High Tide Aquatics

Sponsors...

glee said:
Support from LFS is important as others have mentioned because for new entrants to this hobby, the gateway is from LFS and everyone in this community. I’m not necessarily talking about sponsorship type of support but just making sure we have good relationships with our prized LFS. Keeping members happy is just as important because the more minions we have, the more we are willing to talk about the ethical husbandry of marine life.
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Bingo!

While I stirred the pot, and called it "Sponsors" -- what I really meant is forming a good two-way partnership between LFS and members, and in pursuit of new members. sponsorship is secondary, even tertiary...
 
We also need to consider the type of member.

New website Guests:
FB and adds at LFS would really help here.

Paying members:
Making the web experience great helps.
Frag swaps requiring membership seem to drive this also.

People that regularly go to club events:
Not sure on this one.

I/We are certainly open to ideas.
 
rygh said:
We also need to consider the type of member.

New website Guests:
FB and adds at LFS would really help here.

Paying members:
Making the web experience great helps.
Frag swaps requiring membership seem to drive this also.

People that regularly go to club events:
Not sure on this one.

I/We are certainly open to ideas.
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Back when I did a startup, we needed engagment form certain customers. We tried many things like radio twitter newspapers..etc.
By far the most effective and cheapest was fb. I kid you not a hockey stick graph of engagment appeared every time we run adds on fb.
We had similar issue like bar that we needed a very specific users in a micro areas...
Eventually the BOD will have to decide which outreach method they want to have the BAR adapt. Lfs's, adds platform's....etc.
I personally do not think word of mouth is scalable and I am a living example of that..if it was not for LFS I would have not been here while I was on R2R and RC since early start if my hobby..

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I am intrigued, and I am sure others are also. But....
Realistically, Step 2 is for the BOD to approve FB or other marketing expenses/plans.

The real Step 1 in a small club like ours is to find a volunteer to drive it.
Who will generate some nice FB images and ads?
Who will set up the FB directed advertising?
Who will track results and tweak it?
Who will maintain the FB account? Both short term and long term.

Similar with a extended push for LFS advertising.

I already have 2 jobs at BAR, so I am totally not volunteering. :)
 
rygh said:
I am intrigued, and I am sure others are also. But....
Realistically, Step 2 is for the BOD to approve FB or other marketing expenses/plans.

The real Step 1 in a small club like ours is to find a volunteer to drive it.
Who will generate some nice FB images and ads?
Who will set up the FB directed advertising?
Who will track results and tweak it?
Who will maintain the FB account? Both short term and long term.

Similar with a extended push for LFS advertising.

I already have 2 jobs at BAR, so I am totally not volunteering. :)
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Ha ha fair enough,
A note, see what R2R do. They do not generate content for the adds. They use the thread that is trending that week and push it to the target audiance.
This will eliminate the costs of creating an add contents.
If the BOD decided on a path am willing to chip in, resources and manpower to help out.
And at the end of the day when it comes to outreach, you learn as you go. You test things and see how audience reponce.

Am also planning to talk to Neptune and see what his thoughts are in rejoining the club. I know for a fact he have no hard feeling about bar otherwise he would have not asked me to join last year..

So count me in, if I can add value..



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ofzakaria said:
Ha ha fair enough,
A note, see what R2R do. They do not generate content for the adds. They use the thread that is trending that week and push it to the target audiance.
This will eliminate the costs of creating an add contents.
If the BOD decided on a path am willing to chip in, resources and manpower to help out.
And at the end of the day when it comes to outreach, you learn as you go. You test things and see how audience reponce.

Am also planning to talk to Neptune and see what his thoughts are in rejoining the club. I know for a fact he have no hard feeling about bar otherwise he would have not asked me to join last year..

So count me in, if I can add value..



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The conversation's been had with Robert. And for that matter Karson.
 
Twisted said:
Sad to hear this club doesn’t want growth. As far as I know I’m the youngest member on BAR and love this forum! But I know a ton of people my age who refuse to join the forum because they call it “dead”
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Not the case. Growth is fine. We want people who want to do it right. We don’t need or want or forum to be the biggest. We want our local club to be the best it can be. If they want a forum they can find that elsewhere. If they want a club and a community of real people to interact with this is the place to be.
 
JVU said:
We are a diverse club of people with diverse opinions. Mike is very experienced, and on the Board, but he’s giving his personal (strongly worded) opinion, not an official position of the Board or the club.

It isn’t useful to take what a person says on a forum out to the extreme fringe of how it could be interpreted and then get upset about it, which I feel has happened a couple times on this thread. It seems to be the Internet’s specialty sometimes. The mission of the club has nothing to do with having experienced vs inexperienced reefers, except that we try to help everyone be more successful, which includes education and experience. Clearly we need a balance of experienced and inexperienced people for our mission. And of course the club needs a constant flow of new members, including new more-active members to keep things running.

There have been some great new ideas and newly championed old ideas discussed here. Let’s focus on those. The Board is meeting this weekend to discuss this and other agenda items.
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Board meetings are usually open to all members by the way. Not sure about this one. Great place to learn more about how the club works, why some things are the way they are, and contribute your thoughts and ideas.
If you don’t have time or interest to attend you can pass on written comments to be shared at the meeting.
 
We have a BOD meeting this coming weekend, and if time permits, I will bring up the following:
There is a proposal to do Facebook targeted advertising.
Does BOD think it is a good idea to pursue. If so, we will see if we can get a volunteer to drive it.
The volunteer will come up with a plan, description, and cost estimates.
Then meet later with board to discuss for final decision and plan.
 
ofzakaria said:
Mike, the more I read this post the more I want to say something. So am gonna say it and hopefully it will not be taken the wrong way. I have ton of respect for you and everyone in the club.

