Launching (and Relaunching) “HowManyPeopleVoted.com”

Posted on December 8, 2020 by adammarx13

Background: An Opportunity to Get Involved

Early on November 1st, I noticed that my friend Mubs had posted a new project just days before the 2020 U.S. election—it was called “How Many People Voted?” and was a simple vote-tracker. Apparently he’d cooked it up and kicked it out the door in just a couple of hours.

I flew out of bed and onto a zoom call with him; I saw immense opportunity in it and knew this was something I had to be involved in. Politics and local involvement had been something that I had become progressively more intrigued with, and Mubs’ new build piqued my interest immediately.

Over the course of the next hour, Mubs and I kicked ideas back and forth about how we could grow and expand “How Many People Voted?” beyond the 2020 November election. Sure, it was definitely timely in that respect, but as grassroots involvement has grown, so too has interest in locally focused organizations and initiatives centered around expanding the democratic process. It’s not that similar initiatives weren’t around before, but rather that we seem to have seen a resurgence of local interest from demographics of people perhaps previously not so tuned into the mechanics of the process.

Maybe it’s just the times we’re living in.

Minor Tweaks and Copy Content

And this isn’t even a uniquely American trend either. Grassroots and local communities in democratic nations around the world appear to be experiencing similar trends of interest and involvement here. Those people were (ostensibly) voting too—maybe we could apply the same idea there for other elections in the future.

But back to America in November 2020.

We updated the How Many People Voted? page (and its Product Hunt profile page) as quickly as we could—Mubs rearranged a couple things and I wrote up some copy to give some context to the election for our non-American visitors and the most accurate voting numbers we could source before the actual election.

We added columns for “Early Voting” and “2020 Population” counts as well. Then I tweeted it out into my political network and waited. There wasn’t much to do before the actual voting results started to come in.

Initial Traction

During the first day or so, we started to do some significant traction—people all of the country (and world!) were clearly geared up to learn and talk about the election, even if we didn’t have any new number yet. Regardless of political affiliation, there was clearly more interest in the political process than there had been in years.

We got posted to Hacker News and started to work our way up the main page to number eight!

We started with a couple thousand visitors in the first few hours—that night we got posted to Reddit and started to trend!

We were also featured on OnePageLove which was another plus for the day!

Then we jumped to over 7K visitors by the morning of November 2nd. That day we were retweeted by GA State Senator Jen Jordan as well as Staci Fox, the CEO for Planned Parenthood Southeast Advocates.

We ended up doing more than 10K visitors by Election Day on November 5th.

Continued Growth

What was interesting was that the visitor numbers only seemed to accelerate after Election day was over; presumably because there were still hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of outstanding votes left to count all over the country. We all knew it was going to be a long wait and that numbers would continue to trickle in. I figured we’d still continue to see some more page views, but wasn’t sure just how many.

The next day on Nov. 6th, that question was, if not answered, then certainly addressed: we were featured on Refdesk.com as their site of the day. That kicked up our traction a bit.

By the end of the week, we’d done somewhere in the neighborhood of ~13K views with almost no marketing. In fact, the only “real” marketing Mubs and I did was perhaps a tweet thread each with some people tagged. I ended up resharing the same tweets with people in my local network here in Atlanta (the energy here was—and is—insane!) and in my other social networks in the lead-up to the election to try to motivate everyone to go exercise their right to vote.

Relaunch for the GA Runoffs

Fast-forward to now. While most if not all of the 2020 races have concluded around the country, here in Georgia, things are still very much red-hot. Both of our U.S. Senate seats are up this year; one as a regularly scheduled election and the other one as a special election. The latter will be up again in 2022.

In Georgia, state law requires candidates to receive a majority of the vote (50.1% or more) in order to be declared the winner; failing to do so for either candidate leads to a runoff election. And this year, our senate seats are heading to dual runoffs!

So Mubs and I put our heads back down and redesigned How Many People voted? for the special circumstances we now find ourselves in. We updated the copy to give non-Georgia citizens an idea of why the Senate is still up for grabs and a brief overview of the four candidates now vying for the prospective seats (the general 2020 election featured an all-party jungle campaign for the special election Senate seat). Similarly, we updated the informational deadlines at the top of the site to correspond with the particular deadlines that are set here in Georgia.

