Ideas on publicization

[Forgefire]

Now admittedly Charity gaming marathons can be a blast. They are fun to play, they are fun to watch and really you never know what may happen with one. That is all well and good. The problem is that they are not for everyone.

That is where you can come in. This is a thread to post either your ideas to help publicize upcoming marathons. Everyone here wants people watching, and more importantly we want people donating. After all why else would you all be here? So why not kick things up a knotch and actually share our ideas on how to make the marathons draw in a bigger crowd, and thus deepen the donation pool. Tell us where you spread things by word-of-mouth, what fliers you use, who you approach about it and what you say. Let's share ideas and make sure we can get as much money as possible to the people who really need it!

[The Returners]

What can you do to help us promote the marathon? How can we effectively get the word out to increase viewers and donations? The first thing that you can do is get the word out locally. Tell all of your friends and then tell them to tell their friends. Word of mouth spreads things quickly. Tell parents and family members as well. Tell people you might meet at local game places or anywhere people who might be interested gather. We've got fliers put up on the forums in the Final Fantasy Marathon Help thread that you can save and print out. We suggest making copies of those fliers and wallpapering your town in them to help get the word out.

There are also a number of things you can do to help online as well. First when we put up stories of the marathon on Digg or Reddit or other social networking sites go to them and vote the stories up, even if you need to make an account to do it; tell your friends to do the same (and if you want, make multiple accounts to vote the stories up multiple times). You can also send multiple news tips to large gaming sites such as 1up and Destructoid, because the more individual tips about the marathon they get, the more likely they are to post a story about it. Email large gaming sites and blogs to see if they'll get in on promoting the marathon as well.

Tell anyone on YouTube that you watch about it (especially if they have any interest in gaming--like LPers). Make YouTube videos about the marathon as well. If you are a member of any forums (especially gaming forums) ask the admins if you can post about the marathon, and if they say no post anyway. Some people will see it before the thread gets locked and removed. If you're a member of Something Awful, post about it there in the gaming threads and in the LP subforum.

If you have a Facebook account, post about the marathon on it and post it to every facebook group you're a member of. You should also retweet about the marathon on Twitter, constantly. The more you do the more people will see it. Tell your friends to retweet us as well and have their friends do the same. You can also try to get celebraties to retweet the marathon. It has happened before for other marathon groups, after all.

Ultimately we can't make this a successful marathon without all of you helping to promote. We're only a handful of people while you all are legion and much more effective in getting the word out far and wide to places we couldn't even imagine reaching. We can only do so much to promote--you can do so much more. Don't just do one thing and think the job is finished, constantly promote the marathon from now until it ends. Let the world know about it until everyone's sick of hearing you go on about it. We need this level of dedication to promotion to help raise as much money for Doctors Without Borders as possible. We need you all to be our voice in letting everyone else in the world know so that we can make this marathon as successful as possible. If you want a challenge, here's one. Promote the marathon so hard that we finally break a thousand viewers on the stream. Promote so hard that we break into five-digit numbers and beyond! Promote so hard that you guys make other marathon groups give pause and say "whoa, these guys mean business." We're nothing without you guys, and we can't become more without you guys helping us out. So please, spread the word everywhere you can, as often as you can, and even a little more often than you can.