Work projects can take longer than normal these days. You know this if you pay attention to the news.
If you’re working on a project and not making good time, maybe spending more company resources than you should, when your boss or your customer asks you about it just respond by muttering words like “supply chain.” Or “COVID.” Or “chip shortage.” Or “inflation.” Doesn’t even matter whether these reasons have anything to do with your situation. Just say those trigger words to get folks off your back.
There you have it. Valid excuse has been made, and you’ve just bought yourself a crap ton of time and a reason to go way over budget.
You’re welcome, America.
Speaking of projects, the new City Hall/police station for Platte City is showing signs of progress. DJ Gehrt, city administrator, this week said the concrete footers for the new building under construction at 224-228 Marshall Road were poured last week. Concrete basement walls will be formed and poured as soon as possible, depending on some dry weather.
Progress has been slower than hoped, due to long lead times for many construction materials. Remember the above lesson about the words “supply chain?” Maybe there’s something to it.
Gehrt speculates final completion of the new city facility will be delayed until late November or early December. “Suppliers of some specialized material and equipment have already provided late November dates as the earliest delivery for some ordered material, including the emergency power supply and power switch gear,” Gehrt told me on Tuesday.
It’s a digital world.
Speaking of which, we’ve noticed The Landmark’s web site at plattecountylandmark.com is racking up some views. Thank you for your interest in local news and in particular for the local news as it is presented by The Landmark.
For instance, in the month of April, according to Google, The Landmark’s web site attracted 155,000 impressions. An impression, also known as a view-through, is when a user sees an advertisement.
In layman’s terms, that’s a butt load of views. Now you know why national brands take an interest in placing ads on our site. VistaPrint, YouTube TV, Hertz and Men’s Wearhouse are some you’ve likely seen recently, adding to others such as Best Buy, Staples, and many more.
Top performing queries folks used on Google in April to land at plattecountylandmark.com were these four phrases, in order: “platte county landmark,” “parkville mayor candidates,” “parkville mayor election 2022,” and “kci 29 logistics park.”
A little more shop talk.
Those Google numbers for our web site were for the month of April. I’m expecting bigger numbers for the month of May. And here’s part of the reason. Our Facebook post with the link to reporter Valerie Verkamp’s story on the FBI coming to Platte County has been read by 87,800 folks as of today.
That’s close to setting a record number of views for a Landmark Facebook post. I haven’t yet given it hard core research, but off the top of my head I can only recall one post of ours that generated more views, and that was a photo/informational piece on Bar Louie in Zona Rosa closing down, which topped over 105,000.
To be honest, for many years I wasn’t crazy about the idea of establishing a Landmark presence on Facebook. So while most newspapers jumped on Facebook around 2010, The Landmark waited for several years. Facebook can be a bit of a crap show at times, with loose cannon commenters and such, and I was worried it would become a full time job for a staffer to check in on the comments section to maintain proper decorum. But former Landmark reporter Alan McArthur (remember him? A Park University graduate and solid young reporter for us for several years in the early 2000s, who while here would also volunteer for other duties like assisting me with repairing Landmark news racks and running the DirecTV lines/splitters where they needed to go inside our building) reached out to me in early 2017 and said something to the effect of “Hey, old codger, you need to get The Landmark a business page on Facebook. I’ll create the page for you to get you going.”
Five years ago this month Alan voluntarily built The Landmark’s Facebook page and then handed us the keys. And it has taken off, consistently attracting a growing audience. We’re at 5,619 Facebook followers as of this writing. Our Twitter follower count is 3,063 and we play around just a bit on Instagram, with 760 following along there.
Here are some demographics. Sometimes these type things are interesting. Of The Landmark’s Facebook followers, 70.5% of them are female and 29.5% are male. We’re happy with that, and our advertisers should be happy with that because–as you probably know–the females are most often the ultimate deciders when it comes to the spending of dollars in the household.
The Landmark is most popular with females in the age range of 35-44, followed closely by females aged 45-54.
A couple things I wanted to get to this week but got wrapped up in talk of the digital age. So next week: Names are starting to emerge as candidates for the job of next police chief of Kansas City. One of the names being touted, according to a story in the Kansas City Star, is surprising to me and not in a good way.
And also next week: Have we found a home for that space-eating 1898 Babcock press in The Landmark’s back office? I think we have.
(You’ll find Ivan Foley fighting through things like “supply chain” and “chip shortage” via email to ivan@plattecountylandmark.com)