{"id":8491,"date":"2017-09-13T18:45:10","date_gmt":"2017-09-13T22:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=8491"},"modified":"2017-09-14T09:37:09","modified_gmt":"2017-09-14T13:37:09","slug":"friedson-rules-social-media-in-district-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=8491","title":{"rendered":"Friedson Rules Social Media in District 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco.<\/em><\/p>\n

Political handicapping is a very subjective exercise.\u00a0 That said, there are a handful of objective measures that give clues to the state of a race: fundraising, endorsements, surrogates, communications (like number of mailers sent and TV time purchased), and more.\u00a0 The jury is still out on the importance of social media followers.\u00a0 But if Facebook followings matter at all, Andrew Friedson is waaaaaay ahead on that measure in the Council District 1 election.<\/p>\n

As of Monday, September 11, here are the Facebook followers on each of the District 1 candidates\u2019 campaign pages.<\/p>\n

Andrew Friedson: 4,822<\/p>\n

Pete Fosselman: 461<\/p>\n

Bill Cook: 224<\/p>\n

Reggie Oldak: 154<\/p>\n

Other candidates: no pages<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right, Friedson has almost six times as many followers as his competitors COMBINED.\u00a0 And they have all been running for months before he got in.<\/p>\n

One reason why Facebook followers are discounted by many is that they don\u2019t reflect actual voters in the relevant jurisdiction.\u00a0 They can come from all over Planet Earth.\u00a0 So your author asked Friedson to provide a geographic distribution of his Facebook followers.\u00a0 According to data from his page, roughly two-thirds of Friedson\u2019s followers reported cities of residence.\u00a0 Of those, 1,490 lived in Maryland, 971 lived in MoCo and 462 lived in the District 1 areas of Bethesda, North Bethesda, Potomac and Kensington.\u00a0 An additional 700 reported living in D.C., but some of those people could actually live in the Maryland suburbs.<\/p>\n

This is an impressive campaign page following for someone who just declared for the race a month ago<\/a>.\u00a0 It reflects Friedson\u2019s ability to tap into a number of networks, including his friends and family as a MoCo native; his college network from the University of Maryland (where he was a class President); his professional network from his time as an aide to Comptroller Peter Franchot and Congressional candidate David Trone; and his non-profit networks stemming from his service as a Board Member on the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the MoCo Collaboration Council for Children, Youth and Families.\u00a0 These are real assets for any candidate for office.\u00a0 And Friedson can leverage them through social media to raise money, spread his message and build name recognition in a way the other candidates can\u2019t (yet) match.<\/p>\n

Reggie Oldak has shown early success in the public campaign finance system<\/a> but Andrew Friedson is off to a fast start.\u00a0 Let the rest of the field beware!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco. Political handicapping is a very subjective exercise.\u00a0 That said, there are a handful of objective measures that give clues to the state of a race: fundraising, endorsements, surrogates, communications (like number of mailers sent and TV time purchased), and more.\u00a0 The jury is still out on the importance of social media followers.\u00a0 … Continue reading Friedson Rules Social Media in District 1<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[151,165,284],"tags":[1545,806,1547,1201],"class_list":["post-8491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adam-pagnucco","category-council-district-1","category-facebook","tag-adam-pagnucco","tag-andrew-friedson","tag-council-district-1","tag-facebook"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-2cX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8491"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8521,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8491\/revisions\/8521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}