pic: Battle FIRST?

[Greg Needel]

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[Andrew Blair]

Huh, I guess google threw a little more into the bargain. Publicity is good, but this one's worded a little badly.

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by Andrew Blair

Huh, I guess google threw a little more into the bargain. Publicity is good, but this one's worded a little badly.

I'd guess this will generate some extra hits at usfirst.org. That's a good thing.

I'd also say it doesn't matter how or why someone new finds out about FIRST. What we do to inspire and involve those potential new FIRSTers after they've found us is much more important.

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Andrew Blair

Huh, I guess google threw a little more into the bargain. Publicity is good, but this one's worded a little badly.

Google has nothing to do with it. That's paid advertising -- someone is advertising on those search words on FIRST's behalf.

[Adam Y.]

Originally Posted by M. Krass

Google has nothing to do with it. That's paid advertising -- someone is advertising on those search words on FIRST's behalf.

Actually, it's free. FIRST is one of the recipients of Google Grants (Beta). http://www.google.com/grants/recipients.html

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Adam Y.

Actually, it's free. FIRST is one of the recipients of Google Grants (Beta). http://www.google.com/grants/recipients.html

Yes, that's true. We've talked about this before around here in the past. FIRST receives the service for free, but that ad placement is a 'paid search' result, generally speaking, and someone is deciding on FIRST's behalf what those ads say and for what search terms they appear.

[artdutra04]

Even though comparing FIRST to Battlebots may seem like a bad idea to many of us inside the FIRST community, let's think about something. Practically everyone in the United States knows what Battlebots is from the television shows, but not many can identify what FIRST is. Obviously the marketing people/focus group responsible for this ad thought they could reach a wider audience by putting "Battlebots" in there.

Once involved in FIRST though, they will see the gracious professionalism and know then that although this is similar to Battlebots, its more like a "gentleman's sport" than Rock-em, Sock-em robots. But by then they will already become FIRSTified and addicted to FIRST, so the means of how they became involved would be trivial.

[Karthik]

I was pretty shocked when I saw this advertisement. For years there's been this attempt to distance FIRST from Battlebots my a majority of the community. I can't actually recall if this was ever done on an official level, or in any of Dean or Woodie's speeches. I do know I've heard many a FIRSTer say "The most annoying thing is when I talk about FIRST and someone says, "hey isn't that like battlebots" ". Kind of ironic.

I have to agree with Richard. It's all about getting as many people involved with FIRST as possible. Targeting the "Battlebots" keyword is just smart business. However, I am curious how those who are "Anti-Battlebot" feel about these ads.

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by Karthik

I was pretty shocked when I saw this advertisement. For years there's been this attempt to distance FIRST from Battlebots my a majority of the community. I can't actually recall if this was ever done on an official level, or in any of Dean or Woodie's speeches. I do know I've heard many a FIRSTer say "The most annoying thing is when I talk about FIRST and someone says, "hey isn't that like battlebots" ". Kind of ironic.

I have to agree with Richard. It's all about getting as many people involved with FIRST as possible. Targeting the "Battlebots" keyword is just smart business. However, I am curious how those who are "Anti-Battlebot" feel about these ads.

As someone who hasn't been able to get his head around building a fighting robot since actually building a few robots, I don't have a problem with it. I'm pretty much used to the Is-that-like-BattleBots question by now, so the means to segue between the two has become (to me, at least) familiar.

I'm just surprised that there's still lots of searches about it.

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Billfred

I'm just surprised that there's still lots of searches about it.

Generally speaking, there aren't very many searches for Battlebots at all. On Yahoo!, the only search engine that provides that data, there were 1470 searches for 'battlebots' in June.