OK party people, I have a fun question for you. I have a special code that will allow one lucky person to get two months (actually 67 days!) of SuperPass completely free of charge and I need your help. I want to figure out a fun way to give this away that also helps draw a lot of attention to SuperPass (more people in SuperPass = more teachers in SuperPass = more awesome SuperPass classes = more betterness for SuperPass members!). So my question is…how would you give away two months+ of SuperPass?

Have people tweet a special code and select one tweeter at random?

Give it to the first person who can find a way to get SuperPass mentioned on a local TV news broadcast?

Award to someone who can get have SuperPass be the top story on Digg.com?

(Those are just my thoughts. I’m sure you can do better!!)

I want to hear your thoughts. And the best part is that whichever idea in this thread is the best one…that’s the idea we will go with.

But wait, there’s one more thing worth mentioning…I actually have two codes. :)

So whoever comes up with the idea that’s the best will get the other one and get 2 months (er, 67 days) of SuperPass for free as well. :)

OK, let’s let the ideas fly. We’ll pick a winner at 5 PM PST on Friday, July 10th (one week from tomorrow).

I’m really excited to hear all the “wild and crazy” ideas y’all come up with!!!

How about a free pass for the first person who can have him or herself videotaped walking down a crowded city street pulling a little red wagon. In the wagon is a computer and monitor, and the person must go up to total complete strangers with the computer’s electrical chord in one hand asking if they have a spare electrical outlet they can borrow. The person must explain to the strangers that he / she just signed up for SuperPass from eduFire where members can learn all they want for less than a dollar a day. He / she must explain how it’s such a great deal that they don’t want to waste a single second for learning something new.

Extra kudos goes to the person who makes it like a commercial with a cool tagline superimposed over the last scene that states something like….

SuperPass from eduFire. Life is Super… don’t let learning about it Pass you by.

This is like just the BigPrize Page in Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/BigPrize#/BigPrize?ref=nf) ^_ .

How about a collection of links where he posted/recommended EduFire SuperPass with the most eye catching phrase/image?? (own homepage,blog, social networks profile, Tweeter, Plurk, Youtube….) no spam…

or

Try to promote SuperPass creatively in 2 different languages (native language plus another one?) and post it on their blog ???

(lol) this might take a lot of work but some people could use what they learn too since a lot of students are trying to learn new languages… It could also open awareness to others who read their blog. ^_

just some suggestions ^_

Or how about this one….

A free eduFire SuperPass for the first person who designs/creates a SuperPass Super Hero Costume which incorporates the eduFire logo and SuperPass. The person should then have pictures or a video taken wearing the costume as he/she goes out into the community doing good deeds and telling the world about eduFire SuperPass.

How about -

Each person who wants to compete creates a brand new blog (no cheating with established blogs – blog must be created after start date) about online learning in their subject(s). In each of their posts, the competitor mentions the wonders of eduFire and Superpass and provides a link via the name eduFire to the eduFire site home page. There must also be a link to eduFire homepage on the Blogroll. The first person to reach 1000 hits on their blog (excluding themselves) wins. It might be best to restrict this to wordpress as that can count hits on a blog and exclude the owner.

[Alternatively, if eduFire can monitor referrals to the home page and see which blog they came from, the first person to reach 100 referrals could win.]

Competitors could use Twitter, Facebook etc to drive traffic to their blog, generating yet more good press for eduFire…..

How about an easter egg hunt.

or:

Each class gives a “secret key” sometime during the class and the first person to collect # of them from different tutors wins.

or:

The funniest video of people learning something. After a while you would have a nice organic library.

or:

The most interesting edufire body art.

Great ideas.

Idea #1: Crazy Ideas
1. The wannabe pitchmen or women do a one minute infomercial on YouTube. Best pitch wins.

2. Write and perform a Crazy Al Yankovic-like song about eduFire performed on eduFire. Best song wins.

3. Man-on-the street-style interviews. Take the laptop and webcam on the streets and ask people if they know about eduFire. YouTube the results. Best segment wins.

4. Morgan Spurlock did “Supersize Me.” Have contestants go to McDonalds, Burger King Wendys, etc. and when they order their food, they ask the employees to “SuperPass Me.” When they get the confused look, they explain eduFire and the SuperPass. YouTube it and the best video wins.

