to the fact that you're out contributing to your space, people will be driven to your site. It's nearly impossible to make a corporate site go "viral" and quickly spread around to thousands of people - however, an interesting microsite can easily take off and start referring traffic to your main organization's site. In addition to the upfront traffic from initially marketing your microsite, there will also be a longtail, as different blogs continue to pick up the site down the line and it continues to rank on Google for keywords.
  
  One great example of a long tail generated by a microsite is Website Grader. This microsite was created by an internet marketing and SEO company named HubSpot. It started off as a fun experiment and microsite for their team and has resulted in thousands of sites linking to the tool, references from major blogs, and more than 400,000 URLs being graded. The microsite captures people looking for a free website evaluation and then drives a portion of that traffic to HubSpot as; almost all of these visitors are part of the company's main target.
  
  Another great reason for a microsite is to establish your firm as an innovator in the space. This would be considered out teaching. By creating a forward-thinking microsite that has great content and addresses an important topic, people will begin to look to you as a thought leader and innovator in your space. This was certainly one of the motivations behind votethesite.com; our firm has always done a great job of developing political websites, but the microsite helps establish us as a thinker in the space that is exploring how online campaigning is affecting real elections. By taking the time and putting in the effort to build an innovative microsite, people will realize that you're a leader in the space and a company worth following.
  
  A microsite also allows you to create powerful spinoff content, whether it is blog posts, free reports, white papers, or others. Giving this content away would be classified as out sharing. Our microsite wasn't just a one-off solution, we've used it to generate several good blog posts (one of which drove nearly a thousand visitors to our site today), and it will also allow us to repurpose the data for reports and white papers. A microsite gives you an ideal opportunity to generate valuable data and content that you can continually use for your company's advantage.
  
  These are a few really compelling reasons to build a microsite. It is certainly a time investment, but is well worth it when you think of the longtail and the ability to create spinoff content. However, be sure not to half-ass it; if you're going to build one, really throw yourself behind marketing it and getting value out of it. Have you had success with a microsite? If so, leave a comment and let us know your story and why you decided to build it.

   

• Six Hours In: Launching a Niche Microsite

  Oct 29, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Blogging, New Media Campaigns, Politics, VoteTheSite, Web Marketing | Comments (4)

  Earlier this evening, we launched a microsite at www.votethesite.com to allow people to vote for their favorite political websites.  In just six hours, the site has already recorded 3,000 votes, received dozens of comments, and been viewed by hundreds of visitors from across the world.  This site wasn't just launched with an "if you build it, they will come" strategy, but is the result of a multi-stage, concerted effort by our team to publicize and market it.
  
  We launched the site hoping to gain as many votes as possible, and hoping to get picked up by outside political blogs and circulated around the designer community.  We knew that we had to crawl before we could walk, so first we needed to get traction with low hanging fruit, such as friends and family.  So far, we've followed a pretty regimented roll out; here are the steps we're taking to market our microsite.

  1. Send to friends and family - Everyone on the NMC team sent the project to their friends and family, encouraging them to pass along to others.  This was kind of a light launch that let us fix any problems that arose, knowing that the visitors would "love us no matter what" as my grandma told me when her district's screenshot didn't appear correctly.  This led to a good first wave of traffic and gave the voting some momentum, encouraging others to vote when they got to the site.
  2. Distribute to Favorite Social Networks - For this stage, we all posted on the social networks that we spend the most time on, which are still composed of mainly friends, but more distant than in stage 1.  We each posted the link as our Facebook status, Tweeted it (follow me for more updates on the site), put up as our Gchat away message, and a couple more.  This round was really successful, leading to several re-tweets (including from complete strangers), and getting picked up by a North Carolina newspaper's blog.
  3. Email out to list of political contacts - As a political web design firm, we have a pretty sizable amount of consultants and campaigns that we work with, who we knew would be interested in the site.  We sent them all individual emails, encouraging them to try the site out.  This resulted in some good feedback and even a call from a contact that we hadn't spoke to in months who wanted to hire us to work on a new site (nice!).  In addition to just our personal political clients, we also sent out an email to each contact from the campaigns featured on the site, letting them know that they had been highlighted and to let us know if they had any feedback or changes for us.

  These are the stages we considered part of the initial rollout.  The goal here was to gather a decent amount of votes on the site, so each race had multiple votes and to start a little buzz around certain circles that we had launched this site.  Considering we launched the site at 5pm, we had modest expectations for the results of these phases, and have exceeded all our expectations so far.
  
  Below is a brief overview of the next steps we're taking to get the site in front of more voters.  I'll offer more details on these steps later this week, after we have tangible results on whether they worked or not.

  1. Continue Blogging about the project - Over the next few days, we'll be continually blogging about the project, the programming behind it, and it's coverage.  By continuing to create good content about the site, visitors to our main site are likelier to go to it, it can spark interest in different web communities, and will more likely get indexed by Google.
  2. Submitting to popular news aggregators - This is the stage where we really try and take the views to the next level.  We'll be submitting to Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, and some others.  If it gains steam, these sites could drive some serious traffic.
  3. Reaching out to industry decision makers - In this stage, we'll reach out to the big time players, such as Politico, large newspaper blogs, and other relevant sites.  Hopefully, they will like the idea, see that it has already been fairly popular, and write up the site.  This would result in huge traffic and give the site a lot of credibility.  This would be the ultimate win.

  Well, there's still 6 days before the election, so we think people have plenty of reason to check out votethesite.com and vote on their favorite political sites.  Per #4, we'll be keeping the blog updated as we keep publicizing the site and we'll let you know if we reach our goals and how the traffic is doing.  Wish us luck and be sure to go vote - both in our fake election and in the real one!

   

• Vote for the Best Political Websites

  Oct 28, 2008 by Joel Sutherland | Filed in: VoteTheSite | Comments (0)

  

  Even though our days are consumed with building client websites and providing customer support - that doesn't mean we don't have some free time in the evenings to work on some side projects together.  The New Media team just released a new microsite at www.votethesite.com - the site allows you to browse campaign websites from races across the country and vote on which candidate has the better site.

  We had a lot of fun building it, but it also serves a functional purpose - we want to see if there's a correlation between which campaign has the better site and who wins.  As a political web design firm, we're very interested to see if the better campaign site is also winning the actual election.  The more votes we record on Vote the Site, the more data we'll have to include in our results.  If you'd like to signup to receive the final results after the election and the correlation chart, send an email to results@votethesite.com.

  To get this site up and running was a team effort.  Everyone burned the midnight oil gathering screenshots, designing the interface, and programming the functionality, but we're really pleased with the product.  Please be sure to check out votethesite.com, vote, and let us know your feedback.