O Sasquan, My Sasquan

The social media strategy of this year’s Worldcon, Sasquan, is far from seamless.

We’re halfway through January and fans have been questioning the committee about when Hugo nominations will be accepted.

Tonight Sasquan tweeted

Hugo nominations will open on JANUARY 16, 2015. The nominations page is… http://fb.me/1LUxDJyIk 

So naturally I click that link. It sends me to a Facebook page with this message:

Hugo nominations will open on JANUARY 16, 2015. The nominations page is http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/hugo_nominations/

General information about the Hugo awards is available at http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/

PLEASE NOTE THAT THOSE PAGES WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE UNTIL JANUARY 16th.

And true to their word, those links deliver a 404 error message. (Why did I click? “Trust but verify” as the saying goes.)

Sasquan would present a more competent image if its tweet went to a working information page on its own website, rather than another social media platform which has the same info, and if it would refrain from posting URLs anywhere until they are live.

14 thoughts on “O Sasquan, My Sasquan

  1. Tweets? Neither I nor my computer do tweets comfortably. I’m too old & decrepit to atttend distant WorldCons, or participate in them via tweets, but I do wish this one (and all of them) would offer a bit more variety of electronic contact.

  2. You were specifically told to wait and you went ahead anyway. You were told the fire was hot, but had to burn your own finger and then complain that someone told you about fire.

    As it turns out, those pages are now open and the links work.

  3. Is the Sasquan committee really so touchy that it insists on deflecting even mild criticism directed at making it look more efficient?

  4. It’s not deflecting. You were told “This won’t work until the 16th.” and you successfully verified that. But then confused that what you were verifying with what you personally expected and somehow found that grounds for criticism.

    And if you were really interested in improving efficiency of a concom, surely you must know that making a suggestion, perhaps even one by email would be more efficient than public criticism. That’s just human nature and I know it will surprise some people, but concoms are made up of humans. You might have also bothered to just the tiniest bit of research and realized from looking at the committee list that the Social Media team isn’t in charge of the website, so even if there was a legitimate complaint about this situation, you were banging on the wrong people when you shot the Social Media messenger.

    I am extremely proud of the solid work the Sasquan Social Media team has done. They’ve blown the roof off on all kinds of metrics: Facebook likes, retweets and so on. They’ve built a huge audience reach by Worldcon standards. They’ve kept the buzz going consistently and worked hard to develop and promote content both with all divisions of the con internally, but also with external sources like the CVB.

    So, yeah, when you call out one of my teams, I do get a little touchy when I know they absolutely don’t deserve the knock and because I care about my people.

  5. WTF, Glenn? Mike wasn’t complaining that the pages didn’t work on January 14th, he was complaining that the Twitter link sent him to a Facebook page which then directed him to ANOTHER page. Why the unnecessary step?

    Why didn’t the tweet say :”Hugo nominations will go live…” and “The nominations page will be…” and provide a direct link to the nominations page? And, like Mike, I don’t understand why a link was provided two days before it was scheduled to become active.

    But this was all a very minor tempest in a teapot. Your over-reaction here, and lack of simple understanding of what Mike wrote… well, let’s just say it reflects much morre poorly on you, and on Sasquan by association, than a minor complaint about the timing of an announcement..

  6. Glenn: The medium is the message. Social media is instantaneous communication. It does not look clueful to tweet links that don’t work yet.

  7. It’s the 16th. Has been for more that 14 hours where I live. I’m still getting a 404.

  8. The “Buzz?” Is there anything on paper? I only check the horizons for smoke signals on a regular basis.

    Seriously, the only “buzz” I’ve seen is here on File770. But, then, I have never felt a need to have information about any worldcon fed to me on an hourly basis, 24 hours a day. Once a month is adequate, really.

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