Pushing the site?

Open question to the Admins/Mods/etc.

Since this site went live over a week ago there has been a steady trickle of people signing up. I believe this is mainly by word of mouth as I’ve not seen it mentioned properly on any of the forums I browse.

The only place I have seen it mentioned is in 2 H4H threads as a non working link. A lot of gamers don’t monitor the forums so are you going to advertise the organisation/site in anyway?

You make a good point there. I have to say that I have not seen any extra info around the net.

I am going to put some posts up on the few forums that I am a member of.

dave

I've been "Spreading The Word" around The AWA (The Army Wargamers' Association), I'm pretty sure that some of the people who have signed up recently have done so through being informed through those means. I've asked people to pass the link to the BTSWA forum on too. Further reminders will be sent out in the coming months.

One thing that I can say for sure from my experience with The AWA, is that getting publicity is always a hard graft. Something that you may want to consider, Henry, is contacting BFBS, for representation both on their Website and for on-air broadcasts. There's no other broadcaster with such a world-wide coverage! Plus, you shouldn't have to pay a penny for any mentions and the Tri-Service WH Tourney in aid of H4H would be a good subject to bring along!

You may want to consider, although I'm not a member of it myself, is ARRSE, and, of course Army Net.

Of course, there are also the generic gaming forums/sites, but you'll have to consider carefully who your audience is, and who you want to join, and how you will confirm their eligibility to join. Currently serving members is easy, if they have a suitable email account, but ex-regulars are harder to confirm, unless you've got a friendly and helpful person in the Locations branch in Glasgow (for the Army, not sure about the blue side) who won't mind doing some checks on service numbers for you (and that raises a host of data protection issues ...).

Tim

Just do what you can guys. We are trying to get people to push it out at units and on forums they are on because its the only way!

There are so many people who are just afraid to let it be known that they are geeks who play with toy soldiers so its never going to be an easy task!

Ok Dave so you're relying on word of mouth - which only gets people you already know game.

I wondered if you had bigger plans, believe me I know how difficult it can be to get a game. Pushing the site on forces forums such as Armynet or other parts of the forces gateway should be a given. Branching out to arrse and rum ration et al would be the next step forum wise.

Are there any plans to join the GCN? This would give advertising in GW and White Dwarf almost every month.

Other possibilities are members wearing T Shirts at tourneys, decent ones tend to be talking points and other forces there would likely be interested.

Are there any plans to run tables at conventions? Starsmash, colours and even GD UK are ideal places to attract members.

I guess I'm just curious to see what your intent is and what your plans are after the H4H?

Steve HJ

this is what i've done so far.

bek hawkby from the gcn team has redistributed a email sent to her to the service clubs that she knows.

soldier magazine has been asked to cover the HFH tourney, i'm also looking to see if there's a raf/navy equivalent.

i've contacted everyone i know by email, phone and public forums, and asked them to spread the word.

what i will do:

i hadn't even thought about bfbs so that is a definite angle to be worked on.

You can do that one mate!

I dont have a face for TV or a voice for radio!

Remember rhythm, speed, volume and pitch!

And dont forget to say over after every sentence.

If you do decide to do shirts I'd probably get 1.

With ref to the navy you could try the Navy news. they have an office in HMS Nelson but I dont have the full address

There's an RAF newspaper, I'll see if I can get the details tomorrow.

Hopefully I'm not stepping on anyone's toes (trying to be helpful).

Whilst researching some short URL (Web addresses) for other groups I discovered that some of the ones that I wanted were already taken. So, taking a bold leap, I checked for the BTWSA with Tiny URL and discovered that it wouldn't be possible to have tinyurl.com/btswa because they want at least six characters after the /. So.... I asked for tinyurl.com/TheBTSWA, which it gave up without argument.

Hopefully this will help with promoting the BTWSA and that I didn't dent any toes in the process. As I found out, if you snooze you lose, so I figured better to get it now whilst we could.

Tim

I stuck a general email out to the juniors in Corsham Mess and had 2 replies!

1 was from 1 of my mates telling me I should quit 40K and start playing MineCraft. The other was from some random fem who asked if it was a JOKE!!

I am guessing there are not many players in that place!

tim not a problem mate all the advertisement we get is only to the benifit of the forum

In a discussion about Club shirts, one of the guys in the Blandford Garrison Wargaming Club forum mentioned QR codes so, having created one for the BGWC, I've also done one for the BTSWA:



Hopefully that will prove useful too.

Tim

sorry i'm a technopobe what does that do?

Henry,

it's a called a QR code. QR codes are supposed to be 'simple' ways of coding data/information that can be read by techno-devices, such as smartphones and tablet devices. The device must have both a camera (to 'see' the code) and the software to interpret the information/data.

QR codes can be really simple (Yes! That is a simple one), like the one above, which just has the URL (Web Address) for the BTSWA, and a lable identifying what the URL is for. Alternatively, they a QR code may contain a mass of information.

In the case of a complex QR code, you could have multiple phone numbers, a Web address, and other information. The concept is that it should be easier to scan the QR code and have the software automatically place, for example, contact information, into the phone's contact book, than it would be to type it all in (with the appropriate possibility of typos (especially pertinent when auto-"correct" slaps its hand on the data entry) all of the information. Their benefit gets better as the quantity of data goes up, but, for the geeks among us (yes, I will be posting to the other thread at some point...), they're recognisable & cool.

Tim

RAFWA has put the link into our forum, and I have seen some of our regulars on the forum.
We are in discussion to sort out the permissions so you guys can get some more info. At the moment we are a closed forum due to spammers.

If you want a look.

www.rafwa.co.uk