Hyperlocal Content Idea: Political Interviews
by Matt on Nov 5, 2008 in Content
Quick post to remind folks in the U.S. that right now offers a golden opportunity to get some great hyperlocal content on your blog(s) by interviewing the winning (and maybe even the losing) candidates from this week’s elections. Catch the winners soon while they’re still basking in the glow of winning the election, and anxious to please/reach out to their constituents.
- Ask your new city councilperson about fitting in, about local issues like traffic, crime, or whatever else matters.
- Ask your new school board member about educational funding, standardized testing, etc.
- Ask your returning county commissioner what s/he still hopes to accomplish after so many years in office.
The opportunities are endless. And now’s the time to jump on them. (Actually, local political interviews would have been a great idea pre-election, too, and I would’ve written this sooner, except I’ve been fighting the flu on and off for about two weeks and am just now getting back to full speed.)
Your Turn: Did you do any local election interviews on your hyperlocal blog? Or did you create any political content? How’d it turn out?
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4 Responses to “Hyperlocal Content Idea: Political Interviews”
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Hi Matt,
On one of my blogs, which is not strictly hyperlocal but does occasionally feature local content, I did write politically-oriented posts in the past month. One was about a local proposition that was being voted on in my town. The other was about a political candidate. Both posts won me comments from new readers. That was nice to see.
Miriam
We had six mayoral candidates in our city. After hearing a lot of folks complain about how much trouble they were having when trying to find information about each candidate, we launched the “Mayoral Candidate Zone.” It was basically a series of interviews beginning with a simple “Meet the candidates” round where we asked easy, personal questions. From there, it advanced to a “Where they stand” round which centered on local issues and finally a “Final thoughts” set that allowed each candidate to send a final letter to our readers.
We turned off comments on the interviews to let the candidates’ responses stand alone but created a post specifically for each round where people could discuss everything.
It was a huge hit and all of the candidates were eager to participate. We got a lot of attention from local bloggers and were interviewed by each of the local newspapers.
Election day resulted in a runoff between two of the more popular candidates so I guess we’re not off the hook just yet. We’ve reduced the Mayoral Candidate Zone to only the two final candidates now but we’re planning one more round of questions before the runoff election on Nov. 25th.
By the way. We love Hyperlocal Blogger. Thanks for the hard work and inspiration.
Thanks for the two great replies, Miriam and Todd. Say Miriam — how did the new readers find you? Did your posts rank well on Google for terms related to the local proposition?
Todd — awesome story, especially the attention from the local paper. I’m just cynical enough to think my local paper would probably not be willing to feature someone that was essentially doing the paper’s job better than the paper itself! Well done.
You know, Matt, that blog is such a side project, I’m not tracking traffic on it very seriously. My guess is that it’s a combination of good organic rankings + the duration of the posts appearing at the top of Blog Search for the keywords in their titles and contents. But, I didn’t actually track the visitors.
So much to do…so little time to spend looking at analytics.
Miriam