Sean Smokey Smullen and the YouTube effect

A couple of weeks before the local elections, I noticed one of the candidates had a YouTube logo on their poster.

It was the first time I’d seen anything like that and it prompted me to search for the video on YouTube. I wrote about it briefly on my Posterous and it was also covered on Irish Election.

I had never heard of Sean Smokey Smullen before, so I was interested in how he would get on as a first time independent candidate. As it turns out, he did get elected on the last count without reaching the quota. His election resulted in a sitting Labour councillor with 25 years service losing his seat.

He took 215 first preference votes which is not bad going for an independent considering some more established figures locally took 50 or 60 additional first preferences.

What definitely set him apart was his video. None of the other candidates had one. It’s impossible to say for definite that YouTube got him over the line, but I think it did. Just before polling day, it had received over 2,000 views (it’s 2,489 now). A parody video of the original had over 1,000 views. When you consider that 3,997 people voted in the Wicklow Town Council, those video numbers are significant.

Based on the promises in his video, the man has a lot to deliver on and his chances of doing so are pretty slim – but it’s good to see new faces on the Town Council. Lets hope he CAN effect some change and shake things up a bit.

The parody video is hilarous by the way.

Here’s the original :

And here’s the Parody (turn up the sound! the fuckin’ state of it)