Expanding Presence

[Mark]

Hi,

Facebook, et al have been suggested. How about sites like Wikipedia,
although they do not dedicate themselves to comic books they do have a
large collection of information and (more importantly) editors.

If we can cross link some of the GCD stuff into Wikipedia, say by
improving the amount of references, we might attract more
editorial/indexer to come and join us.

Mark

[Mike Nielsen]

There is already a Facebook page for the GCD.  But it has no real traffic.  Last message was Dec 15th.

I know it's more a PR item, but hopefully when the PR committe is finally sending out "press releases" and stuff they should also post them on the facebook page.

Mike Nielsen 
 
 
Atom: "They are replicating."
Aquaman: "Yes, and they are making more of themselves too!"
 - Batman Brave and the Bold Cartoon episode "Journey to the center of the Bat" 

Hi,

Mark

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[Lionel English]

I think one problem with our Facebook page is that it's a "group" page  rather than a "fan" page.  I think we want the latter, so we can "push" content to fans, rather than relying on people to monitor the page for discussions.

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Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net

[Mike Nielsen]

Ahh, I wasn't aware that there was a difference.  Yes, we should be doing that.  Other groups I've become a "fan" of I get updates periodically when items are posted on the page.

So there could be one of our membership goals, X number of fans on the GCD page by whatever date.

Mike Nielsen
 

 

 

Atom: "They are replicating."

Aquaman: "Yes, and they are making more of themselves too!"

 - Batman Brave and the Bold Cartoon episode "Journey to the center of the Bat" 

---

From: Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net>
To: gcd-membersh...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wed, April 14, 2010 11:21:56 PM
Subject: Re: [gcd-membership] Expanding Presence

[Lionel English]

We already have a presense of a sort on wikipedia; I've noted us increasingly often in the source links of various comics articles, and Ralf just sent a message to me indicating that a significant amount of our web traffic is coming in from wikipedia.  I imagine this will expand naturally, as we're the oldest and most diverse reference out there, and especially as we begin filling in publisher histories and eventually creators and characters I imagine we'll become the de facto reference source.

 

That helps, but I think we need ideas/goals that more directly address the recruiting question.  Do we want to set up tables at cons to promote ourselves?  That would presumably cost us some money, but I don't know how much.  We can throw it out as a tentative idea, and Tony can shoot it down later if we don't have the funds (once we determine costs).  Mike, didn't you and Will or someone do that in Kansas City one year?  What were the results?

--
Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net

[Mike Nielsen]

I agree on everything except characters.  We will never beat the guys doing the DC and Marvel wiki projects.  And we should just link to them when we finally get to that point.  :)

But to get back closer to topic, it seems to me that when we say "members" we are really talking about indexers, approvers and just generally people that hang out and are active on the email lists.  We don't seem to be to considering the people who use the site in this discussion.  And that's fine, I'm not sure how we'd really track that anyway.

So yes, some of us did the KC show a couple years back.  That was Lou, Will, Mark and myself primarily.  Jerry Hilligas stopped in for most of one day also.  We gave out flyers, and had a laptop there for people to view the site.  We also did a presentation about the GCD for one panel.  I believe panel attendance was poor (I manned the booth during that time, Lou would know more)  But this show, I'm not sure any of the panels were attended heavily.  We talked to a lot of people, lots of them new us already.  I don't think we got any new indexers out of the deal though.  We did make contact with one guy who was a former indexer who did do a little indexing over the next 6 months or so before he fell back into silence.

Having done a show like that I have to say I'm not convinced that it's worth the time, at least for shows like this one was.  They had guests and panels but it wasn't of the caliber of some of the bigger cons.  It was mostly a big room full of dealers.  I wonder what the experience would be like at one of the bigger cons like Mid-Ohio or the NY con or something like that.  Of course, the costs would be more also.  I don't remember if we even paid for the table at KC, they may have given us the space.  So we didn't really have any expenses except for flyers and then everybody's time.

We had a bunch of flyers for the GCD.  What wasn't used there I donated to the local con to put into the gift bags they gave out to attendees.  That's a good cheap way to blanket a lot of these smaller cons I think, getting them flyers for their free tables or gift bags or whatnot.

 

The above makes it sound like we didn't have fun at KC which is NOT true.  I think we all had a lot of fun there but it didn't seem to generate any new indexers or increase our exposure with the fan community.

Mike Nielsen 

 

Atom: "They are replicating."

Aquaman: "Yes, and they are making more of themselves too!"

 - Batman Brave and the Bold Cartoon episode "Journey to the center of the Bat" 

---

From: Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net>
To: gcd-membersh...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Thu, April 15, 2010 11:40:49 AM

Subject: Re: [gcd-membership] Expanding Presence

[Henry Andrews]

----- Original Message ----

> From: Mark <znx...@gmail.com>
> To: gcd-membersh...@googlegroups.com
> Sent: Wed, April 14, 2010 4:41:46 PM
> Subject: [gcd-membership] Expanding Presence
>

Hi Mark,
Communities like the GCD and the Timely-Atlas list, which are specifically dedicated to the study of comics, tend to have an uneasy relationship with Wikipedia. Wikipedia articles, at least on comics, tend to accumulate the most commonly repeated "knowledge" on the internet. In the case of comics (particularly once you get outside current mainstream books and into older, more obscure stuff), this tends to be dead wrong. Some folks who have tried to correct things there have had bad experiences with more established wikipedians who cling to views that have been thoroughly debunked here or elsewhere.

But Wikipedia should not be ignored. I think it's more a topic for the PR committee (is someone running one of those?) but if we could find or recruit someone who spent time actually building credibility on Wikipedia and prodding their articles in a direction more based in research, that might be good for us. Although the direct benefit to us is not entirely clear.

An easier project would just be making sure comic articles link to us. A lot do, but some don't, and a lot have old ULRs that would be nice to update (it's a bit more expensive to keep forwarding all of those requests to old URLs).

thanks,
-henry



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[Mark]

On 20 April 2010 17:22, Henry Andrews <andrew...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>  Communities like the GCD and the Timely-Atlas list, which are specifically dedicated to the study of comics, tend to have an uneasy relationship with Wikipedia.  Wikipedia
> articles, at least on comics, tend to accumulate the most commonly repeated "knowledge" on the internet.  In the case of comics (particularly once you get outside current
> mainstream books and into older, more obscure stuff), this tends to be dead wrong.  Some folks who have tried to correct things there have had bad experiences with more
> established wikipedians who cling to views that have been thoroughly debunked here or elsewhere.

Ugh, my experiences with Wikipedia has been brief and certainly not
comic related, that does sound like a road GCD has already tried to
travel.

>  But Wikipedia should not be ignored.  I think it's more a topic for the PR committee (is someone running one of those?) but if we could find or recruit someone who spent
> time actually building credibility on Wikipedia and prodding their articles in a direction more based in research, that might be good for us.  Although the direct benefit to us is
> not entirely clear.

Linking to our resource would ultimately improve our presence,
increasing people who acknowledge us and therefore increasing the
possibility of people actually signing up and indexing?

>  An easier project would just be making sure comic articles link to us.  A lot do, but some don't, and a lot have old ULRs that would be nice to update (it's a bit more expensive
> to keep forwarding all of those requests to old URLs).

That does sound like something that could be undertaken without too
much trouble, certainly not requiring us adding articles etc to
Wikipedia. Maybe we can get the tech side of things point out 404
attempts that have Wikipedia as a referrer to allow us to improve the
situation of broken links? I suppose it depends on the frequency.

Thanks
Mark