I’ve been preaching this for years, including getting the community college and the high school involved. I’ve gone and talked to the owners at The Nexus a few times and they aren’t very reliable, it seems they are too focused on staying in their own setting rather than trying to advertise more and get more people to come to their stores. Daniel apparently got Gamestop to donate a decent amount of stuff for prizes this past LAN and if we can continue working with them and possibly get an official sponsorship or even advertising from Gamestop then that would be great. There are so many ways and venues for advertising the club and the LANs but they require A LOT of work to actually get going.
Daniel did not have a TON of time to get things organized and advertising to go out properly in time, along with sponsors, but with the amount of time we have now we can get a ton of advertising in place and hopefully things completely populated. The problem is that we NEED people to take the initiative on things and to put the work in to get people to come.
Some things that could have been a bit better for advertising and to do next time:
1. Banner placement on the front of the UC. Whenever something is hanging off of the UC, people notice, whether directly or indirectly.
2. Servers need to have advertisements for the LAN running 24/7, pretty much.
3. The website needs it advertised on the front page weeks, if not a month or so, in advance.
4. Signups need to be set up and in place before hand as well.
5. Sponsors need to be contacted and they should be continuously contacted to check on the status, then their banners/etc should be added to the website and fliers.
6. Flier design needs to be 100% completed in the next month or so, with the final design being sent to the print shop for our quota of high quality fliers to be printed off. If there isn’t enough, use some of the money in the gaming club account and get more made.
7. Ask Gamestop if we can advertise for them on our website and then have the local store advertise for us. Don’t ask the cronies at the front desk, ask for the manager himself and explain things to him. Explain how we’ll work for him if he will just put up a couple of fliers and MAYBE tell people once in a while.
8. Maybe we can even ask Best buy as well while we’re there?
9. CRAIGSLIST! I don’t know how many of you actually use Craigslist or not to buy used games, etc. but Craigslist is an AMAZING advertising tool. When I was looking for Rock Band 2 for my PS3 back in Wilmington I saw a place in Myrtle Beach (45min south of me) advertising for their Call of Duty tournaments. Why couldn’t we do this for our LANs? Takes 5 min to make a Gaming Club account on Craigslist and another 5 min to make a couple of advertisements, especially if you just use the image for the filer as the advertisement.
10. The tables in the UC were great, saw a lot of people playing games and I hope it brought a few more people in. If we get games such as Halo on there I think it will attract a lot of people as well. Maybe we can have a laptop playing a VoD youtube of a SC2 match or something as well?
11. Freshman advertisement seemed good, we had nothing to track to see whether they were a freshman or a senior, etc. but I saw a decent amount of fresh faces so that is all is well. I didn’t see Dustin there (I don’t think?), so was there a reason as to why Dustin and a lot of the other freshman that were supposed to come with him didn’t show up? I think we could advertise once or twice more in the dorms for the freshman or even at places such as Harrill and the new dorms, but we should really be focusing on getting some appealing things that will draw people to the LANs, such as prizes/sponsors/etc.
There are A LOT of ways to advertise for our LANs and bring in tons of people, including highlighting certain popular games that are very attractive to gamers of all kinds (Halo: Reach, Call of Duty, Starcraft 2, Smash Bro’s, Tekken 5, etc.) The stuff they play at MLG, including maybe even CS/TF2/L4D2 on there, is a key thing that will draw people in. Games like BlazBlue, MeltyBlood, Guilty Gear, etc are all games that are amazing to play but appeal to niche gamers, which are great, just we need to appeal to the masses.
Lets get some of these ideas working, instead of just ideas.
Also Waffle, love your Tshirts, they look amazing.