What are cost effective strategies for site promotion at an academic conference?

Question

I previously asked How to engage with graduate students and academics in psychology and cognitive science?. One suggestion was to promote the site at an academic conference.

I've read that there is a potential budget for promotion.

We can come up with budgets and promotions but the means and ideas about how to reach your target audience HAS TO come from you and your community.

However, this still leaves the question of the most cost-effective way to do this. For example, having a stand is probably fairly expensive; getting swag in the conference bag may or may not be that effective; I'm not sure.

Question

• If the site was to be promoted at an academic conference, what specific strategies might be cost effective?
• Are there any strategies that have been applied in the past by related sites?

Answer 1

cstheory.SE went through stages of trying to get and getting conference sponsorship and promotion. I am not intimately familiar with the results, but I've assembled some links on meta discussions:

Site Outreach/Promotion at FOCS

Nominations for publicity poster at FOCS ?

Promoting TCS.SE at FCRC

Possible Conference Speaking Sponsorships — 2011

Promoting Theory Stack Exchange in FSTTCS conference (India)

Note: FOCS is (one of the two) top venues for theoretical computer science (think Nature and Science) and FCRC is a large umbrella conference that covers lots of computer science (including theory, with the other top venue STOC).

It might be a good idea to head over to the cstheory wiki and ask them for advice like the quant.SE people did. If we have a particular question we want to ask them, and you think it is better for a high-rep cstheory user to do so, then I can volunteer.

Answer 2

Thanks @Artem. I've read the links, and see that there is also a discussion of conference support on the Stack Overflow Blog.

Inspired by this reading, a few ideas include:

• Flyer: Distributing a flyer in conference satchels
• Presentation: Presenting a talk or poster about cogsci.se
• Integrated conference Q&A Site: See if the site can be linked to the conference similar to the way that twitter uses hastags; i.e., participants could be encouraged to post questions in real time during the conference related to conference material (we might even permit temporary inclusion of a a conference tag for the duration of the conference, so that people could filter on that).
• T-shirt: Free t-shirt with cogsci.se url and logo (once we have one), etc for any active users (e.g., something like 300+ rep) of the site who are attending a conference and agree to wear the t-shirt for a day at the conference.
• email to conference attendees: An email could be sent to conference attendees by conference organisers about the website. However, there is a risk of being perceived as spam. However, there would be ways around this; it could be as part of thanking a sponsor; it could be integrated with other communication; This has the benefit that when people learn about cogsci.se, they can immediately click on the link; the concern with presentations and flyers is that the time between awareness and engagement is delayed.

From all of the above, I like the "Integrated conference Q&A site" idea the best.