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 was fortunate enough to be able to travel to Sweden last year to meet with the Hattrick team, 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 Swedish community, and I will try to check and respond to it often. I don't speak any Scandinavian languages, unfortunately, so I will probably be posting in English – from what I understand, many people in Sweden speak English quite well, and I hope this won't impede our ability to communicate. Still, if someone could translate my posts in this thread (including this one), that would be very much appreciated!

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 Swedish 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 Sverige, 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 know that basketball is only starting to become popular in Sverige, but I would love to see the see the Swedish community grow to be one of our core groups!

Welcome to Sweden Mark!

Basketball is growing more and more popular in this country but have ways to go before even touching the "national team sports" as football (soccer to you) or hockey. Translation will probably be redundant as english more or less are our second language apart from a couple of lingos that are closely related (Norwegian and Danish). Im guessing that most of the Swedish BB community comes from the marketing on Hattrick. A couple of us have even played in the same leagues there.. (and I was on top Chesperito!).

Its late and I really should be doing other things right now but regarding some marketing Id say check out www.basketligan.se which is our (very humble) version of nba(.com). There you'll probably find someone to contact that could point in some clever directions.

-P

Last edited by Cosmic sl0p at 5/14/2008 7:32:09 PM

Heya Mark

You should take a look at www.basket.se (Instead of www.basketligan.se) since the other page doesnt exsist. Though it might be hard for you to navigate on that page since you dont speak any scandinavian language.. If you need any help translating anything on any Swedish page just send me a BB mail and i'll help you out

Oops.. good call!

I'm not that much into swedish BB anymore, but wasn't there some site or magazine called something like 3noll5?

Hi Skåning and Cosmic Sl0p,
Yes, I'm having some trouble finding the correct contact person in Swedish. Would one of you be able to find me the relevant contact email address on that site?
Thanks!

Okay, i've been looking around on www.basket.se personnel list of people that probably could help you with your problem.. wasn't that easy though haha.. The person that should be able to redirect you (Hopefully) to someone or something that could help you is probably Lena Wallin (lena.wallin@basket.se) the secretary-general.


PS.
You should aswell take a look at www.basketballshop.com and see if you could get any ads there.. you shouldn't have any problems navigating on that page though since it's in english ;P

Hi everyone,

I'd like to ask for someone to help out with the marketing in Sweden -- 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 an official 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 Sweden).

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 4:56:14 PM

Been trying to find out if there is some sort of really big youth tournament. When I was young(er) there was something called the Malaco Cup but that seems to be gone now(?)

I think promotion in youth cups would be a good way to reach potential BB-fans. But on the otherhand I'm no PR guy. :-)

I know there are some tournaments arranged by local clubs but I havent heard anything like "gothia cup" in football/soccer where ALOT of teams are participating.

I did send Mark a list of email adresses to all the regional coaches in Sweden.

Well I'm rather familiar with youth cups in Sweden since im a youth myself.. Our "Gothia Cup" is called "Göteborg basketball festival" also located in Gothenburg its the second largest in EU.. I'd be glad to help BB with the PR in Sweden as long as there is a group of people to work with, don't think i'd be to good on my own haha