Meta isn't seeing much activity. What are our options?

Question

There hasn't been much going on on meta, and I feel like there hasn't been much going on in terms of promotion or activity around the parent site, in the past few weeks (at least since the end of august). I don't think that bodes well for the site; we've seen a good influx of users from two tweets by Joel, and there has been some cross-network activity from some great questions that have bubbled up the StackExchange homepage, but other than that, it feels a little dead.

What should we do about that? I'd like to see some more efforts into promotion. Are there any events coming up any of us are attending? Do we work for companies with active twitter accounts that can occasionally tweet a question (I've been doing this with @quplo)? Can we point questions to people who have a lot of followers (like @stephenanderson, who I've been forwarding relevant questions to)? Remember, you can earn the new promoter badges for linking to a question and getting at least 50 hits to that URL.

Answer 1

First of all, it's OK for the site to grow naturally. We'd rather have a small(ish) number of high quality questions and answers than a bunch of lesser quality ones.

That said, as always, the best way to promote the site is to share interesting questions and answers with peers, so be sure to take advantage of the Facebook, Twitter, and question share links:

_{(source: stackoverflow.com)}

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/announcer-booster-and-publicist-badges/
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/a-recipe-to-promote-your-site/

Answer 2

I keep forgetting that its here. The UI of stackexchange makes it easy to forget. Alternatively, if the UI didn't make a different URL but rather it was just a tag, people would ask a lot more questions.

The difference between the parent, meta and community wiki (for both), is highly confusing. Tags are quite simple on the other hand. Sometimes the desire for explicit separation conflicts with how the user, who doesn't read the FAQ, thinks about how it should work.