Best of Southern Maryland: How Voting Works & How to Win

Four papers, three counties, one ballot

somdnews.com isn't one newspaper's website. It's the shared digital home for Southern Maryland Newspapers, a Lee Enterprises operation covering Calvert, Charles, and St. Mary's counties through four sister brands under one masthead. This readers' choice program runs out of that combined readership, at somdnews.com/best_of/, which is why it reads less like a single town's popularity contest and more like a genuine regional institution.

That structure matters for how a business should think about the contest. A Waldorf business and a Leonardtown business aren't competing in separate, unrelated polls the way they might if each county ran its own paper. They're on the same ballot, filtered by category, inside a readership that somdnews.com has spent years building across three counties at once.

See the Maryland contest hub for how this compares to the Ocean City program on the state's other coast, and the USA contest index for the full map.

What the published 2025 results actually confirm

somdnews.com posted a complete set of 2025 category winners. That single fact separates this program from a newer readers' choice poll still building a track record. It also sets the standard for how a business should talk about any placement going forward: cite the actual published year and category, not a vague "voted best" claim with nothing behind it.

Why the published year matters more than the win itself

A 2025 winner in one category tells a reader something specific. A blanket "Southern Maryland's best" claim tells them nothing, and worse, it risks stating something somdnews.com never actually confirmed in that form. The organizer did the work of publishing results by category. Using anything less precise than that undersells the credibility a real placement carries.

Businesses building the broader case for a readers' choice win can look at how best business of the year voting frames the general category, though the specific rules and calendar here belong to somdnews.com alone.

Nomination first. The ballot comes second

Skip the nomination stage and there's no later door into the vote. That's the part of this program most likely to catch a business off guard if it's used to single-stage local polls where anyone can just show up and vote for a business by name at any point.

A restaurant or service business planning around a single memorable vote day will miss the earlier nomination window entirely if nobody tells the customer list about it first. The restaurant vote campaign guide covers timing reminders across a two-stage structure like this one.

Calvert, Charles, and St. Mary's aren't interchangeable

Prince Frederick and Solomons sit in Calvert. Waldorf, La Plata, and Indian Head anchor Charles. Lexington Park, California, and Leonardtown carry St. Mary's. Three real counties, three different commuting patterns into the D.C. and Baltimore metro areas, and three customer bases that don't automatically overlap just because one masthead covers all of them.

A La Plata retailer's regulars aren't the same people voting from Solomons on a Saturday, even though both show up on the identical somdnews.com ballot. That's worth remembering before assuming a single generic reminder post reaches everyone the program actually touches. County-specific framing, mentioning the actual town by name, tends to land better with a readership that identifies with its own county corridor first.

Businesses that also serve customers across the Chesapeake in a different tri-county rhythm can compare structure against Best of New Jersey, a statewide trade-publication version of the same nominate-then-vote pattern, or the coastal Best of Ocean City program on Maryland's other shoreline.

Running a real campaign here, honestly

No automated votes. No duplicate accounts. No claiming a win before somdnews.com actually publishes one for that year and category. Past that floor, the honest version of a Southern Maryland campaign looks like most local outreach: an email or text to the existing customer list explaining exactly which category and business name to look for, in-store signage during the live window, and a repeat reminder because a single post buried in a feed rarely reaches a whole readership on its own.

somdnews.com's own four-brand structure means a business with locations in more than one county can genuinely say so, rather than picking a single town to represent the whole footprint. That's a real advantage worth using plainly. For the underlying standard behind any legitimate vote push, see what a real vote actually requires, and for the general mechanics this two-stage ballot builds on, how online contest votes work.