[OH-Publicity] Publicity metrics

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi publicity peeps,

I have been thinking lately that we should work on getting more people 
aware of what we do, to help them plug in to our community.

I also want to be thinking of how to quantify that, so we can be sure 
we're moving toward the target of more people being aware and plugged in.

Here are some starting points. I'm happy to have this be an ongoing 
conversation, but I do want to commit to something sooner rather than 
later, so we have something we're moving forward on.

I'm curious what you folks think! And if you see this sort of goal-setting 
as motivating.


OpenHatch announce list
-----------------------

* 1000 subscribers to http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/announce
   by 1 year from now

Right now there are 168 subscribers. The monthly newsletter that goes out 
to that list is probably the best way to keep abreast of the latest in 
OpenHatch land.

Is 1000 too aggressive? Maybe that can be our reach goal, and 400 can be 
our must-hit target. But on the other hand, there are lot of untapped 
resources for getting this number higher:

* campus.openhatch.org attendees

* website signups

* Prospective staffers (I'm working on making a list of these people now)


Facebook page
-------------

* 300 "likes" to our Facebook page by 1 year from now

Right now, we have 82 likes. It seems doable to get that up to 300.

The monthly newsletter also goes out to the Facebook feed, plus all our 
usual blog posts.

We can increase this number by having people who already like us invite 
their friends, and/or by having the blog or OpenHatch front page suggest 
that you like us. We can also suggest that when people staff at our 
events, they post about it to their Facebook land with a suggestion that 
friends "Like" OpenHatch.

Another metric would be the number of actual "impressions" (i.e., people 
who actually saw a post) on Facebook. This is more useful, as we care more 
about people actually seeing the content. It's slightly harder to make a 
commitment to that number, so I'd prefer to first make a commitment to the 
one that's changeable at a first order.

(Also, if anyone else is interested in being an admin there, by all means 
say so here!)

(In general, these metrics are somewhat gameable. We can "cheat" by buying 
100 Facebook likes for $5, for example: 
http://fiverr.com/allwannasay/add-100-real-fans-to-your-facebook-page-within-24-hours 
But I presume we're not in this to just play silly games with numbers.)


Links from the outside world
----------------------------

This sounds spammy, but I think it's smart to think about.

I often forget to engage with blogs like Geek Feminism and aggreagators 
like Slashdot, Hacker News, and the like. So perhaps we should have a goal 
of 10 successful placements of OpenHatch content on services like that 
over the next year.

For example, Slashdot and opensource.com are likely to be interested in a 
"What we've learned by running Open Source Comes to Campus events" post. 
Colleges with subreddits are likely to be interested in a link to our 
post-event wrap-up posts. Geek Feminism has a "linkspam" section where 
they aggregate posts that have to do with geek feminism generally. Our 
post-event wrapups from Open Source Comes to Campus events should probably 
be there. The denizens of the free software and open source sub-Reddits 
probably care about what we do, too.

Some time ago, I made a list of venues like that here: 
https://openhatch.org/wiki/Getting_the_word_out

10 seems like a very doable goal.

(Some sites, like opensource.com, are interested in cross-posting rather 
than just links. That counts in my book.)


Other goals
-----------

Curious what you folks think, and/or if you have different quantifiable 
publicity goals that we could put together.


Meta: Beeminder
---------------

I'm willing to consider using Beeminder <https://www.beeminder.com/> to 
put money on these goals to put the fire under my feet, as it were.

-- Asheesh.

P.S. I do realize I'm slightly behind on putting together some blog posts. 
Please pardon that.