Newsroom Editor

Lookin’ Good

David Goldstein — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:53:21 +0000

It appears that our recruitment efforts are finally paying off!

A graduate student at the University if Missouri saw one of the hundreds of fliers we posted up and emailed us to say she was interested in writing for Iknowcomo. She asked us a few questions about the site, what we were all about, what type of content we were looking for, and what type of compensation our contributors receive. We told her we were very flexible in our content and would be interested in basically anything Columbia related. Because we currently have no budget we can not offer our contributors any type of compensation, but this is something that we hope to change in the future. She was very understanding and offered to write a piece for us. Click here to read it.

I think the piece is very good and touched on an important issue that is not heavily covered. It is a bit more serious than a lot of the content we usually post on the site, but that is not a bad thing. I like that we are willing to expand our content beyond simply “Arts and Entertainment.”

In addition to receiving content from a new contributor, we have received inquiries about Iknowcomo as a student organization. These next few weeks will be crucial in determining the sustainability of the publication.

Preparing for the Final Presentation

David Goldstein — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 21:42:35 +0000

The date of our final capstone presentation is quickly approaching, so the Iknowcomo team thought it would be a good idea to get a jump on the work. We decided the most efficient way to complete the assignment was to divide the workload amongst ourselves. An essential first step was determining what questions need to be answered.

The presentation will consist of two main parts: the written portion and the PowerPoint/spoken portion. Each group member has been assigned an equal part of the written portion to complete, while the PowerPoint will be a conglomeration of all of the information we gathered individually. Although each group member will go through the other member’s sections and add information as necessary, it is important that everyone does a thorough job the first time through, as that information will be the basis for our spoken presentation.

In addition to preparing for our final presentation, we approached future capstone members about possibly continuing the project next semester. I do not want to give anything away, and nothing is concrete yet, but the situation is looking optimistic. I am excited about the possibilities for I knowcomo, both in the short and long term.

Recruitment: Part 1

David Goldstein — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:22:48 +0000

Last week I outlined the work still ahead of the Iknowcomo team, most importantly of which is recruitment. With that in mind we set out to build a larger staff and following. Earlier in the semester we designed some fliers to post up and hand out to recruit contributors and grow our audience. Now that we are a student organization, we figured we would be given more leeway to advertise on campus. However, we discovered that we couldn’t just go out and post up fliers willy-nilly, we had to get permission first from the building coordinators.

Beth found a master list of all the building coordinators and their email addresses, so we sent out an email explaining that we were a new student organization, and asked them if it would be alright if we put posters up in their buildings. Most of them said yes, so we took an afternoon and saturated campus with Iknowcomo recruitment fliers.

We are hoping to get some responses shortly so that we will have people outside of the capstone class interested in carrying on this project. If nothing else, the fliers will serve as a good advertisement for the website and we should see a spike in traffic. This was only step 1 of our recruitment plan. Stay tuned for the next installment.

Iknowcomo: Entertainment website and Student Organization

David Goldstein — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:45:01 +0000

WeAfter a long and arduous battle, the improbable has happened. Iknowcomo is a student organization! Whew, what a relief.

We were informed on Tuesday in an email from The Committee on Student Organizations, Government, and Activities (SOGA) that our application to become a student organization was accepted. While this is certainly exciting news, it means our group has quite a bit of work to do before the end of the semester. First of all, we have some administrative duties to take care of for the SOGA office. This includes an officer meeting with SOGA and setting up a mailbox on campus for official mail. Unfortunately, we will not have a budget this semester because the Treasurer (which is me) must attend a finance training session, but there are no more sessions available this semester. This means we must find a new treasurer and make sure he or she attends the session next semester.

This leads me to what is perhaps the most important task we have ahead of us: recruiting. We must find people to carry on not only the content production for Iknowcomo, but the administrative duties as well. We need a new president, vice president, contact person, and treasurer in order to keep the student organization running. And we need to find people to produce content in order to remain a viable entity for entertainment news in Columbia. We are currently putting together a recruitment plan to enlist students to carry on the website and organization, and will be implementing it throughout the rest of the semester.

Our very own promotion team.

David Goldstein — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 21:43:58 +0000

In case you didn’t know, it’s that time of the year again; Twestival time. “What’s a Twestival?” you may ask. I bet if I called it a Tweetsival you would know what it is, although it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

A Twestival, or Twitter festival, is a celebration organized by volunteers for the purpose of raising money for education. It is also a good way to meet all those people you follow in the digital world in real life.

Columbia Twestival 2010 was held at Shakespeare’s pizza. There were raffle prizes, free food, and good times. There was also an excellent promotional opportunity, and luckily the iknowcomo team recognized it. Think about it. Almost everyone present at the Twestival most likely have Twitter accounts, and are active users. That means a room full of potential followers, and in turn potential readers/viewers.

Beth and I both attended the event wearing nametags with the @iknowcomo Twitter account name on it. We walked around talking to people about iknowcomo and encouraged them to visit the site, where we would be posting pictures from the event. It was a successful event in terms of promoting the site, and it ended up being a lot of fun.

Takin’ it to ‘em

David Goldstein — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:54:59 +0000

You know those jobs that come with company credit cards and expense accounts for business lunches? Well this isn’t one of them. Each individual member of the IKnowComo team, both past and present, has put in his or her own hard earned money to help make the site work.

As I discussed in a previous post, the committee that grants student organization status is concerned that we will use the site for personal profit. In order to assure them that this is not the case, we have begun making a list of all the expenses we have incurred as a result of working on the IKnowComo project. These expenses include cost of meals/food for our “best of Columbia” section, concert and theater tickets for show reviews, cost of printing business cards and fliers, the cost of supplies like poster boards, candy (to hand out as a gesture of good will), digital video tapes, and batteries.

