Tuesday, May 29, 2007

more than I could have hoped for

The game audio poll that I posted last week got posted on Kotaku.com this morning. When I originally created the poll, I thought "It should be pretty easy to get about 1000 responses. That's all I really need."

Then I watched as it languished around 100 for about 4 days.

I was beginning to struggle and wonder if I needed to completely redefine my expectations. I was simultaneously wracking my brains trying to figure out every avenue I could to post this thing in order to get it some traffic.

- I tried submitting it to Craigslist. It got flagged as spam and deleted. Twice.
- I tried submitting it to Digg.com. Somehow I managed to undigg my own posting of it making its digg count go from 1 to 0. Needless to say, no one bothered to read the lame story with 0 diggs.
- I sent it out as a bulletin on MySpace and Facebook through at least 5 different people's accounts.
- I'd even toyed with posting it to TheForce.net's forums asking the Star Wars fans there to check it out. After talking about it with Amanda, we both decided that it'd get me more instances of "when r u giong to make teh new XWING gmae?" than anything else, so I scrapped that plan.

Amanda had been saying all along "Ask your editor at Game Developer for help." Needless to say, as soon as I listened to her advice I got a response from my editor saying "Kotaku will help you out." By Sunday night the poll had netted a grand total of 318 participants. Then it went up on Kotaku this morning. As of this evening, it's sitting at about 1600 responses.

Kotaku rocks. My editor rocks. Amanda rocks. Everyone who helped me by getting this thing out there or taking the poll rocks.

There's a lot of rockage in my world today.

3 comments:

rooni said...

o/` Yay, yay, yay!
Yay, yay, yay! o/`

I love happy posts from Jesse! =)

Anonymous said...

You know, I did the same thing to the only item I've ever posted to digg. Do they not have a way to remove your own posts in the event you post incorrectly?

Bug said...

Apparently not. I was trying to edit it, realized you can't (maybe I'm wrong about that), tried to delete it, and in the process merely unDugg it. Not a good UI.