SMC Announcement May 2, 2003

[Keith Outten]

May 2, 2003
SawMill Creek needs your help! We are looking for somone with marketing skills to help us promote The Creek. Possibly we already have such a person as a member and don't know who you are, maybe you are a novice woodworker and this could be your opportunity to contribute. We have a clear vision of what we want to do, we need someone who would like to get on board and help us accomplish our goal to promote woodworking and assure that woodworkers everywhere will be able to share in the collective experience of our membership. Contact us via email, private message or telephone if you are interested in joining our staff.

webmaster@sawmillcreek.org
Hampton Roads Online 757-591-5300

April 29, 2003
We are actively seeking companies that are interested in joining our "FreeStuff" drawings and our "SawBucks" bulk buy programs. If you represent a manufacturer, retail or wholsale outlet for woodworking tools, equipment or supplies please contact us for more information.
The response to my recent round of phone calls has been great, several companies have expressed an interest in participating. I hope to post the details in the very near future. We ask all of our members to please patronize the list of companies that are willing to work with us and support the woodworkers at SawMill Creek.

Our public calendar is open to anyone who would like to promote any event that is of interest to the woodworking community. Messages are posted for free, please contact us via Private Message or send an email to webmaster@sawmillcreek.org and we will be glad to add your event to our public calendar.

April 27, 2003
The first draft of our board rules, legal and privacy statements will be out for review on Tuesday. Those who were selected and have agreed to comment please forward your comments to me as soon as possible. I would like to have all of these documents posted by the end of this week.

April 14, 2003
We do encourage professional woodworkers and those who represent woodworking businesses to get involved at SawMill Creek. This is your chance to contribute on a personal level and to communicate with our woodworking community.

[Pete Lamberty]

Hi Keith, I am not a marketing expert or an expert at anything for that matter. But I was reading a thread today that is on the Wood Central site. It asks, "What is your full time job?" A few readers pointed this out and I noticed as well, that the vast majority or the responders are in the IT field. Probably 80% or more. I was thinking that if you want to increase the readership of Sawmill Creek, it might be wise to attract people who don't usually use computers. I am not sure how to attract these people. But a quick thought is to somehow get the okay from a woodworking business/es to contact each of their customers and invite them to visit Sawmill Creek. That way you get a broad range of people that are into woodworking but maybe not into computers. They may have to ask their children to get them online and to the Sawmill Creek site. But if you can interest them with the idea of all of the benifits of visiting your site they may make the effort to find it. Just a thought. I hope it helps. Pete

[Keith Outten]

Pete, your very close to to an idea we are considering.

What would you think about a quarterly newsletter, distributed on CD or DVD that was commercially sponsored and allowed SMC Members to contribute their articles and share their information for free. An electronic media could allow us to include video, audio and catalog information as well as excerpts from the board. A similar project could be done via paper newsletter and both media types could be distributed at the counters of woodworking retail stores.

Online storage and distribution is also an option, I just acquired an automated 250 disk rewritable DVD jukebox carousel with 4 integral DVD writers in a commercial cabinet with plenty of room for expansion. The existing carosel has a capacity of 650 Gigabytes of rewritable DVD disks.

This is just a dream right now but with the proper people and lots of hard work we could get this off the ground. I'll bet that our Members will also come up with some very innovative ideas as well. Now that the cats out of the bag everyone should know that our plans for SawMill Creek are to go way beyond our forums. The voice of our membership could have tremendous range if that is of interest to our community.

[David Reid]

Keith:

I tried to send this e-mail to you @ the webmaster@sawmillcreek.com e-mail, but apparently it did not go through. So here goes attempt number 2. You were right there was a marketing/woodworker lurking among the Saw Mill Creekers. I have 15+ year background in advertising/marketing having worked at a variety of ad agencies and have been woodworking for nearly that long.

I will say, that to date, I have not frequented Saw Mill Creek that
often, but have been encouraged by the quality of posts (dialog) and the quick growth of memebers. I'd love to help out in anyway.

My home e-mail is reidd@comcast.net. Feel free to e-mail and we'll set up a time to chat on the phone.

Dave Reid

[Aaron Koehl]

David,

Glad to have you aboard!
The email is <a href="mailto:webmaster@sawmillcreek.org">webmaster@sawmillcreek.org</a>.

_Aaron_