TThe above list does not even include the money the founders of the site, Alex Geoff and Gwen Ragno, spent on the domain name and hosting; overall the expenses total in the hundreds of dollars. I think this list will demonstrate that we are not out to make a personal profit.

However, we are out to create a successful and sustainable start up arts and entertainment website, which requires people to produce content. That’s why when we bring the SOGA people our list of expenses next week, we will also bring them a longer list of interested students than we originally showed them, as it has grown since the beginning of the semester.

We decided it is better to be proactive and take the risk of coming off too strong, and then it is to sit back and hope everything works out. Becoming a student organization is an important piece of our project.

A week of design

David Goldstein — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:48:03 +0000

The IKnowComo team has begun making preparations for our all out media blitz. We decided that one of the best ways to get our brand name out to more people in Columbia was to physically go and and talk to people, hand them fliers, and get them to check out the web site. So this week Sam and I designed three different types of fliers to hand out and hang up. The first was a recruitment flier which Sam conceptualized. We designed it to try to get more people interested in writing for the publication, as more contributors means more content and more traffic. The second was a full sized flier to hang up on bulletin boards around campus and in community centers. We wanted it to be fun and colorful to catch people’s attention while giving potential audience members a feel for what we’re all about. Finally, we designed a quarter-sized flier to hand out to people on campus, downtown, and outside entertainment venues after concerts and plays. We believe this is an important step in growing our audience.

We have also started discussing how to proceed if we are not given student organization status. While this would be a huge set back for us, we do not think it would mean that we have failed in sustaining the publication, as there are several other avenues to explore.

The Conundrum

David Goldstein — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:19:43 +0000

How do you invite people to participate?

As I said in my last post, IKnowComo has put together a survey for our users to complete. This week I put the survey online, and in order to keep it at the forefront of the website I made it a featured post so that it stays at the top of the page. I also sent a link to the survey to Lynda Kraxberger so that she could forward it to everyone on the Convergence list serve, along with a personal note asking people to pretty please take our survey. Finally, recognizing the power of social networking platforms, I sent links to all of my Facebook Friends that live/attend school in Columbia asking them to take the survey. We will also be tweeting links to it periodically over the next couple of weeks.

Despite this barrage of survey requests from different outlets, the number of responses we received was relatively low. If I have learned one important thing about collecting data this semester, it’s that it is very difficult to get people to respond to questionnaires without offering them some sort of personal inventive. This is where the conundrum comes in.

We currently have no budget. All that we have been able to accomplish so far has come from our blood, sweat, and tears, and our wallets. One of the reasons we want to become a student organization is so that we can use the small budget we will be given to buy prizes for giveaways as incentive for people to participate. However, we recently received an email from the body overseeing student organizations that expressed concern that we would use the organization as a means to make personal profit for its members. They also wanted to know how we planned to achieve longevity before they granted us student org status.

We explained to them that this puts us in a pickle, as becoming a student organization is one of our plans for achieving longevity. We are still waiting to hear back from the committee, but we are remaining optimistic for now.

Who’s our audience? What do they want?

David Goldstein — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:18:07 +0000

These are the questions so pertinent to any start-up publication. The answers reveal important information that will serve as a guide for how to proceed. Once we identify our audience and their wants, several things can happen. First, we will know who we are already doing a good job of targeting, and work not only to strengthen that base, but to expand it by seeking out a broader range of people. Second, we can tailor our coverage to events, features and reviews that appeal to our audience. It will also help us know what type of coverage people want to see more of (i.e written stories, videos, audio, slide shows, etc.) Finally, it will help when we eventually go to businesses about the prospect of advertising.

The challenge is how to gather this information in a simple and efficient manner. Seeing as how we talked extensively in class about how to write a good survey, and we have a medium for distributing it, it seemed like the logical choice. Based on a discussion with the other members of the iKnowCoMo team, I put together a list of questions that we thought important to ask our audience. I then took the rough draft of the survey to Mike McKean to look over. After a few suggestions about how to improve the wording and structure of the questions, it is ready to be unleashed upon the world.

Click here to take survey

Now we will actively seek out people to take the survey and see what the results bring us.

Hits for Hearts

David Goldstein — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:16:48 +0000

Last week Sam and I went out with a video camera and some homemade signs, and asked people to record some video valentines for iknowcomo.com. It was hard to get people to participate at first, but we got enough brave souls to shout out their love that it made it worth while. We weren’t sure how the video was going to turn out while we were shooting, but it ended up being pretty funny

Our little experiment served two major purposes: the first being it allowed us to create some dynamic content for our website. The second, and more important, is that it drove a lot of traffic to our site. By standing outside of busy spots on campus with signs advertising for iKnowMoMo we were able to get a good amount of exposure. By featuring people living in Columbia in our video we not only drove those people to visit the site themselves, but also their friends, and people who they were giving the video valentines to.

In fact, we had 133 views the day we posted the video and 166 the day after. That’s is three, four, even five times the number of hits we had in preceding days. Clearly this was a wining formula and one we plan to pursue in the future.

This week I also emailed a potential advertiser about his interest in advertising with us. I have not heard back from him yet but we are hopeful that it will turn into a fruitful relationship.

Before we start going after advertising too heartily, however, we decided it was important to put together a survey to get a better idea of our site’s demographics. This will allow us to more narrowly target our advertising efforts. We have come up with a number of questions we believe are important for us to answer, and should be making the survey official fairly soon.