5. Is there a beautiful lady you want to meet but to shy to ask? A certain gentleman you think is Mr. Right but too scared to initiate the conversation. No problem. Let our eduFire staff of romantics help you. Bring your laptop and webcam with you and we will give you step-by-step instructions and pickup lines to bring romance into your life. YouTube it and best video wins.

6. Live eduFire class from the strangest location. When I have Internet problems, I’ve done eduFire classes via the WiFi at McDonalds. I’ve thought of doing a class with a street musician at a subway. However, there are crazier places. Be creative.

Idea #2: The SuperPass should go to someone or group who would love to use eduFire but can’t afford it financially. Maybe people could talk to their civic or nonprofit organizations. They explain eduFire and SuperPass to the organization. For example, many afterschool or summer programs are facing budget cuts. The org with the best needs gets the SuperPass. Could be a good market for eduFire.

I loooooove these ideas. Please keep ’em coming. Just four more days and then the folks here at eduFire HQ will pick a winner. You all rock!

Idea: members try to enlist a famous lecturer (or, sigh, celebrity) to give a free lecture on the EduFire platform. Ninety-nine lucky people attend the lecture, but the recording of the session can be posted to Youtube or used for marketing.

- The lecturer could be a famous professor, social activist, government official, or public personnage. EduFire could help arrange interpretation in the event the lecturer chooses to speak in a different language—open it up to the world, and use the professional resources of the EduFire community to make it happen.
- EduFire (say from a steering committee) chooses the top 10 lecturers. The multiple lecture dates could be set over a period of 1-2 weeks and promoted in a marketing blitz with media and bloggers invited to reserved seats.
- Afterwards, the community votes on the best lecture and the person who arranged it can have 6-8 annual Superpasses gifted to the lecturers favorite charity.
- Follow up with a mini-documentary recording the process and power of social media and become bigger than Twitter overnight.

OK, maybe just bigger than AOL.

1. why not simply giving a code to each edufire member that he/she can use to refer people to superpass, the first one who can refer the highest number of subscibers wins.

2. having people making videos in the form of a news programs including superpass with other hot news and posting it on youtube, the one with the highest hit score wins….

From this code, we can know that EdUfiRe is known by as more people as the superPass class will be taken. Obviously,
this program wants to reach this purpose. For your site, my recommendation will be like below:

1. expand your network with the corporation of others big sites like TED, which is known by most of you.
2. Google ADWord will be the pretty better way to promote your site, while lots of companies like italki did that
3. Increase the repute of the site, which can be performed by inviting more celebrities to make the useful, beat-heart
representation.
4. Make some free classes to teach us how to learn the languages which can attract lots of people to come here
5. Make some free classes like social criticals, science, entainments to let people feel like it’s a home here
6. Revise ur profile functions, coz it’s really too simply. How to make people like their profiles? you need to create an
warming environment to let people feeling staying at edufire is totally great.
…….

Edufire is a home
=superpass is a key
=language is spirit
=future is in Edufire

MG

@MG I don’t think Jon is asking how to promote edufire, but he was asking us to give our suggestion about a precise promotion. I also think it would be good if there would be more promotion of this website, but some of the things you suggested are already done, like free classes.

Personally I’m a bit disappointed these day, even though I am in love with edufire unlike other e-teaching platforms I have come across…. because I have to give my best classes for a very low fee even though I’m a professional teacher.

I just give an example, I know html but only to use it myself, i would never give a class on html….anyway I see there are many members who teach subject just to gain some easy money or for fun. For me it’s a job and I only teach those subjects I have not only learned well, but those subjects I know well how to teach.

It’s actually much easier for me to find a student outside and teach through my own tools rather than take him/her here and then get only 3$/class. But I want to give edufire a chance since I enjoy being here.

I usually choose my online teacher with some criteria and I forget other people may simply want to have fun and learn something new, but I expect all teachers to be ‘potential celebrities=professional, knowledgeable and nice’. I think the reputation of a website is done by all the teachers and not only by a celebrity-teacher….

