Best of Hopkins County voting to close soon

Wednesday, June 30 will be the final full day to cast your votes for your favorite businesses and people in our yearly Best of Hopkins County competition/promotion. Remember, you can vote once every hour, so get your votes in, some of the categories are incredibly close, so your votes could put your favorites in the lead.

I’m going to address a few different subjects regarding The Best of Hopkins County, mainly because the past two years I’ve gotten an earful from our wonderful citizens and business owners about the voting process. Many of you, like myself, are “oldschool,” and we liked the way voting was back then. You would sit and write your favorites on the paper ballot and then either bring it down to the paper or mail it in. Voters would hand in anywhere from one to one hundred papers, depending on their level of passion for who they wanted to see win in their favorite categories.

I’ve been a part of promotions like this my entire 30+ year career in newspapers and when given the opportunity to either sit in a room with 2,000 to 3,000 pages of newspapers, with handwritten scribble in each category, trying to decipher each name and tabulate the votes manually, OR get a report the next day with the exact amount of votes in each category, the choice was simple. I was born during the day, but it wasn’t yesterday, so I’m going with modern technology. Plus, with COVID, the last thing anyone wants to do is sift through thousands of newspapers, counting ballots. Digital ballots are the best and most accurate way to vote, period. If you’re upset, I’d encourage you to put a tape in your 8-track player and relax.

And for those questioning the “integrity” of the votes, let me share this with you, there are businesses and people out there, who would come in and buy 100 newspapers at a time and write their business in every one of them, so I’ve tried to encourage people to not overthink this entire process. These promotions are meant to be fun, and when it’s all said and done, this is a fun popularity contest. Do you think Jennifer Hudson really deserved to come in seventh place on American Idol and Taylor Hicks was the best singer the year he won? Her Oscar and two Grammy Awards say, “I don’t think so.”

In the old days, the way the newspaper made money on promotions like this, was to sell ads all around the ballot. That way, it gave the voters a visual of who they should vote for and helped those businesses possibly win their categories. Now that we have digital voting, the best way to help the business and the newspaper, is to allow businesses to buy a link that makes voting for them super easy and convenient for their customers/voters. If this year’s numbers are similar to last year’s, the businesses that purchased the “easy vote button,” as I call it, usually came in first or second in their categories, and that’s because we are lazy people and no one wants to re-type info every hour, for every category, when they can just click and vote.

We currently have 183 categories, which is nearing insanity. In cities that I’ve done this type of promotion/contest in the past, there’s usually between 75 and 90 categories, max. So, I will be eliminating a lot of categories next year. I won’t get it down to 75 or 90, but a lot of categories will be going away. The way I’m deciding which categories will go, will be the categories which get fewer than 50 total votes. I’m also going to eliminate categories where we only have one in town. As I’m writing this, we are approaching 64,000 votes and some categories have less than ten votes total. So next year, if you’re one of those few people and eliminating a particular category upset you, I’m sending you my deepest apologies now and you’ll have a whole year to get over it. Joking, of course. But in all seriousness, I hope everyone will prefer the scaled down ballot next year. I’m going for quality, not quantity. And finally, can we

And finally, can we all please stop saying that coming in second is being the “first loser?” Some of these categories have 20 different people or businesses nominated and we only acknowledge the top two, so it’s a victory to come in second place. I’ve actually contemplated taking out second place and only awarding a “Winner,” but a lot of those proud and I’m not going to take that away from them. So, thank you to everyone for voting, for participating in the process and most of all, thank you for having fun with The Best of Hopkins County. If you have any questions or concerns, you know you can always contact me by phone, email or what I prefer, stop in and talk to me at 200 Main Street in beautiful downtown Sulphur Springs.