Not so recently, Pluto was demoted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) amidst controversy. Members of the public plus academics opposed the decision.

I also felt emotional and saddened by the demotion of Pluto. It may not make a lot of sense to many people but I always like standing up for the ‘underdog’ and since Pluto was my favorite planet during school, I decided to put up a fight. I quickly set-up a WordPress-based website to collect petitions from like-minded individuals.

A site is born, then nurtured by social media
PleaseSavePluto.Org came forth.

In order to quickly market, the website I decided to forgo the normal search engine marketing techniques and did not spend much time in analysing keywords, optimizing the site to make it search-engine friendly or general usability issues. Instead, I bought the domain name and set up the site in about 3 hours flat then submitted the URL to the big three search engines. However, I knew that it would take ages for the crawlers to come and index PleaseSavePluto.Org so I decided to use social media instead. I submitted to Digg but the results were not very encouraging. Yahoo Answers was the answer. I searched for questions on Pluto and its demotion then answered as earnestly as I could (I did read up a lot before setting up the site to educate myself) and then urged people to sign the petition on my site. The second notable thing (I did a lot of not very notable things that did not bring much traffic but the activities did educate me on what works and what doesn’t) I did was submit PleaseSavePluto.Org to Technorati.

A pleasant surprise
I absolutely did not expect the results I got and was pleasantly surprised.

• A mention (and some link love) in an article in The Economist (web and print versions).
• More than 70 links from other blogs (reported via Technorati).
• Top 10 results for keywords like Pluto petition and save Pluto in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
• The volume of traffic was very high though it has plateued now.
• Over 1260 signatures supporting the petition (not including the SPAM and other problematic signatures)
• Over 500 votes in the Pluto poll.
• Many friends made over the course of the petition.

Lessons learnt

1. Do not ignore the power of social media.
2. The power of Open Source tools to create and launch a website is immense and often overlooked. I took about 3 hours from concept to launch and that is truly amazing.
3. I wish I had the time but a great idea would be to convert a blog into a general petition site. There are plenty of controversies in the world everyday.
4. Search Engine Marketing is really a narrow term. It should be called Internet Marketing.
5. Overall, it made a better Internet marketer.

PS: BTW if you feel for the underdog, go sign the petition at PleaseSavePluto.Org