These include:

1) The absentee ballots mailed-by date — Nov. 18th, 2020

2) The GA voter registration deadline — Dec. 7th, 2020

3) The day in-person voting begins — Dec. 14th, 2020 &

4) The runoff Election date — Jan. 5th, 2021

Additionally, we totally revamped our informational columns and breakdown. Since we have a Georgia focus until the election is over, we replaced the other state rows with all of Georgia’s 159 counties (we have a ton!) and the number of registered voters per county. And while we wait to have some official numbers of early votes, we wanted to give some context of the last time we had a statewide runoff election here in Georgia, so we included the data for 2018’s runoff for Georgia Secretary of State.

We’ll see what the numbers tell us as we get closer to Election Runoff Day! Things should be super exciting as there are thousands of newly registered voters here in Georgia who will have just turned 18 and are now legally eligible to participate in the voting process. The energy here is palpable to say the least and it’s clear that everyone’s foot is still on the accelerator.

Remember, if you’re a Georgia citizen and eligible voter, please #GoVote and make your voice heard!

Follow the continuing election numbers on Twitter at @HowManyVoted and keep getting involved!

For more content, you can follow me on Twitter & LinkedIn @adammarx13 😎🚀.

How I Went Viral by Ignoring One of the “Rules” of LinkedIn

Posted on December 3, 2020 by adammarx13

How I Got 1.6 Million Views by Following My Instincts 📈

Resharing my post after Mubs and I updated our Zoom-branding tool, Branded Background!

Accidental Virality & a Little Experiment

In spring of this year, I was scrolling back through some of my LinkedIn posts and was floored to see that one of my posts had gone viral. Without me even realizing!

It was something I’d put up about a month prior just to get my daily quota filled (I try to post every day for consistency) and I hadn’t thought much about it afterwards.

It ended up doing more than 50K views. 😱⚡

I read and reread that post over the course of the week, trying to figure out what in the hell it was that had caused it to go so crazy. Was it the content? The formatting? The emojis (don’t laugh, those things matter!) or the hashtags?

🤔 Working over the next week, I tried a variety of things to understand what had keyed into the LinkedIn algorithm so acutely. After a few days, I began to wonder if it was something else—something which LinkedIn power-users cautioned against. So I figured why not try that and see.

I went viral again. 📈

And again. 📈📈

And again. 📈📈📈

20K, 40K, 80K, 190K views started popping up in my feed. At one point, I even did half a million views on one post!

This actually wasn’t my first time going viral on LinkedIn. But it was the first time I was doing so consistently. This time it was serious.

My first time going very viral happened just before I started running my experiment.

I racked up well over a million views over a spread of just 10-15 posts. 😯

I started to track my thesis in a spreadsheet.

Over the few months that I consistently ran the experiment, I went viral about a third of the time—I was going viral at least 2-3 times a week over a ten-week span.

It got to the point where if I didn’t go viral, it was a little uncommon and I felt that tomorrow I’d just make it up by going viral then.

So what was the secret to all this insane virality?

Hold your breath, because LinkedIn power-users are about to lose their shit here…

☝️ Sharing.

The LinkedIn “Rule” I Ignored to Go Viral (Again and Again)

I ignored one of the “rules” of the LinkedIn algorithm and just went with my natural instincts.

During the time I ran my little experiment, I started sharing…a lot.

A lot more than I already had been.

The spreadsheet I kept for my experiment.

Here’s why this is such a drastic statement:

Because lots of LinkedIn power-users often share tips for how to do better on LinkedIn; a lot of which have become gospel because of how the algorithm reacts—how it changes, and how it doesn’t change…

Core tactics like:

Text content is king.

Write up to the content limit.

Canoe-tagging is okay, even encouraged.

Answer every damn comment.

And towards the bottom of the pecking-order?

Share. 📈📉

Or rather, don’t share, because the algorithm (supposedly) dings you for it.

A tip from a LinkedIn power-user I follow.

I always saw sharing listed at the very bottom, the thinking being that the algorithm smacks you for not creating your own content and suppresses your reach. (Probably a reasonable theory, but as I said, algorithms get tweaked sometimes).

And yet, that post that racked up 50K views? The one I’d just pushed out without thinking about it?

It was a share.

I just went through it, found a few points I connected with, tried to articulate how I thought about them, and shared her post into my network.

Then it spread like wildfire. 🔥

The post that racked up 55K views without me even realizing it!

Why Sharing Works So Well

🙌 Sharing is one of my favorite strategies because it’s a great way to simultaneously learn and build great relationships with the people who are creating the material you connect with.

Here’s why sharing doesn’t work for a lot of people: they’re not patient and they don’t give credit!

It’s not just sharing though; it’s sharing the right way, a key factor which I see trip people up all the time.

