Hi, I'm recasting this blog comment into a forum topic to see if others want to oranize to get meetup.com to rethink this issue:
Do we still need meetup?
Meetup has the brand recognition and gets the marketing. I think it will continue to be a good initial point of physical contact for bringing people to Dean.
We are using Yahoo groups and a.dfa.com, but they are not attracting new people. Marketing matters. Part of the problem is that the Meetup site is brighter and more entertaining (shows total number of Dean supporters, total cities, total in each city, gives opportunity to post little comments, etc. The dfa home page has the buzz, but it doesnt carry over to the a.dfa.com site. The a.dfa.com site is gray, boring and lonely looking.
Re Meetup: The main problem I see is the 42-vote threshold for venues in locations where they are increasing the listings to 10. We wont be able to use meetup to organize intimate 15-20 people venues in new cities because they wont be listed as chosen meetup venues after the voting. There is no point in even listing them. According to a person from meetup who I contacted, they have a 5-vote threshold when 3 venues are listed at a location. My conclusion is that we need to divide up some of the current locations.
In our area, across the bay from San Francisco, Meetup has one location (Oakland/Alameda) for two counties (Alameda and Contra Costa) with 3,000,000 people in dozens of cities over 1,600 sq.mi. Nationally, meetup has about 500 locations for roughly 250,000,000 people; about 500,000 people per location. So we have a deficit of 5 locations (which could each list 3-10 venues each, depending on how huge we want them) for our population size. As it is, we have over 1,300 registered for our meetup location, but weve recorded contact with less than 400 of them, and only about half of those came to our 3 meetups in July. Of the people we have, they are preponderantly from only two cities, Berkeley and Oakland. We are just not reaching and expanding the way we could if we could set up small venues farther a field from this core.
This should be of interest to both meetup and the Dean campaign. It matter to meetup in the long run that people dont want to drive 20-40 miles on our crowded freeways to go to a meetup. We have the population density to support more tightly defined locations. The campaign should be concerned because this structure inhibits growth to new cities not in the Berkeley/Oakland mold. We have vast untapped reservoirs of potential Dean supporters and we need a tool/place for them to meet and bring new guests where people can actually talk to each other and have fun. A venue with 50-100 can be off-putting as a first introduction. The campaign is paying meetup $2,500/mo albeit for another purpose, but surely it can be used to leverage some help for us here.
Do we still need meetup?
Meetup has the brand recognition and gets the marketing. I think it will continue to be a good initial point of physical contact for bringing people to Dean.
We are using Yahoo groups and a.dfa.com, but they are not attracting new people. Marketing matters. Part of the problem is that the Meetup site is brighter and more entertaining (shows total number of Dean supporters, total cities, total in each city, gives opportunity to post little comments, etc. The dfa home page has the buzz, but it doesnt carry over to the a.dfa.com site. The a.dfa.com site is gray, boring and lonely looking.
Re Meetup: The main problem I see is the 42-vote threshold for venues in locations where they are increasing the listings to 10. We wont be able to use meetup to organize intimate 15-20 people venues in new cities because they wont be listed as chosen meetup venues after the voting. There is no point in even listing them. According to a person from meetup who I contacted, they have a 5-vote threshold when 3 venues are listed at a location. My conclusion is that we need to divide up some of the current locations.
In our area, across the bay from San Francisco, Meetup has one location (Oakland/Alameda) for two counties (Alameda and Contra Costa) with 3,000,000 people in dozens of cities over 1,600 sq.mi. Nationally, meetup has about 500 locations for roughly 250,000,000 people; about 500,000 people per location. So we have a deficit of 5 locations (which could each list 3-10 venues each, depending on how huge we want them) for our population size. As it is, we have over 1,300 registered for our meetup location, but weve recorded contact with less than 400 of them, and only about half of those came to our 3 meetups in July. Of the people we have, they are preponderantly from only two cities, Berkeley and Oakland. We are just not reaching and expanding the way we could if we could set up small venues farther a field from this core.
This should be of interest to both meetup and the Dean campaign. It matter to meetup in the long run that people dont want to drive 20-40 miles on our crowded freeways to go to a meetup. We have the population density to support more tightly defined locations. The campaign should be concerned because this structure inhibits growth to new cities not in the Berkeley/Oakland mold. We have vast untapped reservoirs of potential Dean supporters and we need a tool/place for them to meet and bring new guests where people can actually talk to each other and have fun. A venue with 50-100 can be off-putting as a first introduction. The campaign is paying meetup $2,500/mo albeit for another purpose, but surely it can be used to leverage some help for us here.
