I am posting this msg to solicit some feedback on the need/desire for Wanderers social network presence.

I basically see us as having some separate needs above and beyond the current website and the periodic emails we send out now:

1. the ability for the Wanderers website to alert users of new story additions and web updates. Typically these are included in the email updates we send out but it would be nice to provide some notice to Wanderers as the stories are added to the website. So this would be a more traditional Twitter setup where people "follow" a Wanderers account, I log into that account, announce a site addition accompanied by a url, and all the followers then receive that notification.


2. one of the things that came up during the meeting was that it would be nice for Wanderers to have the ability to notify fellow Wanderers of urgent or relevant messages that does not require all the users to come to the website and check the discussion group. For instance, an impromptu run, a run or race cancellation, party, whatever. So this would be more like the traditional “listserv” in that any Wanderer can send a msg which is then broadcast to ppl in that list (as opposed to limiting it to one person broadcasting to the group). This is a somewhat non-standard implementation of Twitter where we may be able to use the List feature to accomplish this. We have the list set up but we need to run some tests to make sure this is working as we need it to (specifically, I need to figure out whether I have to follow people and/or add them to the wanderers_club list in order to accomplish the above). It has been suggested to me during my research that Ning is much better suited for this but I am not sure if you and other Wanderers are up for joining yet another social networking site.


3. finally, we may have a need to do something for special club events like the trail series, trail classic, trackmeet, whatever. The purpose would be a targeted page or pages with public access (facebook group, with discussions and friends) and the idea of spreading the word about an event plus then to drive traffic back to the site.

The reason I feel #3 and #2 above are quite different is the access level. In order for #2 to work effectively, you would probably want to get these on your phone. But even as emails, you would never want to get messages that are only vaguely related to running and/or the Wanderers like we might get from a FaceBook group we might set up.

So my questions are:
Do we need #1, #2, and #3 above? What are your thoughts on this?
And if we want #2, which I personally think is a good idea, we need to do some testing to see if it cuurently accomplishes the goal as described in #2 above. But if it does not work that way, what are our thoughts on Ning? Do any of you have accounts set up for that?

Please provide us with your thoughts and input.
thanks,

Jan

Whoa. Wanderer Nation: after some more digging, i think i have found a solution. There is an extension to the content management solution we are using that would allow all of you to tweet to a single twitter account. This would provide the ability for people to receive urgent updates re race cancellations, impromptu runs, etc. This pertains it list item #2 in the orig posting.

we will get that up and running in the next few weeks.