This is such an avoidable pitfall that it just baffles me why I continue to see this. I always give credit at the top of the post. This is key; never take credit for what isn’t yours. That kills a reputation and potential relationship before they even start.

But there is a way to successfully “piggyback” on someone else’s content without looking like a tool. In fact, I wrote all about it here. The key is, as always, humility, authenticity, & due credit.

This is precisely what I teach people how to do as the #ZeroToOneNetworker. 😉🚀

Resharing a post and trying to add some value to the original message while giving due credit.

So when it took off, it made me wonder why anyone would ever recommend against sharing on LinkedIn. Perhaps the algorithm did penalize you a little bit, but here’s my thinking:

1) We never know for sure

2) Sharing is a great way of pushing out new, high-quality content, &

3) It’s probably the best way I’ve found to build an amazing network.

Breaking 1.6 Million Views (Fairly Effortlessly)

In fact, it’s pretty much precisely how I built my tech network on Twitter, and how I built my network in the music business before that. People who follow me know that 75-80% of everything I tweet or put out is in support of someone else. Either a company I dig, a mission I believe in, or someone who I absolutely wanna see grow and succeed.

So I just started to adapt my Twitter strategy to LinkedIn and see if emulating it yielded any different results.

Now I’ll stop here and say that I don’t know if this is a “surefire” way to still go viral on LinkedIn.

In fact, I don’t think there is a “surefire” way.

Some of my posts did 100K views. Others didn’t even break 100. There was never a guarantee.

But it did make me reexamine the question that so many people ask (and now, amazingly, ask me) of: How do I go viral?

That’s not the right question.

The right question is: How do I build a magnetic reputation and a deep bench of allies in a concrete network?

Answer: You do it through sharing and supporting others in the right way. 👏💫 This is what I love teaching other people how to do because once you start doing it, your network takes off like a rocket. 🚀

Resharing a post and explaining how I find inspiration and value in someone else’s content.

That’s why the share tactic worked for me. Because it was something I could easily emulate from my Twitter strategy (which had also worked for me), something which people associated with my brand, and something that I could easily tweak if need be.

Perhaps, though, the most important part of the strategy (for me, anyway) is that it allowed me to sidle close to the people whom I want(ed) to learn from in a way that was neither fanboy-ish nor self-centered. It was a way to indicate that I appreciated someone else’s mission, accomplishments, company, or character without actually having to say so. Sometimes the subtle signals are the most effective.

In the end, my “share” posts went viral about one third of the time. Not bad at all.

But the really amazing thing is that I ended up doing well over 1.6 MILLION post views from when I started the experiment.

Even more intriguing to me, though, is that I still continue to see many of my LinkedIn friends continue to suggest not sharing because the algorithm dings you on it. And I absolutely understand this; their suggestions come from a place of not wanting their followers’ content to be stifled by the algorithm. So the advice does come from a good place.

But for me, that’s the exact opposite of what I found that really started to work for me. And perhaps most importantly, it’s antithetical to what worked for me elsewhere and what ultimately defines my brand as the 🚀 #ZeroToOneNetworker. Because when people 😎#LookForTheOrangeSunglasses, they know that the content won’t only be my own thoughts, but tips, experiences, & stories from other people in my network whom I also learn from.

Maybe that’s the reason that my sharing worked in the first place; because so many people are not doing it consistently. Daring to do something different—even by accident—is a great way to set yourself apart and make your content more unique.

Maybe it makes me a little different than the other LinkedIn power-users out there, but I’ll double-down and say it:

If you wanna grow your network and content, then share.

And if you really wanna grow your network, then message me and book some time with me so we can figure out how to supercharge your networking chops! ⚡💸

Share positively and consistently; always try to add something valuable and always, always give credit.

After all, I didn’t have anything to lose—do you? 😉

Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn at @adammarx13 and @Zero2OneNetwork.

And continue to 😎 #LookForTheorangeSunglasses!

What Is Socially Just

Posted on July 17, 2020 by adammarx13

In 2018, amidst the high school walkouts taking place around the country, I called on my alma mater, Brandeis University, to join a slew of colleges and universities and put its money where its mouth is. I—and I’m sure many other alumni—challenged them to commit to honoring their ideals of free speech & social justice in the wake of high school administrations cracking down on such free expression.

They rose to the occasion and released a public statement articulating their support for free expression and exercise of social justice—a core ideal on which our school was founded—and committed to honoring interview dates and acceptance packages based on students’ merits, and not swayed by fickle administrative politics. It even got picked up by Buzzfeed News and I made my social media debut—my Twitter handle at least—in a Buzzfeed listicle; I guess I can cross that off my bucket list.

