The new eBrandon celebrated its one month anniversary this past week and If I’m not mistaken Westman that humming sound is you buzzing at least little more than usual ;)
After some initial kinks the flagship classifieds section has been moving along quite nicely. By pure dumb luck the timing of the new launch worked out quite well since the Holiday season provided a nice chance to work on little tweaks that needed to be made. Just speaking as a user of the site myself I’m finding it so much cleaner of an experience to browse classified categories, look at and reply to individual ads.
But I mostly wanted to talk about what a nice little early surprise the Buzz section has become as a compliment to everything else on the site.... showing signs of being what you might call an “influencer” a little quicker than I could’ve hoped for. In the first month the net number of your views on postings put up was north of 100,000 with some getting 4000-5000+. Its been a chat driver offline and online…. on eBrandon and elsewhere too.
A great example of how things are coming together is the posting made yesterday re the casino survey. The posting was put up on here around supper time and connected to a discussion thread that a member had started on the topic. Some folks took the chance to take part in the thread and share their opinion. I pushed out a link to the posting on social media and some additional discussion and sharing took place there.
Over the course of the next half day a couple of radio stations picked up the topic and used it as part of engaging with their listeners. Over that same period a separate site appeared to take the same posting from here, change a few sentences and use it as the basis to push out a little bit to their audience too.
End result is a topic of interest that has the community talking and the new format eBrandon was a driver of that conversation.
There will be times where its the other way around. The story about Chez Angela getting recognition started with a social media post that was expanded on on here for a writeup. Another example is the little post on “The Steam Plant,” which was originally broken by the Brandon Sun and would later be featured on here. The Sun is unique in the community as a local outlet that provides depth to stories and I hope folks recognize that value that makes them distinct.
But I’d better bring this ramble to a close…. I just wanted to take the opportunity to touch on how the new vision for the social part of eBrandon is taking shape and throw out a few thanks to those that are helping it evolve. If you’ve read this longer-than-usual post this far, you’re one of the good ones and your support is appreciated ;)