We’re going to be on the Grammar Girl podcast! What do we want her to say about us?

Question

As I’m sure a lot of you already know, Grammar Girl is a big deal in the online English/Grammar world. I’ve been talking to her about sponsoring a podcast, and as part of the sponsorship we get mentions on the podcast, her newsletter, twitter, and Facebook, along with an ad on the site.

This is a huge opportunity to reach a bunch of people - she has 70,000 listeners and 160,000 twitter followers. So what do we want her to say about us? Obviously we don’t want her to just mention that we’re her sponsor – we should do something cool on the site that she can tell her listeners about. Right?

Here are some ideas:

1. Word Choice Contest - we could start a regular (maybe weekly) event where we do a "name that word" competition (someone reads a definition, and the first person to answer correctly wins). We could do this in a Google+ Hangout potentially.

2. Top New Users Contest - see which new user can earn the most rep in a certain time period

What else? I want it to be something that would attract Grammar Girl's listeners (and maybe herself!) to come check out the site after they hear about it. A chat/Hangout might be good because people would get to talk afterwards. Please give feedback and suggest other ideas!

FYI- she offered me the October 7th podcast slot, which is kind of soon. So let's brainstorm! We can always ask for a later date if necessary (like if we want to try something out among our current users before we promote it off the site), but it would be better to respond sooner rather than later.

[Edit] Another way to get her involved in the site before the podcast would be to interview her and do a write up on our blog. What do you think about that? Would anybody be interested in helping conduct the interview? I'd have to ask her if she'd be willing of course, but want to gauge interest here before I do so.

Answer 1

I like the idea of interviewing Grammar Girl prior to sponsoring her podcast. It might give her something to talk about organically: "Hey! I was interviewed by blah blah blah!" That would be much more interesting to her listeners than conjuring up a contest specifically to give Grammar Girl something to talk about.

This doesn't have to be so contrived. You should interview Grammar Girl because she has something interesting to talk about. You should brag about your events and contests when they are fun and interesting. But putting that cart before the horse risks looking a bit forced and artificial.

I do like the idea of these events and contests. Keep working on them because they make this site fun and interesting. Go forward with an interview request because it's a net plus for this community. But if the sponsorship has to happen on October 7th, perhaps there's already something interesting to talk about amongst your content. But thinking a bit more long term, if the sponsorship has to wait for something interesting to talk about, it seems worth it to wait for that to happen organically.

Answer 2

I think one of the aspects of EL&U that doesn't seem to work the way I'd expected/hoped is that old questions do tend to "wither away", sometimes without the best possible answer being present and/or obviously recognisable by the number of votes it has.

So how about randomly selecting a few dozen past questions every week (maybe by getting User:Community to assign them a bounty?). Count all the new upvotes for each answer, to identify the one most favoured now. Award a prize to the user who has most consistently voted for the "best answer" as thus defined.

Also identify the best half-dozen questions in the competition (again, by new upvotes) and increase competitors' scores according to whether they upvoted exactly and only those particular questions. Apart from raising the profile of good questions, this would reduce the number of "joint winners".

Bias the scoring against people voting for more than one answer to a question, or switching their vote after seeing what others are going for. I'm sure the techies can figure out how to manage those details so the intended effect wouldn't be subverted.

Answer 3

I don't know Grammar Girl, and the time frame is relatively short, but to answer the question in your title, the ideal thing for me would be for her to hang out here for a while, and then say whatever she wants. I can't think of anything less convincing than her fumbling over some blurb that we concoct, without really even taking an interest. Unless she's a great actress...

Answer 4

I love the idea of running a contest, but I have some hesitations about the initial ideas:

Word Choice Contest - we could start a regular (maybe weekly) event where we do a "name that word" competition (someone reads a definition, and the first person to answer correctly wins). We could do this in a Google+ Hangout potentially.

This seems to me like a single-word-request. To make this work, I think there would have to be some substantial practical distinction between a single word request and the contest.

Top New Users Contest - see which new user can earn the most rep in a certain time period

As Kitḫ says, the rep cap is a problem. It causes this contest to favor those members who answer a lot of questions and gain accepts (because accepts are rep-cap immune), rather than those who answer few questions but develop better answers. Additionally, this idea does exist in the form of the user leagues, but due to the rep cap problem, I don't think it's advisable to place undue emphasis on this.

A chat/Hangout might be good because people would get to talk afterwards.

If we're looking into getting non-SE participants, this might not work. Chat requires 20 reputation to participate.

Random Brainstorming: I don't have any definite ideas, but I think a more subjective contest might work—e.g. coin your own neologism, or what's the most interesting word you've learned in the past month, and we would highlight the ones we like best.

Side note: It sounds like the Grammar Girl thing would be a one-time sponsorship (but correct me if I'm wrong). If we wanted to run the contest continuously (weekly/monthly), we could continue that on our blog. </plug>