I would say try a few different methods, and give out one entry for each method done. For example:

1) Have a Facebook fan page – if you become a fan, you get an entry.

2) Write about it on your blog, with a link to eduFire. Post the link here (or wherever you hold the contest), and you get one entry for each blog that’s active (so, not counting ones that were just created for the contest).

3) Have people tweet, like you mentioned – if you tweet, you get an entry.

4) Make a page on myspace for it – if you add the page to your friends list, you get an entry. You get another entry if you put the page on your top friends for the duration of the contest.

5) Make a youtube (or equivalent) video about SuperPass – one entry for each site (so one entry for youtube, one for dailymotion, veoh – have a set list of sites or this’ll be overdone)

◆24 hour available lessons by qualified tutors (guaranteed by eduFire) for students everywhere in the world◆

hire or recruit good tutors by auditioning.
If you can’t find any, train tutors to hire.

I think there are many tutors not having group lesson becase they might end up getting only $3.71 for one hour.
so eduFire can pay tutors you HIRED at least $10 + suparpass fee.
(the amount of $10 is just an example)

So if only one students showed up, you pay $10,
but if four students showed up, you pay $14.84($3.71X4).

If there are good tutors for group lessons, more students will buy superpass.
I am learning Arabic and Spanish, and the superpass is very attractive but I am not buying it, because I don’t have any classes that I wanna take in my time.

★you need to organize tutors!
more tutors→more courses→more students→more happiness for you, Jon, tutors, and students.

best wishes
suzuran

@suzu ran this is again OT anyway as far as I understand training tutors is not one of edufire’s aims, and to some extent I agree, because people have different views about what it means to train a tutor. And you cannot train someone in something like experience, qualification, passion and talent in teaching.

I’m not for quantity versus quality, but I gave superpass a try, I got also superpass because of some courses and I think superpass courses cannot be exchanged for one-to-one tutoring.

When I needed to hire a teacher I searched for the best one and paid the fee I had to pay for the one-to-one tutoring. I think superpass classes are more those classes where a larger number of people can register.

I’ve seen some teachers offer suparpass classes everyday so they can get more money, but as a serious teacher I wouldn’t consider it fair to schedule a decent group course every day. This is up to the students to decide what course is worth it or not.

If you think that all superpass teachers are not quality enough (sorry, but I don’t consider myself low quality) why don’t you pay a session with a teacher you consider the best one for you? You cannot complain for how a teacher is paid and then expect to pay the lower fees of a group class.

I believe Edufire needs strong testimonials, because right now the deal sounds “too good to be true” and also some of the group classes re-inforce the opinion that you can’t get much value at that price.

So my suggestion:
Make it a contest for people to show how much they can learn with one month of SuperPass. Don’t just say “If you had SuperPass you could learn Japanese and Spanish”, but have concrete examples to point to. The community is asked to study whatever SuperPass classes they are interested in for one month and to blog about it at least once a week: what classes did they take, what did they learn, how did they like them, what progress are they making. A before-after picture is essential. The SuperPass goes to the person who made the most progress overall (a lot of progress in one language or decent progress in several) and convincingly laid out how he did so.

I know from experience that it’s possible to make a lot of progress in short time if you have the right motivation (e. g. a community contest or an upcoming trip).

It is not a bad idea to have people hear some hell being raised about something they don’t know, exactly like the word Superpass. And being EF’s baby this idea could/should be carried out by EF itself, for example, uploading a Youtube video – hosted by Jon himself -offering the two passes to a) the winning viewer who uploaded a convincing video of how they would promote the “Superpassfire” and explain the pass b) the winner who uploaded directly his own funny promoting video, like a TV comercial.

Group a would pick winner video in group b, and viceversa, and of course their votes would be cast right here at EF previous registration, at a given section linked to the initial video. The question is how to make this whole thing be a viewed issue in Youtube .

Somewhow that figure 67 should be all over the publicity for Superpass.

So, who is the winner? :-)

The winner is the group of Michael Jackson’s enemmies ….:(

I actually like Judith’s idea above because I myself like very much my Superpass and already made good use of it in only one month and have learned a lot. But on the other hand am not sure this is what Jon is looking for, but something that would reach more new people.

hmmmmm
I like Meyer’s idea :D