Manassas Firefighters lead the way

08 Apr 2007 @ 9:49 PM

Since I write about local SEM here, I thought I’d mention a local (to me) site that’s been doing rather well for what they do. The Manassas Volunteer Fire Company put up a site, containing video, notes and photographs of their responses to incidents, initially just as a fun project, but then they noticed that they started getting people coming to their site (before a recent article in the Washington Post, they got over 300k page hits per week, I’m sure it’s increased since then).

What does this do for the fire company? As a service company, they don’t sell anything, nor are they interested in ‘drumming up business’. What it does do for them is serve as a recruiting tool , a morale booster for the current firefighters, as they get to see themselves on screen, and I’m sure it’ll help them when they send out the postcards asking for donations.

One of the firefighters responsible for the site has even started up his own production company, which has a cute name, but one that may result in quite a few of the ‘wrong kind of clicks’ - hookersandhose.com. His hope is to get this company to specialize in promotional videos for other fire companies, and apparently he’s been getting calls… hopefully from fire companies not from lonely people.