October 23rd, 2009 by Joanna Lee
Building A Sustainable Online Community: ChicagoNow – BlogWorld Expo 2009
Building A Sustainable Online Community: ChicagoNow
Speaker: Tracy Samantha Schmidt
10/16/2009, 3pm – 3:30pm
Tracy Samantha Schmidt wrote for Time magazine. They wanted her to get a student eyewitness at the Virginia Tech shooting. She reached out to people through the Virginia Tech group on Facebook and found a survivor. She beat out 800 other journalists to get an exclusive interview. She believes in using social media to get facts and to reach people.
On Creating ChicagoNow.
The idea behind ChicagoNow is for people to find out what’s happening on their block, things that are happening that affect them, news, and entertainment.
Some key tactics that were used:
- To populate quickly: used an existing community, like bloggers.
- Brought people into the site by funneling all blogs into different categories.
- Hired bloggers by offering them contracts, but the bloggers still owned their content, unedited.
- Remained unnoticed until a massive launch with a marketing campaign.
ChicagoNow has 115 blogs, but no neighborhood blogs. So they created a summary of blogs on paper to distribute to neighborhoods with neighborhood ads.