Promoting LiveJournal - Step Three

[penpusher]

Maybe I should post these statements to a public account, like my spaceagers board. But tamar is here and can read, and perhaps she can either fill in the people she encounters who might be interested, or send feedback here based on what she's heard from them, if anything. Or she'll suggest a public posting if she thinks it's worth it?

In Promoting LiveJournal - Step Two, I was looking at the basic mechanics of the current site and the userbase that is negotiating it.

Really, there could be an incentive program for current members bringing people to/back to LJ. How many people would you nudge to get 200 additional user icons? How many more sign ups could there be? Don't you want to send some more virtual gifts or get extra LJ Tokens?

Similarly to having celebrities on the site, having active LJ users that attract more people here is a program that could prove positive, overall. Again, how it is handled is both the trickiest part and the most important one.



But, perhaps, the most crucial issue for LJ to exploit is the fact that people have grown sick and tired of both Facebook and twitter. In both cases, users are basically obligated to deal with people they may not like or want to interact with, simply because "they know each other." Dropping people on Facebook is just asking for some sort of dramatic fallout to occur, and even if you don't care about the person grousing about getting the old heave-ho, it's probably true that they have a few mutual friends that will have to deal with it.

Twitter isn't quite as bad as all that, since everything there is a little bit distanced. Only handfuls of people even post a "FollowFriday" listing, and I don't think anyone is actually adding people that way, anymore. Still, it is annoying to have to deal with people you don't like just because you are connected somehow through mutual friends or a different social media service.

The brilliance of LJ is that with filters, you can keep people on your list and still not have to read or avoid posting stuff because you can just filter them out. Drama is always at a minimum here and you can still look in on even the people you don't necessarily care to read all the time by going directly to their journals.

Really, if you're a celeb or someone who is just tired of dealing with certain people you are stuck with due to familial demands or co-worker issues, El Jay is the ultimate place.

That's why there should be a multi-media campaign distributed throughout all of the social media outlets, that reminds people of this elegance in design and brilliance in use for the folks on LiveJournal. It would range from tongue-in-cheek infomercial type offerings explaining LiveJournal and it's many amazing uses, to soap opera parodies, featuring the drama of yet another FB interaction you didn't ask for. So many ways to go with these promos!

With LJ reminding everyone of why they are the best - reverting to the days of old, when no one dared think of censoring someone's comments or icons, there could be a sale of permanent accounts or at least a discount on yearly ones. Letting people purchase 4 years of full ride LJ time for 80 dollars or something like that. All of this being an added boost to a system that is ready to negotiate the vast and varied interests of the internet.

There could be even more, with featured bloggers writing from various places: The Super Bowl. The Olympics. The Oscars, just to name three coming up in the next several weeks. Forget live tweeting. Let's start Double-LJing (Live-LiveJournaling)!

Commericals could feature "man in the street" type interviews explaining just how frustrating and distracting FB has become and how there needs to be something new, something that works. These could even run on "regular" television!

Though the budget for this step needs to be tight, there are lots of ways to do all of this on the cheap, and the reminders about the fun of being on LJ might be enough to get some of the current journal owners to come back and dust off their usernames at least to see what's new and different!

More to come...

Comments

[ravenfeather.livejournal.com]

http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-1775/

http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-1776/

[penpusher.livejournal.com]

I GIVE UP!!!

[penpusher.livejournal.com]

Well, ok. This does raise a valid point. People who "grew up" on LJ, the tweens and teens that wrote "High School Poetry" here, are probably not going to want to revisit those journals. It's a part of their past they probably want to forget and certainly don't want others poking into, around and about.

But, just like Kellogg's marketed their Frosted Flakes to adults, LJ can find elements that were the good things about the experience and get people to return to that cereal.

LiveJournal... it's Grrrrrrrrrrreat!

[ravenfeather.livejournal.com]

*laughing*

Ok, what I meant by posting those (which were recent btw) is that LJ is already famous enough to be a part of pop culture. I mean we are in COMICS!!

I think you are right, market to a certain demographic. People already KNOW what it is, now a new dress is what it needs.

[sugarplumkitty.livejournal.com]

I find myself coming back here to see the real story of what's going on because FB is a little too public for complete honesty. I don't feel comfortable sharing things of real depth there because there is such a weird mix of family and friends from different facets of my life. Here, I feel in control of my privacy, however true that may or may not be. Many of my friends feel the same way.