Journey by Dmitri Dawkins

More about The Jamaican Blogger Project

// January 24th, 2011 // 8 Comments » // Cool Stuff, Technology

It has been almost 6 months since the start of the Jamaican Blogger Project. Since then, well, it hasn’t grown as much as we thought, but the primaries in the project have been pretty busy working on other projects. This year we have decided that this project is necessary to help promote blogging in Jamaica and want to build an even stronger community around it.

The aim of the project is is to promote content about Jamaica or created by Jamaicans. We will also sometimes share information helpful to the blogging community.

Currently the project is only on Twitter (@jamaicanblogger) however we also plan to launch a website soon. The @JamaicanBlogger handle currently re-tweets content posted under the #Jamaicanblogger hashtag. There is also a daily newspaper that aggregates links from the hashtag automatically: http://paper.li/tag/jamaicanblogger it has a history of previous editions as well.

Nicky from Cinnamon Coffee one of the project primaries, who originally came up with the hashtag, has also created the two logos below which we will be using to promote the project:

What would really help is feedback on the logo and what you would like to see from the project. Please comment below or contact us on twitter @JamaicanBlogger or email jamaicanblogger@dmitridawkins.com with feedback, suggestions and ideas you may have. Thanks.

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#FNOJa Success According To Social Media

// September 13th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // Cool Stuff, Social Media Marketing, Technology

Fashion’s Night Out, a sale event hosted by The Jamaica Observer on September 10, 2010 was a huge conversation piece last week on Twitter. The event which was heavily promoted on Twitter, caused quite a stir as over 1600 tweets were made using the hashtag #FNOJa.

I am not much of a fashion person myself, but on Tuesday I realised the importance of this event since we could use a common hashtag to track the influence of this event on Twitter and across the web. By Wednesday I had already messaged the Jamaica Observer to have them encourage all participants of Fashion’s Night Out to use the #FNOJa in their promotional tweets. I also encouraged friends to use the hashtag and shared it via several twitter accounts. Soon most Fashion’s Night Out related tweets were using the hashtag. I must say thanks to The Jamaica Observer for realising the need to track the hashtag and promoting it so well.

@jamaicaobserver Can everyone please use the #fnoja hashtag so we can establish Jamaican users vs. rest of the world? Thanksless than a minute ago via TweetDeckDmitri Dawkins
utenjm

So what did we learn from this? There were 1683 tweets about #FNOJa from 416 unique authors. 130 web links were shared in those 1683 tweets from 24 distinct domains. You can see more below:

#fnoja twitter stats

416 unique authors may not seem like alot, but those 416 authors had a potential impact of 152,000 views. Additionally this hashtag was specific to Jamaica, most of those 152,000 views were Jamaican. Additionally these views are better than any flier, because it is buzz, people talking to people about the event, creating greater online presence and awareness directly.

Using Hashtags is an awesome tool to help promote a cause, brand, or for tracking. Hashtags organise data to make it usable and easily found. I personally use hashtags to keep up on news on specific topics such as the #JamaicanBlogger hashtag that Jamaicans use when they release a new blog post, content from that hashtag is also retweeted by @JamaicanBlogger. Tweets using the #Jamaica Hashtag are also aggregated daily for an online newspaper using a platform called Paper.li (Thanks @brukins).

On September 10 we made our mark on Twitter with a truly local hashtag, let’s continue to use them as we organise and comment on more things using social media, to let Jamaica’s presence be known worldwide!

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