Marketing tools from StackExcahnge

Question

The common thread I seem to see in all the proposals is that creators are struggling with marketing and nay-sayers (those who ask why a proposal must be re-initiated for the ump-tenth time when prior efforts have failed) seem to think that the Area51 population is static.

I believe there needs to be specific tools for marketing and planning a proposal. Some people will be content with creating the proposal and seeing if the mud sticks. Others will want to rally the users of their group.

Being able to address the followers through poles, questions that are "proposal only" so they don't pollute the larger "discussion zone", and being able to form groups within the proposal to divy up work, I believe, would go far in allowing someone to manage a proposal successfully.

There should be more to building a proposal than just hoping that Area51 users will find it interesting....

Answer 1

I think we agree that long gone are the days when you can throw a proposal in Area 51 and have it created solely on the basis of being an interest of our current audience. If a proposal makes significant progress, certainly we can (and do) advertise it to the 10s of millions of users on our network; but I also delete hundreds of proposals every month that go nowhere, so we can't advertise them all. That means that the initial push and the initial audience has to come from the groups proposing these ideas.

I believe there needs to be specific tools for marketing and planning a proposal.

I'm half inclined (and half kidding) to mark this status-completed.

This stuff is out there — Google+ to organize groups, Facebook to rally support, Twitter to broadcast updates, Tumblr, SurveyMonkey, StumbleUpon, Meetup. Certainly we're always looking for ways to improve our tooling and our user experience… for our part; but I wouldn't wait on a whole slew of social-networking and marketing tools from Stack Exchange. The social networking space is simply too vast and too ubiquitous recreate these tools here. But I have been exploring ways to aggregate some of these social and organizational tools through the proposal page as a way to help with awareness and organization. But nothing is imminent.

So I guess I would mark this with some combination of status-deferred and status-planned. Better tools are always in development. But for the time being, part of the barrier of entry is still being able to show the ambition and means of rallying support for an idea. That is still an integral part of the Area 51 process.

How can we attract “civilians” to follow site proposals?