Play on your community’s insecurities

You know those annoying national media stories that highlight the top 10 “Best of Something” lists? Best place to live. Best restaurants. Best travel hot spots. How often does your community get mentioned in those?

So play up that omission. Challenge readers to set the record straight with local nominations.

When editors of Outside Magazine listed only one park in any of the eight Great Lakes states as among their favorites, we asked readers to tell us which ones from our region should have been listed.

What we got back was a mixed bag, but included were some smart responses. People want to have a voice and sometimes they need to be pointed in the right direction.

Using a third-party polling service like Polldaddy or Surveymonkey can also give you a low-effort (and low-cost) interactive feature that can run with a story, with multiple stories or as a standing feature. It allows readers to weigh in easily. Critics gripe - often in the comments - about the unscientific nature of these polls. We never say the results support the facts of a news story. But that doesn’t stop readers from weighing in and clicking an answer.