My company, Matter Media, has been co-producing a website called Chasing Glaciers that follows the trek of two female athletes as they climb mountains in Pakistan to document global warming.

We thought that creating an interactive website that follows the journey of two extreme athletes through blogs, vlogs and photos as it happens would be unique, and we had hopes that the videos would spread virally. Boy were we wrong.

The website has gotten very little traffic, because no one gets that this website is tracking an ongoing expedition — everyone I’ve spoken with about the site assumed that it was a documentary about some past trip. So why didn’t we get traction? Was the story boring? Does no one care about glacier melt and climate change? Does no one believe that vlogging can be done from 20,000 feet? Is the design that uninviting?

We put the videos on YouTube and MySpace, but got nothing, and the same goes for the press release that we distributed. We thought that with An Inconvenient Truth, Live Earth, etc., and with interest in extreme sports (via free skier Alison Gannett and climber Zoe Hart) that the world would have been ready for ChasingGlaciers.

Please tell me, how did we miss the mark so completely?

By John Gartner

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