On Oct 11, 2012, at 9:48 PM, Kevin Grignon <kevingrignon...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 4:22 AM, Juergen Schmidt <jogischm...@gmail.com>wrote: > >> >> Am Montag, 8. Oktober 2012 um 19:03 schrieb Rob Weir: >>> Some quick observations based on recent experience and metrics. I >>> think this is important when we consider ways of reaching out for >>> volunteers. >>> >>> Facts: >>> >>> 1) Adding something an the www.openoffice.org homepage, as a news >>> story, gets around 80K hits/day >>> >>> 2) Adding something to the header on all of ooo-site gets 800K hits/day >>> >>> 3) Putting out a blog post on blogs.apache.org gets around 1K hits/day >>> >>> 4) Sending something out by Twitter gets maybe 1K, but it is a one-time >> thing >>> >>> 5) Sending something out via announcement list reaches 8K users, but >>> this is also one-time >>> >>> 6) Other mailing lists, like ooo-dev and ooo-users reach a few hundred >> users >>> >>> >>> What is effective? What isn't? What gets the eyeballs? >>> >>> >>> Case 1: Google Moderator >>> >>> Over we had 1,116 users submit 910 ideas and cast 13,354 votes. This >>> was promoted via mailing list, social networking, blog post, >>> announcement list, but it did not really take off until I linked to it >>> from the website header (method #2 above). This massively increased >>> the number of people participating. >>> >>> >>> Case 2: Danish and Polish translators. >>> >>> I put a brief note on the Danish and Polish homepages, in English, >>> saying that we would welcome volunteers: >>> http://www.openoffice.org/da/ >>> >>> This was something so simple, so low tech that I never bothered to do >>> it before because I was not sure it would be effective. But then I >>> noticed that these NL home pages were getting nearly 5K hits/day. >>> Although this is a much smaller audience, it is a very targeted >>> audience. >>> >>> Within 48 hours of putting these notes up we now have multiple >>> volunteers starting to work on completing the Polish and Danish >>> translations. In fact now we need to worry about how we coordinate >>> multiple volunteers on the same language, a good problem to have. >>> >>> >>> Case 3: QA volunteers (a negative example) >>> >>> We've had a lot of good information on helping test AOO, on the wiki, >>> automation code checked into SVN, test procedures, test reports, etc. >>> All of this is happening in the open on ooo-dev and ooo-qa. But I >>> don't think we have a really attracted any more test volunteers. >>> Why? >>> >>> Maybe this is because we have only asked on our lists, which have >>> relatively few subscribers -- a few hundred -- compared to the how >>> many we can reach out to via other means. >>> >>> >>> So based on what I've seen, in this example and others, I'd recommend >>> thinking like this: >>> >>> >>> 1) Are we looking for a broad or targeted outreach? >>> >>> 2) If narrow, look for targeting specific pages on the website that >>> will be seen by those users >>> >>> 3) If broad, consider something on the home page or the header on >>> every page, like we're doing now with ApacheCon. >>> >>> 4) Even though a blog post gets less traffic, it still might make >>> sense to start there. It gives you something that you can then think >>> to from other places, as well as a way to engage with the reader via >>> comments. >> >> thanks for this very interesting and useful observations and hints how to >> reach a broader audience. >> >> Juergen > > > > Can we set up the header content to cycle through important notices. With > so many daily hits we should optimize this opportunity. > I like this idea. It would require some changes but one way would be to have the header markup be static rather than a SSI, but have that static markup reference a JSON object in an external JS file that contains the various messages, URL's and weights. Could even be locale-specific. > Perhaps we could assign priorities to the messages so core messages have > high visibility, while still leaving some impressions for other messages, > such as recruiting, surveys, etc. > > Thoughts? > > Regards, > Kevin
