Social media, SEO, marketing and writingReasonableViews.com: A Hang Out for Intelligent Debate
Can anyone reading this imagine putting together a winning business proposal based on “My competitors want your company to fail?” Who among us could support a budget request with an argument like, “If you turn this over to those racists in the ____ department, they’ll ruin the company!” No one can imagine supporting arguments like that in the workplace, but when it comes to discussing politics and economics, that is exactly what most discussions boil down to.
Evan Dodge and Jim Kee wanted more than that. Like most professionals, they want to see evidence before they’ll accept an argument. “We want to provide that professional level discussion that we expect at work in the arena of public policy, economics and politics. We think that there’s a large middle swath of the country that’s not emotionally committed to their party right or wrong. We want to engage them.”
ReasonableViews.com was born.
“We believe in ’showing your work,’ so we bring facts and footnotes to the discussion, say Kee and Dodge. “We believe that by being good students of data and history and by doing some unconventional thinking we can be one step ahead of the mainstream. ReasonableViews is a sports blog that discusses the issues you’ll find in The Economist.”
One way Kee and Dodge are blazing a new trail in the blogosphere is by using tools and technology to stay a few steps ahead of the other guys. SocialStrawPoll.com is an example of a tool they recently used to proclaim a 3-way race for the Republican Presidential nomination several days before the mainstream media.
“We recognized the genius of Herman Cain’s campaign strategy while everyone else was proclaiming him crazy for not campaigning in Iowa. We debated the fairness of the flat tax 3 weeks ago; the Wall Street Journal editorial page covered it 3 days ago. We drew a connection between Herman Cain’s unconventional campaign success and Occupy Wall Street that I haven’t seen anyone else mention. We produced original research on the ‘lost decade’ while everyone else is talking about a double dip. Nailing those insights before other people have them energizes us; it’s a blast, and it keeps us going late at night.”
The biggest challenge for Kee and Dodge to date? ”There’s such a long learning curve creating a website,” they confess. “Just when you think you’ve got Twitter, StumbleUpon, YouTube and Google Analytics figured out, you realize that there are 16 more online tools you need to know, plus some new twists on old things to get up to speed on. It’s like walking down a telescoping hallway: the farther you go, the more you realize you have farther to go. The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.”
“But, you hear people say it all the time: it doesn’t feel like ‘work’ when you have a passion for the subject material; well, not as much like work. Debating politics and economics is stuff we like to do.”
The duo at ReasonableViews.com is doing something right. Their online brand health score is already an impressive 608 out of 1,000 according to Heardable.com. Their brand is #15,955 of 14,309,865 brands, putting them in the top 7% of all brands worldwide.
Contact:
reasonableviews@gmail.com
