BuzzerBeater Forums

My name is BB-Mark, and I’m one of the founders of BuzzerBeater. I really wanted to make an effort to be more active in some of the national forums. I have been to the Netherlands before, so I am very excited to be the BB liaison to your community.

I’ve created this sticky thread to better communicate with you guys as an official BB liaison to the Nederlands community, and I will try to check and respond to it often. I don't speak Dutch, unfortunately, so I will probably be posting in English – from what I understand, quite a few people in Nederlands speak English fairly well, and I hope this won't impede our ability to communicate. If someone could translate my posts (including this one), however, I would very much appreciate it.

We really feel that the bigger our community, the better the experience is for all of our users. I would like to ask for your help expanding our Nederlands community. There are two ideas I wanted to put to the community:
- If there are any big basketball or sports forums you know about or in which you are active, we would love to have a presence on those forums. If anybody knows some places that we should contact (or even better, runs one of these sites and wants to make an exchange), do let me know. Recently, we arranged for a news post and banner ad exchange with a Lithuanian forum, and they established a BuzzerBeater folder on their site for us – we got over 500 users in the first week as a result!
- We have also been asked to do interviews with the local media, and we’re more than happy to have the publicity. If you have any contacts at local or national newspapers, magazines, or other media, we are certainly free for an interview if they want to do a piece on us.
- If you have any creative ideas for things we may do, I’m open to suggestions!

If there are any complaints specific to Nederlands, please do let me know. For example, we recently found that people in Serbia were not able to use our PayPal system to purchase the Supporter package.

Finally, we have had a couple complaints about the banner ads shown on the site. These ads are provided by a banner ad network, and in most countries it is very difficult to control whether the ads that are shown are appropriate for our audience. If anybody knows of a company that wants to advertise on BuzzerBeater, we'll gladly pay you a commission on anybody you find that can help us serve better and more targeted banner ads.

Thanks for your help with this. I would love to see the see the Nederland community continue to grow and be one of the core groups of BuzzerBeater!

Last edited by BB-Mark at 5/14/2008 12:46:09 PM

That's a great initiative.

If there are any complaints specific to Nederlands, please do let me know. For example, we recently found that people in Serbia were not able to use our PayPal system to purchase the Supporter package.

We have had several questions about the payment methods. Are you planning to introduce new methods soon? (f.e iDeal, just like in Hattrick)

Yes, we're working on that now. Hopefully, it will be set up in the next week or two, but I can't promise (testing can take anywhere from a couple hours to a few days).

- If there are any big basketball or sports forums you know about or in which you are active, we would love to have a presence on those forums. If anybody knows some places that we should contact (or even better, runs one of these sites and wants to make an exchange), do let me know. Recently, we arranged for a news post and banner ad exchange with a Lithuanian forum, and they established a BuzzerBeater folder on their site for us – we got over 500 users in the first week as a result!

I play onlinesoccermanager. This is a football game with games every day and is played in the Netherlands and Belgium. I believe they got almost 100.000 users!! So maybe you could try to advertise on there site?

And maybe you could do another advertisment on Hattrick!! Many of those players who has joined in that time have give up there account because of the problems with the servers back then!!

Mvg,

The Hammer.

Hammer, ik heb hem al eerder een bericht gestuurd over osm. Hij zou er naar kijken. Wie ben jij eigenlijk?

Met OSM bedoel je?

CCONTABI-violator

En wie ben jij dan?

Last edited by The Hammer at 5/18/2008 6:13:46 AM

Hi everyone,

I'd like to ask for someone to help out with the marketing in the Netherlands -- it's turning out to be pretty hard for me with the language barrier, and I could certainly use some help building this community.

In some other countries, we've appointed a Marketing Associate to help us draw more users into the game and draw in some more revenue -- they contact sites on our behalf, try to set up link and banner exchanges with other sites and communities, and look for other groups who would like to buy our ad space or become a sponsor of our game (for all users or just for the Netherlands).

This has turned out to be very successful in some cases, and we will gladly offer a commission for all banner sales (and perhaps even some financial compensation for bringing in users or Supporters to the game). if anyone is interested, please do let me know!

Thanks for your help. I've seen some very dedicated people in this community, and I would very much appreciate it if there is anyone (or a few people!) who are willing to help out directly.

Take care,
Mark

Last edited by BB-Mark at 5/21/2008 4:55:54 PM

Hi Mark,

I am Rijswijker and NT Coach of NEDERLAND in BB. In real life I am a manager in a trading company and I am graduated in Marketing and Management. Having said this I thought I just give my two cents on this topic and give you a brief introduction of NEDERLAND:

NEDERLAND is soccer crazy. I believe many people here have watched the Champions League final yesterday seeing the dutch goal keeper block the decisive penalty. Being soccer crazy as we are; naturally soccer PC/ARCADE games are immensly popular.

The Online Soccer Manager has been mentioned before; of course HATTRICK is huge. Footbal Manager LIVE will be released soon. So drawing some attention from there can be useful. Of course you already have done Hattrick which is the truly MASTER move. Its sports; its management and free. It was very very unfortunate that exactly when the partners page was released at HT; the huge amount of traffic was not foreseen. I think that was a real oportunity missed. Our ducth community dropp from 500 to 300 range again. And my guess it will go down another 100.

But this topic was not meant for this but how to improve the community:

Sports forums: I dont know; if any.
Community forums like Facebook: www.hyves.nl and MSN LIVE.

Personally I believe it will be very challenging to attract more users (profit wise) from NEDERLAND. Basketball is not hugely popular as an activity; which is the opposite in your mentioned Lietuva or Latvia. Sports popular in Nederland: Football(soccer), Hockey, Tennis, All round skating. Much lesser community but about the same popularity ranking: basketball; volleyball; swimming; Judo.

I try to think of a media where BB can be introduced. But finding the correct target audience and media is pretty hard. Because as I mentioned earlier: basketball is not popular and you also need people who like PC management games. I hope some elses read this and may come up with a magazine or any other media which BB can be advertised.

www.hyves.nl and MSN LIVE attract the most PC users on a day in NEDERLAND but very few will be your target audience.

I would appoach similar web management sites(not only dutch users) and try to get attention there by banners: Hattrick, Planetarion; WOW; Conan and FOOTBALL MANAGER LIVE.

I would like to help out but do not feel fitted enough to apply for Marketing Associate. So this is a bit of nothing or something. I hope this helps you enlighten your view better.

See you guys on court,

Rijswijker

Hello,

I saw buzzerbeater for the first on the forum of real-life BB club. I don't if it's possible to maybe post some info about Buzzerbeater on sites of bb-clubs.

BGcc

I don't know if you are intrested in more users for Belgium too, but I do know a few Belgian basketball forums where you can advertise...

So maybe you can let me know anything about Belgium and the expansion of users?

Viva.

Thanks for the advice, Rijswijker! I'd certainly like to try talking with some of the Netherland forums and see if I can arrange a link, banner, or news post exchange.
Cheers!