After the Revolution

Who is in this community? What are their interests? How do they communicate?

It seems that in order to truly capture an audience, I am going to need to focus.

Since I know that there are many more immigrants from Ukraine in the United States than there are from Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, I could choose to focus on that population.

If I decided to go after this group, I would need to focus on Ukrainian news and news that affects Ukraine. Since Ukrainian immigrants seem more comfortable getting news in Russian or Ukrainian, I would need to hire a translator to offer foreign language versions of my site. I would also need to hire someone who speaks Russian and Ukrainian to monitor any comments or discussion boards.

As Ukrainian immigrants enjoy listening to the news on the radio, I could turn my posts into a weekly podcast that could be listened to online or broadcast on one of the foreign language stations as a promotion.

Also, as Ukrainian immigrants enjoy not just news but also practical information, I could offer more How-To type articles and videos explaining processes and situations particular to America.

If I chose instead to focus on Americans with more tenuous links to Eastern Europe, I would have to employ a different strategy.

For these readers, I would reorganize my site to cover news from all across Eastern Europe and hire more bloggers to cover different countries. I would create pages for each country and make sure to post pages of background information, statistics and maps for each.

Because American travelers enjoy personal blogs, I would ask for their submissions and feature a story of someone’s experiences abroad on my front page each week. I would hire columnists for each country so that each page would have a mix of news, personal anecdotes and opinion.

Because Peace Corps volunteers like to get in touch with each other before starting their service, and because they enjoy keeping in touch afterward, I would make sure to have well organized discussion boards set up for people looking for advice or trying to catch up with old friends.

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