| On Thursday, the RCDC launched their Website/Blog called Rockland Dems at http://www.rocklanddems.com. The site has many useful tools and features including:
• A news and blog area where the Committee will share information and opinions. There is also a comments area at the bottom, much as you'd find on blogs such as Daily Kos, The Albany Project, or Talking Points Memo. Currently, County Committee Chairman Vincent J. Monte has his welcome letter up there with a comments area below it. Later, news will be published in this area about candidates, campaigns, and other relevant news.
• News from the New York State Democratic Committee and Democratic National Committee. This news is updated through RSS feeds and goes live on RocklandDems.com as soon as they're published.
• A calendar of events, called "The Agenda," that highlights meetings, fundraisers, conventions, and other events.
• Fundraising through ActBlue. The RCDC can now take contributions through this progressive political fundraising tool.
• A link to the Rockland Dems Facebook site.
Please visit the site.
And now I'm going to give my sales pitch for Facebook to those that have stuck with me this far:
Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) is a social networking site that has become powerful in connecting individuals with similar interests.
The Albany Project has an official Facebook group and many of our national, state, and local elected officials and candidates use Facebook to attract new supporters and communicate with them through message boards, news feeds, event invitations, and fundraising pages. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Hall, Eliot Engel, Tom Zugibe, Liz Krueger, and David Patterson, among others, have supporters pages on Facebook set up by their organizations. The New York State Democratic Party also has a very active supporters' area.
The Rockland County Democratic Committee now has a page on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19658090944) and we encourage you to join your fellow Democrats and neighbors there.
We did a "soft launch" of the Rockland Dems Facebook page back in December and while our numbers are still small, we've already had some small successes: It has already attracted some people that have not previously been involved with the party, but have since become involved. These people, mostly new Democrats and/or young voters found the Rockland Dems because they saw their friends and neighbors had joined the group. And yesterday, I sent out an event notice for Tom Zugibe's brunch on Sunday. Several of these people found out about the event through this Facebook announcement and will be attending tomorrow. Like I said, they're small successes, but they would be much larger if we had more of us with a presence there.
Going forward, Facebook could be a great tool for networking and communicating with other Democrats and help greatly with our Get Out The Vote efforts. I highly encourage everyone to join! |