Now, two years later, I called on them again to rise to a similar, if not more daunting challenge. And again, I imagine I wasn’t the only one.

As the Trump administration seeks to engage in thinly-veiled isolationist and racist policies—in the wake of a global pandemic no less—simple students have found themselves caught in the political crossfire. The administration’s “guidance” over not allowing foreign students to take online-only classes for the U.S. fall semester is yet another stain on a consistently tumultuous and erratic educational policy. It’s not only antithetical to everything that Brandeis stands for as an institution, but what we as a nation stand for. One would think that such a stark departure from core American ideals would be enough to dissuade the Trump administration from pursuing such a draconian agenda.

And yet here we are.

On the heels of Trump’s announcement of the new policy, Harvard University and MIT—two other Boston-based schools with which Brandeis is good-naturedly competitive—filed a joint lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts against the Trump administration. In Harvard’s own words to CNN:

“The order came down without notice—its cruelty surpassed only by its recklessness. It appears that it was designed purposefully to place pressure on colleges and universities to open their on-campus classrooms for in-person instruction this fall, without regard to concerns for the health and safety of students, instructors, and others[.]”

The lawsuit itself expands further on this line of thinking:

“…for many students, returning to their home countries to participate in online instruction is impossible, impractical, prohibitively expensive, and/or dangerous.”

Why does any of this even matter? Why did I even tweet about it?

Well if you’re reading this as someone with any connection to Brandeis at all, you should be able to answer those questions on your own.

For everyone else, here’s why:

Because Brandeis was founded on ideas of equality, diversity, right to a first-class education, and above all, social justice. Indeed the latter phrase emblazons most every free space around the university’s campus.

In the school’s own words:

“Brandeis University was founded in 1948 by the American Jewish community at a time when Jews and other ethnic and racial minorities, and women, faced discrimination in higher education.

Brandeis’ visionary founders established a nonsectarian university that welcomed talented faculty and students of all backgrounds and beliefs.”

There, in the first breath of our school identity and history, is the commitment to being different in the face of adversity and acting as a tether—the tether—to being a socially just port in the storm. It’s no surprise that Justice Brandeis—the school’s namesake—adorns the central space by the Student Campus Center—the “green building” as it’s affectionately known to students. The indelible mark that Brandeis made on modern jurisprudence is now playing out before our eyes.

And in this moment, we as Brandeis alumni and community members cannot be spectators; we must be leaders.

When I called on Brandeis to step up to the plate in this game, I didn’t have a specific goal in mind beyond urging my alma mater to lead in the game from the start. Whether joining Harvard and MIT or finding a place similar to Cornell University, which has joined the case as a friend of the court and had this to say:

“This was wholly unexpected, and it is a senseless and unfair policy that runs counter to all that we stand for as a global academic community[.]”

Because in the end, this is not a game.

This is about who we are and what our legacy will be. I spent years at Brandeis majoring in history—I studied masses of it. From East Asian and European Medieval to Roman and American Colonial, there’s always one thing that’s true about history:

There is always a right side of it. And a wrong side of it.

It seems that the Brandeis administration is of a similar mind.

As I continued to tweet about this whole snafu last week, I noticed the Brandeis account liking all of my tweets.

Then I saw their comment pop up; a link to a tweet from the Brandeis account late last Wednesday evening—hours after I’d logged off for the day and busied myself with dinner and household chores—that detailed their full statement on the matter. The official post—appropriately titled “Supporting International Students”—basically boiled down to this:

“In the face of such callous [ICE] guidelines, Brandeis must act in support of our international students and those across the country. Today, we are joining with a number of other colleges and universities in supporting an effort by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology to temporarily prohibit the enforcement of these guidelines…We are committed to finding solutions to redress the ICE guidelines.”

However Brandeis is named in the suit—either jointly with Harvard and MIT or similarly to Cornell and other universities—is more or less irrelevant. Semantics are just that—semantics.

The only relevant thing is that they—we—are in the arena, fighting for what we as students, donors, alumni, and socially just thinkers went there for. This is how Brandeis can (and will) continue to define itself as a leading university and community in the coming years; how it proves to the outside world that it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the Ivy League schools and similar institutions like Emory, Stanford, and MIT.

The suit came before a federal judge this week and it took all of five minutes (seriously!) for ICE and the Trump administration to cave. But I have no illusions; I imagine there will be other repressive agendas that follow. And in those moments, we as Brandeisians must see and meet these challenges head-on.

Because ultimately this isn’t a meaningless issue. There is no gray area here.

There is only what is socially just.