I ran an ad for my Canes blog

As you know, I’ve been doing a blog on the side about the NHL all-star game, http://canesallstars.wordpress.com The game features online voting to choose the starting lineup for the game. A few weeks ago, a Buffalo Sabres fan started a website http://www.voteforrory.com encouraging people to write in Rory Fitzpatrick, a Vancouver Canucks player who played for Buffalo last year. Fitzpatrick is basically a back up player who has not even scored this season. Well, the effort snowballed, and the guy got 150,000 write ins already, and has been getting huge media coverage. His website is getting about 10,000 hits per day, and has been written up on dozens of sports websites in the last three or four days, including espn.com

 I found out about the Rory campaign on November 26, and made my first post about Rory on November 27th. (I’ve written three or four posts at my blog so far on Rory).

I saw the offer yesterday at voteforrory.com to run ads in return for donations to the Canucks foundation and emailed the site last night and negotiated my ad.  It went live around 11 pm ET, and as of 6 am ET today, I’ve already had 102 hits on my blog coming directly from http://www.voteforrory.com !!

I paid $40 to have the ad run for two weeks.

Here’s my ad at http://www.voteforrory.com:

I’ve seen Rory play a number of times, as I attended Games 1, 2, 5, and 7 of the Eastern Conference finals in Raleigh last year and game 6 up in Buffalo.

I was glad to donate to the Canucks charity, and I’ll post here and let everyone know how much traffic my ad generates!

My Canes all-star game voting blog: marketing

I’ve got a blog covering online voting for the NHL All-Star game, focusing on the Carolina Hurricanes nominees. Voting goes through January 2. I’ve been posting every day. I’ve been trying to incorporate ideas from this class.

I’m running a guerilla marketing campaign, using some of the tools suggested by the marketing component of this course. The assigned press release announced the campaign. I used the list of message boards and blogs in my original writing and posted voting information and links to my blog on all the message boards and blogs I found in the research for my original writing.  I next decided to embark on a viral marketing campaign. I went to Myspace and found two different Carolina Hurricanes groups with several hundred members each, and posted info on voting on the discussion thread for each group, and used my member’s privilege to send a bulletin to all the members of one of the groups. I used my unc facebook.com account and found a dozen Canes fan clubs there as well, varying from 50 to 500 members. I posted info on voting and a link to my blog on the wall on each of those groups. Yesterday, I wrote to the admins of each of those groups, asking them to message all of the members with the information.  One admin has already messaged her 250 members, I hope others will follow along when they return from Thanksgiving break.  I’ve also written to the Canes marketing department and talked stragegy with them.

 I’ve linked a graphic from the Canes website to the ballot itself:

 

My N&O Op-Ed on redistricting

I have an op-ed on redistricting in the Sunday 11/26/2006 N&O (page 27A in the print edition). Interestingly, after they accepted my writing, I had to FAX separate releases to two different people at the N&O, one for the print version, one for the online. (Don’t the two divisions speak to each other? The releases were identical) My initial writing was 1,700 words, I cut it to 890 before submitting it, they edited it to 872. Interestingly, they edited down the next to the last paragraph, leaving it beginning with the word “And” (my version did NOT start with “And”)

 I’ll post a version here later this week that has links to my sources.