Here's a lesson in interactivity and web-print cross-promotion from the advertising side of the house: a fun and successful initiative from the Tri-City Herald that supports the paper's yard sale advertising effort as it kicks off for summer.
It starts with an interactive yard sale map where you can search by location in a listing, by clicking on a map or doing a refined search in a database. (Caution: it didn't work on my Mac with the Safari browser, but Firefox works fine.)
To help promote the effort, the TCH team picks an advertised yard sale at random each week to get a suprise visit from the Tri-City Herald Yard Sale Team,which delivers free coffee, donuts and balloons and searchs the sale for the best bargain a dollar can buy. This is all videotaped and delivered in an online "Yardcast," which is a lot of fun. You can see one here.
The team also produces a weekly video with tips and tricks supplied by veteran area yard salers who tell you how to make your sale more successful. An example is linked from the same Yardcast page, available here.
This is a powerful build on the TCH's long strong of video successes, anchored of course by their powerhouse high school football videos -- which can draw more viewers during football season than all three local television sportscasts combined.
The Herald does all this with a small but creative and dedicated staff. Have a look at the quality they're achiving with modest hardware expense and talent all drawn from exisiting staff.
Doesn't it make you think there's more you could do with your staff?
– Howard Weaver
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