I am in the hobby for 12 years, living in bay area for 13 years...yet I only heared of bar last year from rob..
as you can see, am engaged in the hobby, but I still consider myself a "noob" and have asked stupid questions and debated where am proven wrong or proven right or even agreed to disagree. All added value to me as a reefer and influenced how I want to forge my path..

I wish I have found BAR 10 years ago when I was making mistakes left and right, but if our mission statment is that we do not want noobs who ask alot of question, I think the club have a fundamental problem.

Because I believe "quality" "the right answer" and "the right way" are very subjective especially in this hobby.
The hobby is evolving and things are changing, some of these changes are accepted by all, some are accepted by part of the reefing community, so now, how do we judge this queation or answer is good or bad? Furthermore, if an experienced reefer felt the question is not worth the time, simply they should not bother, someone else will address and life will go on...

I come to BAR to hear other points and openions and diversity in that is key to drive engagment and discussions do not you think?

Reading older thread back in 2018 the same comments were made that the club need new blood, the club need helpers and volunteers. Fast forward 2 years in this thread, I see similar theme, that means engagment is still low. I also see many of the users who used to be active here no longer engaged...

We cannot expect the bay area reefing community is small. Yet I think engagment in BAR is lower than what I would expect it.....heck this area gave birth to Neptune systems and apex, Neptune aquatics and aquatic collections...these companies and stores changed the hobby forever...you drive engagment of any product BAR included, by bringing new users to the products noobs and experienced..

Sorry for the long post all what am saying is:

- I think new reefers with their silly or complex questions (to a point ofcourse) is good for the club

- local store are very important to the club since the club is intimate regional club

- I wish that the actual mission of the club is not "this club is execlusive to experienced users only" if it is, I do not think I qualify myself for its membership..

Cheers all.

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There are a lot of points here. I will address later. Busy day for me today.
Short story is the club has survived, and is therefor working. It can of course always be improved. Bigger is not necessarily better. We do not need a huge forum base to be successful as a local club. The more active members that want to help make the club continue to be great the better. Finding those people (new or experienced)is good.
If there is a couple new people questions and I don’t have mine I will skip them. If there are 20 People every day asking what temp and salinity they should run their tank at I may stop using the forum.
 
NanoCrazed said:
Bingo!

While I stirred the pot, and called it "Sponsors" -- what I really meant is forming a good two-way partnership between LFS and members, and in pursuit of new members. sponsorship is secondary, even tertiary...
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It’s simple. We want them to tell people about the club, and we tell people about the stores. That’s how it is now.
 
ofzakaria said:
And verdicts?

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The take away I recall was that BAR had drifted from its roots and mission statement towards an online forum of people that wanted handouts from sponsors and free or cheap corals and equipment. They didn’t feel the need to support what they perceived the club had become in short.
While I don’t totally agree with their perspective on this I see how they feel. If we build it they will come. We have been trying to focus more on the mission and doing things in a way where they would like to support us again.
In reality the biggest form of support they can give us is telling people about us in my opinion.
 
So I checked, and we do have statistics, at least for some recent years. Looks messed up on 2013 and before.
User registrations are NEW users. But I think that hump in 2016 is not real. We changed the paypal method a bit.
I can do daily as well.

BAR_usage.jpg
 
rygh said:
So I checked, and we do have statistics, at least for some recent years. Looks messed up on 2013 and before.
User registrations are NEW users. But I think that hump in 2016 is not real. We changed the paypal method a bit.
I can do daily as well.

View attachment 13611
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I actually think such data should be kept private withen the BOD btw.
Its metrics that can help the BOD with evaluating growth and or health of the engagment, not sure it's wise to have it published frequently...just my openion

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Btw if I understood the graphs correctly looking at the posts vs user active you see a hap that might indicate ppl ar not engaged or can be improved to engage. We want to narrow the gap between user active and posts.
That gap is your engagment.
The registration I did not get, its showing zero so am guessing you simply did not include it, not that there is no new registrations..

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rygh said:
We have a BOD meeting this coming weekend, and if time permits, I will bring up the following:
There is a proposal to do Facebook targeted advertising.
Does BOD think it is a good idea to pursue. If so, we will see if we can get a volunteer to drive it.
The volunteer will come up with a plan, description, and cost estimates.
Then meet later with board to discuss for final decision and plan.
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Sounds like a good plan.
Maybe also discuss if you want to increase LFS engagment
Finally,
Is it worth it to think of what users are seeking from the forum so you think backward from customer?
I saw couple of posts suggest that freebies or giveaways is big on...is it?
Not sure how much engagment is being improved with giveaways and some such events..cause in other posts it felt lile participation in such events have dropped..
BOD should have better insight and data on this..

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Coral reefer said:
The take away I recall was that BAR had drifted from its roots and mission statement towards an online forum of people that wanted handouts from sponsors and free or cheap corals and equipment. They didn’t feel the need to support what they perceived the club had become in short.
While I don’t totally agree with their perspective on this I see how they feel. If we build it they will come. We have been trying to focus more on the mission and doing things in a way where they would like to support us again.
In reality the biggest form of support they can give us is telling people about us in my opinion.
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Got it so this is old conversation. Am talking to rob and have good confidence we can bring him back in ad a supporter to spread the word about bar more and more..

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