Although I’m no longer the sole keeper of the Mustang Daily fan page on Facebook, the editors who are in charge don’t have blogs (what a shame). So I’m going to pass along a little tip that tripled Mustang Daily fans in a week.

It’s simple and perhaps obvious: invite all your friends. And tell your entire staff to invite all their friends. And all their friends to invite all their friends. Once people see “So-n-so became a fan of mustangdaily.net” their newsfeeds, they follow suit. It’s a domino effect. Everyone on the Mustang Daily staff invited all their hundreds of friends to join, and in a week we went from 290 to 840 fans.

Something else learned from this experiment is that the name of your fan page is vitally important. You may notice that 290 fans is not a lot. But because we named our page “mustangdaily.net,” anyone searching for “Mustang Daily” on Facebook won’t find our page. That’s a huge, irreversible mistake.

So name wisely and invite heartily. And Happy Thanksgiving!

The following is an e-mail I received from the Mustang Daily Media Board (I had no idea such a thing existed):

Greetings,

As chair of Cal Poly Journalism Department’s Media Board, I’m hoping to gather your input on a couple recent proposals submitted to the board that could affect the future of the Mustang Daily newspaper.
Both of these proposals are in response to reduced income from advertising and long-term budget concerns. We’re currently asking for input from students as well as members of our advisory board. The proposals are as follows:

1. Beginning next fall, drop the Friday edition of the Mustang Daily (meaning the paper will be published four days per week – M-Th).
2. Add the option of placing advertisements on the front page of the newspaper.

If you have an opinion on these proposals, please attend tomorrow’s meeting (5/5/09) in 26-223 at 11am.

After an initial discussion among Mustang Daily editors at last night’s weekly meeting, the staff seemed highly resistant against the notion of putting ads on the front page. 

I have a feeling I’m going to be the only dissenting voice tomorrow. I’m all for both proposals, and have been from the start. 

I am concerned that the so-called “media board” didn’t let our editors in on their initial meeting. As an advocate of transparency and inclusion, that seems backwards.

Another concern we have is that we can get thousands of dollars owed to us from advertisers who say they’ll “pay later.” Because San Luis Obispo is a small community and advertisers are sparse, my understanding is that we’ve let some payments slide to keep bridges from burning. I’m not sure on the exact details, but we hope to find out tomorrow.