Wanted: A Clever But Easily Exploited Person

This is less a blog post, and more and advert for assistance. I just thought it was better to put it here rather than in the window of my local shop where less people would see it and chances are super evil Chris Moyles* man from the garage or the man who’s always at the bus stop and cares more about his hair than people, might get in touch and I don’t want that thank you.

Over a year ago myself and director man Ben Hilton decided to see if we were able to make our own weekly online political comedy show. I felt saddened by the lack of political humour in mainstream media despite just how ridiculous the current government and the state of politics has been in recent years. Ben, despite having a bazillion projects he was already working on, wanted to direct and produce something he cared about too. We had weeks of meetings, threw names and formats back and forth and eventually made six episodes of the Partly Political Broadcast last year. I got the wonderful mushybees aka Simon Coxall to animate things for them, and bullied my brother into giving us some of his music for free. We wanted them to be fast paced, full of gags and mostly, focus on the week’s political events with my biased personal opinion on happenings. But we would also criticise every party when we could.

The videos went up on youtube. I annoyed a few people to tweet and post about it, I shamelessly emailed everyone I knew and upset my Twitter followers with endless promotion. The first episode ended up on a few blogs and got around 3000 views. The next less so and less so and less so, till the last two episodes managed around only 800. It was no longer a new thing, people just didn’t care half as much, even though we had to grips with what we were doing and they were better quality overall. After six episodes we both realized it was taking up a lot of time with very little reward. We discussed and reached the conclusion that we needed to outsource some internet marketing from a company like YEAH! Local but, with no time and no budget meant that we stopped with thoughts to do it again.

Various very nice people then spent the next year repeatedly asking me when they would come back, how there is still nothing out there like it and so it’s needed, and how much they’d like to see more. We wanted to do more and so, after Ben got to grips with being a new dad and I got control of my own diary again, Partly Political started up again four weeks ago. We had learned from the last time. Youtube stats had showed a lot of people had only watched the first 3-4 mins of the episodes last time, so we made them shorter this time. We constructed a format that could work every time and a regular schedule that meant I’d write the episode every Tuesday, we’d film it on Wednesday, it’d be out Thursday. We’ve put it in iTunes and youtube, and gained a tumblr, a Twitter and a Facebook account. And so that’s what happened. And they’ve been getting even less views than the end of the last run. The people that have watched them have been very nice about how much they enjoyed them. It just seems a lot of people don’t know they are there.

So, this is an advert asking if any of you out there have experience in promoting social media. Youtube and Facebook now seem to require pumping a lot of money into promoting your links and videos to even make them appear on people’s searches and feeds. Twitter posts disappear down someone’s timelines in seconds. No one really looks at Tumblrs and sometimes I post them on Linkedin just to make myself laugh. I don’t want to keep asking favours of more famous people I know to post them up because that is unfair and I’m concerned about boring my own Twitter followers with it till they go braindead. So, what else can we do? Despite no money and no time we want to keep making them weekly as long as we can. Just because we want to. But it’d be nice if people watched them. I know that I am just adding to the clutter on the internet, just firing more words than can join the endless stream of nonsense that will definitely never recreate the works of Shakespeare. But we’re genuinely proud of these and we’re always learning how to make them better. But if the views get lower and lower, it’s just not worth the time and work.

So, if you have ideas or thoughts on these sorts of things, please get in touch. Neither me or Ben have any money to hire people in but if you’re just passionate about trying to make people more interested in politics and political humour then we’d love to hear from you. Unless you are the evil man from the garage.

Our youtube channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/user/PoliticalPartly
To subscribe on iTunes go here: https://t.co/Xix0K10j98
Our Twitter is: @parpolbro
Our Facebook is: https://www.facebook.com/ParPolBro
And our Tumblr is here: http://partlypoliticalbroadcast.tumblr.com

* Chris Moyles is of course, evil. So to be his evil doppelgänger you either have to be good, which this man is not, or super evil. Which he is.