Our Mission onto MySpace

As part of the Digital Avenger work we have been doing we decided to look at trying to attract people to one of our UK Challenge Events, Three Peaks .

We set up a page which can be seen at http://www.MySpace.com/deafchildren

The aim was to attract friends who had an interest in walking, hiking or outdoor events.

Ultimately we would then send them to a landing page where they can then enquire about the event.

As we have been using members of staff for the project I thought it better to have them tell it how it was from their perspective, with a few prompting questions from me. Thanks to Kathy for her Co-operation…

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Ross: Have you used MySpace before?

Kathy: No, only Facebook and Bebo

Ross: How easy was it to set up?

Kathy: With help at the beginning it was pretty easy to set up. The basic page was a bit dull so it took a bit of time to add the extras like the video and images.

Ross: So you learnt some new skills then?

Kathy: To make the pages more interesting it was useful to have some basic html, which with Madhava and Kevin’s help and some digging online I was able to do.

Ross: How many Friends do you have?

Kathy: At last count 411

Ross: That’s good! Isn’t it?

Kathy: Oh no, its now 410 (as she looks at the MySpace page!)

Ross: Will have to look into that and see how good 411 oh 410 is. How did you get those friends?

Kathy: We used a program to collect friends. It is called Stealth Friend Bomber .

Ross: What did you do?

Kathy: We would search on Google and MySpace Groups to look for people interested in walking, hiking and outdoor pursuits. Then send them a request to check out our profile and sign on as a friend.

Ross: Were there any problems?

Kathy: Yes, I would manually have to go through my ‘Friends’ and find the UK profiles before sending out event invitations, as a number of them were American or European.

Ross: What would you like to do moving forward?

Kathy: It would be great to get a few of the people who did the event this year to either join the group or perhaps give us a quote that we can use. Also I would like to have more contact with the marketing team and get information to send out to our 410 people signed up.

Ross: Thanks

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Success/Learning

NDCS staff have learnt to create, manage and populate an MySpace organisational profile

In less than two weeks of promotion, over 300 MySpace users have accepted friend requests from NDCS, self selecting their interest in our Challenge events.

Some interesting questions that came out of this…

Is 410 good? Please let us know…

What should we be doing to a) keep these people interested and b) look at new avenues to collect more friends from MySpace?