Hi Dave,
Why not? It IS an election, right? Michael wants more people there to vote, so I think everyone who's forum is in the election should try to bring as many voters there as possible. Honestly tooting our own horns is much more above-board than cheating. As for advertising along with reminding people about the election, again, why not? I'd rather know that advertisers have a secondary outlet such as a non-advertising forum, instead of just dealing with a person with a singular focus. It's also good to know that people who came in with little or no marketing knowledge can learn things. Advertisers learn about art, music, and history, and the artistic people learn about business. Adlandpro gives us the capabilities to show many facets of our interests.
Adlandpro was primarily a classifieds site for 6 years before the community started, why do so many community members overlook that? This is a little town within a big business, we could think of the forums as little shops or entertainment venues within our town, some sell hard, some sell soft, some don't sell anything but they offer relaxation or advice.
Tooting our own horn for our forum also brings in new visitors who haven't been to our forums before, new voters who haven't voted before, etc. There always needs to be a first time for something, then those people see the fun of it and continue visiting and voting and become more active, maybe starting their own forums and being nominated for something in the future. Action begets action. If no one tooted their own horn, why bother having an election, why bother having forums or logging in every day?
If anyone thinks the top posters or top friends list is an elitest group, it isn't, we're not all close friends with other top people. We do have one thing in coommon...we're all motivated to strive higher every day and none of us are going to sit still and stop being active just to make less active people happy. To stop tooting or stop being active is a big step backward, that would definitely bring the vote count down to nothing, bring forum activity down to nothing, and bring the community to a slow crawl. The top post numbers in themselves don't mean anything, the main reason to post is to be known as active, so people know who we are, everyone knows we're here regularly in sociability and business. Name recognition and photo recognition are very important in business, availability is important, daily diligence and reliability are important. Being active is a good thing, in all venues of this community. If anyone isn't happy with their vote count, start tooting. Michael didn't put an end date to the voting yet, it's still a very open field to people who are motivated.
Kathleen VanBeekom