This project is starting to produce content in Russian. Good. The problem that we now have is how to push it out. We could:
pass onto Masha the credentials for the ER Twitter + Facebook, so that Masha can write short texts in Russian (that include links to the Mission: Belarus content) to be pushed out.
create a V-Kontakte ER account – actually this is a good idea anyway!
go through the FB-TW accounts of Russian-speaking Edgeryders, especially in the Belarusian community, starting from those of Masha herself and, for example, Olga. The British ambassador, Bruce Bucknell, tweets both in English and in Russian and could probably help us with a few retweets (but he does not have many followers, and anyway the action seems to be mostly in V-Kontakte and Facebook). The same holds for UNDP Belarus.
These are not mutually exclusive. Everything that sends traffic towards the Mission: Belarus part of the ER website is good. @hexayurt, @masha cheriakova, @saidhamideh, @Noemi, any brilliant idea?
In my opinion it doesn’t make much sense to use our current channels to push out the larger bit of content, yet we can use them as peripheric. Otherwise we risk not reaching our audience, as it happened with Georgia and Armenia on twitter.
Question: where do we suppose the majority of the Belarusian entrepreneurs, grassroots activists, tech & makers communities are? where is our audience? @masha cheriakova I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Are there forums or facebook / V groups where they gather?
Are there online magazines or portals with large traction which we could approach because there’s an overlapping interest with ours? (don’t know if it helps, but I remember with Edgeryders in its year 1 I was trying to reach out to Romanians and the best thing I did rather than go through myself with a limited traction, was getting in touch with portals who’d receive a shorter version of the content I would want shared and a call for participation with link to edgeryders.eu. It generated content for them, and traction for us - win-win)
I believe the best approach for reaching our audience is targeting the existing ‘social’ platforms such as the start-ups hub Imaguru, Social weekend, hackerspace, hack4future, SocStarter, Talaka etc. I will contact them as soon as possible. I think VK is not really our target audience. Twitter we could think of in a bit later stage. However no one in my network uses Twitter… so don’t know if it is the best channel…
I contacted 34magnet.net whether they would like to add a short summary of the blogs and forward their readers to the edgeryders platform to read more. 34Magnet is a digital magazine that focus on Belarusian culture and the underground scene, writing about the informal side of Belarus and cover events that shape the local cultural context. OUr target group, no opposition!
I have asked Kalilaska’s FB community and Ludmila’s FB community to post about Edgeryders, so that is happening. This will further develop once I blog about more social innovators.
Hi @masha_cheriakova and all, just to let you know what I’m seeing so far based on Edgeryders website analytics:
Belarus is country no. 5 in number of site visits in the last month, with 330. A small part of them do come from VKontakte, so I guess you decided to go that way too?
In terms of content, it tends to drive itself: Vinay’s post Other people’s utopias got 366 views in less than 4 days. By comparison, the second best, your post about Lesya, got 118.
Very few new users though (3), but this may be because of language barriers you identified and perhaps that calls for participation weren’t framed that way? Anyway, just thought I’d share this with you, and depending on your insights, could be useful for upcoming work.
