A lesson for non-incumbent candidates in local elections

I was just checking the analytic data for this blog, the Empoprise-IE blog, to see if my election posts had resulted in a surge of interest in the blog. It turns out that they have, since at least some people were getting here while searching for information on Paul Vincent Avila. But the most popular search terms for this blog include variations on Frederick J. Minook's name.

This just goes to prove something that I said back in August.

[A]s of this evening (August 24, 2010), if someone were to search Google to find out who the heck Frederick Minook is, my previous blog post on Frederick Minook would be the first search result that they would encounter.

As of this evening, that blog post is STILL the top search result for Minook.

It's fairly obvious that Minook did not conduct any type of online campaign. As far as I know, the only campaigning that Minook did was to send a postcard-sized mailer to voters - and if you search the web for "minook mailer," you'll find that a post on this blog was the top search result there, also.

Yes, this scares me. And it even scared Paul Leon, and Leon was Minook's opponent in the election. Leon offered the following comment:

Well stated. The internet should also be thoroughly researched for truth in content. Not only can somebody shape your identity, they can put a very negative spin on it. Cross referencing all research is very important. Good point here. Even "trusted" sites like Wikipedia can be suspect because the nature of Wikipedia is for "users" to add content. Now that is a bit scary!

Now I have never met Leon or Minook, and I don't know how well they know each other, but during their campaign I never heard them taking swipes at each other.

But if there's any lesson that non-incumbent candidates should learn, it is that any candidate, especially a non-incumbent, HAS to establish an online presence. If the candidate doesn't do this, it's possible for their opponent, or someone else, to do it for them.