Debatepedia made its presence known at the South By Southwest Festival, wrapping up on March 22nd a two-week-long promotional effort in Austin, TX.
Washington, DC, March 27, 2009 — Debatepedia, a project of the International Debate Education Association (IDEA), launched its promotional effort at the “Interactive” conference with a simple strategy in mind: canvass the entire conference and converse with all of the 9,500 participants in attendance. This effort was a significant success.
It yielded 3 programmers excited about helping expand the pro/con extension Debatepedia developed out of India. In addition, Debatepedia’s presence received significant media attention, resulting in countless blog and twitter posts, which helped increase traffic by 20% in the week after SXSW to nearly 5,000 unique visitors per day. It also resulted in a number of higher profile leads with mainstream media journalists.
The effort down at South By South West represents a part of Debatepedia’s overarching strategy. Debatepedia is “the Wikipedia of pros and cons”, which means it is attempting to crowd-source and build a community of editors around its mission of centralizing and “clarifying public debates globally”. This requires developing long-lasting relationships and expanding the core team of editors, programmers, marketers, and others. Developing relationships face to face with the tech-savvy participants at SXSW’s Interactive conference advanced these goals very well.
Not only are the participants good prospective team-mates themselves, but they also are “influentials” – people that influence the behavior of large groups of people in their respective spheres. Finally, by writing blog posts and making links to Debatepedia, these “influentials” helped improve the SEO ranking of Debatepedia in Google Searches, which brings more readers and prospective team members to the site. Overall, the strategy was a great community-building success, and worth emulating in other web projects.
Debatepedia main page: http://wiki.idebate.org/index.php/Welcome_to_Debatepedia!
Media kit: http://wiki.idebate.org/index.php/Welcome_to_Debatepedia!
Community Portal: http://wiki.idebate.org/index.php/Debatepedia_Debate_Digest_Calendar
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Contact:
Brooks Lindsay
Debatepedia
Washington, DC
206-406-7558
[email protected]
http://wiki.idebate.org/index.php/Welcome_to_Debatepedia!
