Brian Seitz is a Microsoft employee who happens to be running for a seat on the Redmond City Council. I don't know anything about him, but if I lived in Redmond I'd definitely be following his blog. He updates it regularly, so if you read it you come away feeling like you have a good sense of who he is and what he's trying to accomplish. Brian gives immediate feedback about each event he attends, tells his side of the story when the press makes a mistake, and even posts Youtube outtakes of himself.
But here on Mercer Island, we've got nothing but ugly campaign signs and boring web sites. Patti Darling's site is an ugly single page that was apparently designed using the 1930 edition of Microsoft Word (slow!) Maureen Judge hasn't updated hers in over a month. Where's Mike Cero or Bruce Basset? Are they still running?
So far none of our candidates offer an easy way to keep up with how their campaigns are progressing. What's with that? Are they expecting me to do all their blogging for them?
6 comments:
How many people read blogs on a daily basis that are politically focused? For the extreme few political junkies, it's great. For the 98% who don't, it's a big waste of time. Voting isn't done by 2% of the population.
I don't believe it's a waste of time. Thousands of people read my blog, and I am constantly surprised at who they are.
Blogs are another form of word-of-mouth. You could argue it's a waste of time to talk to your friends about politics, but I don't think so. For candidates especially, there are only so many people they can talk to face-to-face, but a blog lets them talk to many, many more of us. Maybe we're the extreme few, but we have not-so-extreme friends who we'll talk to, and so on.
Let's see, Mercer Island has what, 16000 registered voters? And let's assume 80% of your "thousands of readers" are from Mercer Island. So...in the most conservative analysis (where thousands is exactly the lowest it can be, that's 2000), 1600 MI folks read your blog. One would think almost no folks under 18 read it...so that is 10% of all voters (and that is the way low estimate of "thousands"). So, if it's 3200-4000, one would see you reaching 20-25% of all registered voters.
Given this..you should sell advertising commensurate with those rates. And you'd make great money since, based upon published features, this would put your blog nearly on par with the published readership of the Mercer Island Reporter.
the voter's pamphlet came out
there are 5 uncontested races on MI -- and 4 of those running unopposed took time to write a statement to share why they are running and interested in serving the MI community. Only one did not...a city council member running for election. I think that speaks volumes.
Thanks for the comments, anonymous. Most of my thousands of readers are off-island, sorry. But you're welcome to buy a campaign ad here if you like! Heck, if city council candidates can go off-island for their money, why can't I advertise a local campaign off-island too?
Why on earth would most of your readers be off-island if the majority of your articles are about Mercer Island?
What aren't you telling us? That somehow non-Mercer Islanders care a lot more about Mercer Island than folks who live on Mercer Island? Hmmmm....
(Note, this is a thinly veiled attempt to show you the fallacy of your "off-island" city council postings -- you made this easy since you yourself have disproved your own implications about others doing the same thing!)
Post a Comment