About a year ago, I approached a friend of mine about an idea I had. Driven by the hatred of poorly run forums and paid sites, I wanted to create my own place for Buckeye Football chatter. We decided to start a Facebook page. The Buckeye Board was a no-brainer for me because I needed a place to write but wanted to do it with a controlled fan base. There was too much negativity surrounding the program and other forums, and I wanted The Buckeye Board to be a place where attitudes were positive.
As time went on, The Buckeye Board expanded not only in the number of fans and members; but through different social media outlets. After the Facebook page came the blog and Twitter. The exposure that The Buckeye Board was getting caught the attention of a few guys. In this business, everybody is looking to grow; and Ohio State has more writers revolving around the program than any other school in the nation. There were talks of a new site with multiple small-time bloggers becoming one big one, but The Buckeye Board held our ground for a few reasons. Bret, Charles, and I do this for fun and want to keep it that way. There is also a bond that has been built between us that keeps us all together. We respect each other, and that has created a positive "workplace" that non of us really wanted to turn our backs on. All of the stuff you see through Twitter, Facebook, and this blog is something we've written because we wanted to.
Over the past Summer the members of The Buckeye Board have been approached with multiple offers to leave, but we still stayed. With our eyes set on the 2012-2013 football season we started discussing ideas of how to move forward as a team. An updated website was the #1 thing on our list. We didn't want to just have a blog anymore. We wanted a website with forums so we could continue to grow and interact with Buckeye Nation. As time went on we found out that in order to make that step a financial investment was necessary, and we weren't really interested in doing that.
Recently, we were approached by a site who has very similar goals as us. We had so much in common, and this site was already running at the level that we wanted to take ours. It's still early in the process, and we thought there wasn't a better time or opportunity to make the transition.
Part of this transition is making sure that we don't lose any fans because our whole objective is to connect Buckeye Nation, so even though our blog will now be gone, we are simply changing names of the Facebook page and our Twitter accounts. To tell you how early in the transition this is, we haven't even figured out what the Facebook page will be called; but we will be bringing you the same coverage. On Twitter, the name changes were easy; but have not kicked in yet. We're going to wait until the new site gets configured before we make the full transition, but we are definitely in the middle of making this move.
As for our new partners, the site is relatively new. It's called Buckeye Empire (buckeyeempire.com), and has a great group of individuals working for them. The addition of The Buckeye Board's staff and their new forums has us all very excited for the future. Make sure to head over to check the site out, and click the "Forum" link and register in the upper right-hand corner to join the forums so we can all chat.
We look forward to seeing you on the other side as we all start a new chapter.
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