LorainCounty.com Blog

We are not yet receiving the volume of feedback we are hoping for. Each post is only receiving a few comments on the site and some email feedback. I know it is a little to early to make a final judgement, but it is probably time to try and spice things up a bit.

Let’s talk about LorainCounty.com Conversation Forums.

What do you like about them?
What could be improved?
How much moderation should there be?
Does the flagging system make sense?
Would you like a different platform for conversations?
Are they too tame/wild?

For many years, LorainCounty.com in partnership with 3 local radio stations, WEOL AM 930, WOBL 1320AM and WDLW 1280AM has provided live and on demand audio of local high school and Oberlin College sports.

Anyone with Internet access, anywhere in the world, can visit the LorainCounty.com sports section and listen. Over the year’s, we’ve received emails telling the story of older brothers and sisters listening in from Iraq and Afghanistan and grandparents listening in from other states.

This week is one of the biggest weeks of the year. Both the boys and girls high school basketball playoffs are in full swing. In the 1-week period between Friday, February 27 and Thursday, March 5, there will be 29 live broadcasts on LorainCounty.com.

There is also an archive of all of this year’s games available for anyone who misses the live game or saw the game in person and wants to relive the highlights.

We are grateful to the radio stations and broadcast teams that do an exceptional job announcing each game. Each year at this time, we start thinking about next year. What are your thoughts?

Have you ever listened live to a high school game on LorainCounty.com?

Do you think this is worthwhile?

What could we do differently next year to make it even better?

This morning I was in Columbus at an Ohio Web Leaders networking event. The speaker was Ryan Squire, Content Acquisition Manager of Content Acquisition for NBC 4, who spoke about the television stations use of social media.

Ryan pointed to the ability to use social media to build relationships and to allow stories to be told that might not make it on the nightly news.

This led me to think that this was a good topic for our discussion of LorainCounty.com 8.0. Over the last couple of years, we have set-up LorainCounty.com on the popular social media sites. We have a twitter account, a FaceBook fan page, a myspace page, flickr page, etc.

We have experimented added some content here and there, but have never put together a social media strategy for LorainCounty.com. What are your thoughts?

Let’s start the discussion with twitter since it is the site getting the most media attention right now. On a personal level, I have a twitter account @edskimin and use it on a regular basis. But what about LorainCounty.com?

Should LorainCounty.com have a twitter account?

How should it be used?

For many years, we have resisted writing a blog for LorainCounty.com. We have always and continue to believe that the site is about the users and not about the development team. Our role is to ensure the site runs smoothly, build partnerships and encourage participation behind the scenes.

So, why start one now? Over the last few year’s, LorainCounty.com has continued to grow in number of users (currently over 45,000 each month); number of page views and number of sponsors. Couple this growth with all of the exciting things that are happening on the Internet and we see a lot of new potential.

It’s time to start thinking about the next phase of LorainCounty.com. Internally, we consider the current itteration to be LorainCounty.com 7.0. I’ll save the full history for a future post.

User suggestions have always driven the development of LorainCounty.com. Previously, this has been done through email and personal conversations. This time, we want to create an even more open and transparent process. We want to think out loud, listen to users and enable users listen to each other.

We plan to post at least 2 blogs a week and always include a question for user feedback.

Let’s start with a process question. In addition to comments on this blog, what other ways could we involve users in the planning and developing LorainCounty.com 8.0?