Anatomy of a Central Market meet-up: Getting outside the office, generating page views

This story begins with my shameless self promotion a few days before the meet-up, both online and in the paper. It’s common sense:

If you want people to see you, you have to let them know where you are.

Here’s the “promo” that ran on ydr.com and in the York Daily Record/Sunday News early last week.

Then, you set up your office. This is what mine looked like on Thursday:

(Note: I haven’t gotten my ideaLab laptop yet, so this was makeshift. This keyboard was the perfect birthday present last week. Read about that celebration here.)

In the time I was there, I’d say about 20 people filtered through my “desk” area.

The million dollar question was: How to turn these conversations into something productive, like page views, for instance?

You know, the lifeblood of a website.

For this, I made sure to offer each visitor — and those following along at home on social media — a few prompts: What would improve your neighborhood in York? What’s missing?

Then, I strung the answers together using iMovie for iPad and uploaded it to our organization’s Brightcove player using the Brightcove iPad app:

I combined that, with this Storify of social media responses, and slapped them together on a ydr.com page.

Click here to see that page.

I socialized the page on the York Daily Record/Sunday News Facebook page, which created ANOTHER wave of engagement:

This shot the story into the website’s top ten, both that day and the entire next day!

All in all, it was a good day. Good coffee. Good company. Good community engagement on multiple platforms.