As a staff writer for the Temple University Honors Blog, honorslounge.com, I approached our editors about a possible one-day-only Game of Thrones takeover of the site to tie in with the Game of Thrones Season 4 premiere, the likes of which the college blog community had never been seen before. They immediately told me to get to work, and 4 days later, on April 6th 2014, Honors Lounge became Hodor's Lounge.
(For those unfamiliar, Hodor is essentially the village idiot of Winterfell, he can only say "Hodor" and is a fan favorite.)
In addition to actually creating most of the content, I promoted heavily on reddit, buzzfeed, twitter, tumblr and facebook, all of which paid off, because:
- The site got over 2500 views that day, which is about double our daily average traffic. And nearly 4 times our average for a Sunday.
- The site received so much traffic that it crashed for a few minutes around 10PM, right after the Game of Thrones episode ended.
- All the articles were taken down at midnight except my Hodor Awarded Congressional Medal of Hodor, which is viewable here
- As of April 9th, according to one of our directors, this article has been responsible for 20% (5K) of our roughly 20,000 page views for the month of April, having only been up for 3 days at the time .
- Update: Nearly a year later, my editor tells me people are still telling him how much they loved this.
This is my proudest achievement to date.