The Campaign I Would Like To See

Feb 28 2008 Published by under Barack Obama, Candidates, Democrats, Elections, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Politics, Republicans, The Internet

Someone sent me a link to the YouTube video below and suggested I take a look at about the 35-36 minute mark. I admit, my curiosity got the better of me and I tried to skip ahead, but the gremlins at YouTube would not allow it. I ended up watching the whole thing. I was surprised to hear my name mentioned at about the suggested frame. This is apparently part of the Authors@Google series in which book authors chat with Google employees. Garrett Graff was discussing online politics.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

The question in which I was mentioned had to do with this Washington Post article in which I said most online campaigns really aren’t moving the ball forward. The question was whether Garrett agreed with my assertion. I’ll let you watch for yourself the discussion and his answer. It’s good, so I recommend you do.

Let me, however, elaborate on the original question I was asked and the reply. I did not mean to imply that campaigns weren’t doing interesting things. Mindy Finn with Romney’s campaign did some really good work on the “create your own ad” effort. Obama’s people have done an amazing job of fundraising online. There are some novel online efforts being undertaken.

What I meant, more specifically, was there does not appear to be any effort to convert that excitement and energy into actual votes. Most of the GOTV work being done is still being done offline. Take for instance this note I got from Hillary’s people.

I’m writing to you because Hillary needs you now more than ever. As I write this email, Team Hillary volunteers here at headquarters are on the phones talking to voters. Can you pitch in for Hillary and join us at the phone bank for at least two get-out-the-vote shifts between now and March 4th? Reply to this email to let me know when you can do your part.

Every night this week a senior advisor to Hillary, including Harold Ickes, Terry McAuliffe, Guy Cecil and campaign manager Maggie Williams, will join our volunteers for strategy discussion of the path to victory. Which night will you volunteer this week?

We need help every day. Our shifts are:

10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
2 p.m. – 6 p.m.
6 p.m. – 10 p.m.

Reply to this email to let me know when you can pitch in for Hillary.

We also have a critical need for volunteers this weekend. Can you pitch in this Saturday or Sunday? Please reply to me and let me know when you can help out!

Obama, Thompson, and Romney all gave me tools that allowed me to make such calls any time it was convenient for me. The technology really isn’t very difficult to create or manage. You allow your user to log in, get a script and numbers, make calls and complete a survey form, and report back the same data they would report back if they were sitting in your HQ.

The Hillary model, which looks like the same model Bill used in 1992, assume I have four uninterrupted hours to spend in your office. It also assumes I want to drive there, find parking, arrange for a sitter, etc. etc. It doesn’t allow for me to participate on my terms on my schedule.

This was something we understood in 2004 and was the reason we pioneered online call tools with the Bush campaign. We made a half-million contacts using our online tools. That was over and above the millions made in the traditional way.

Had Clinton’s campaign spent some time building such a tool instead of figuring out how many Drudge clones they could make (ahem, ahem) they could have empowered their supporters to get involved when and how it was convenient for them.

That was the point that I was trying to make in the Post piece. It’s not that campaigns aren’t doing anything jazzy with technology, it’s the fact that very little of it is meant to empower voters. Romney’s create your own ad effort was a great example. Give people stock footage, audio, video, images, etc, and let them be part of your creative team. Give them walk lists, call sheets, and other tools to mobilize voters and let them do it.

Where the campaigns this year have fallen short is they gave us tools without showing me the best way to use it. If I hand you a hammer, nails and a saw, you could eventually figure out that you could cut down a tree and make something. If I gave you the same tools with a guide to woodworking from raw materials, you’d be much better off.

My vision of campaign 2008 in December of 2004 was dramatically different from what has been. While it still may come to fruition, I’m not seeing much evidence that it will. It should, by nature, have been Obama, Paul or Thompson who pulled this off. I’ll explain what I had hoped to see.

Imagine a completely different campaign. Imagine a campaign that invested heavily in both the mobilization tactics and the microtargeting acumen of the Bush campaign, with the grassroots groundswell of the Dean campaign. Imagine taking a national database of registered voters and creating a sense of ownership among your online activists to reach low-propensity or non-voters. Here’s how it would work.

A campaign invests in microtargeting to determine what their typical supporter looks like as a function of consumer behavior, issue preferences, etc. The campaign buys consumer data for every citizen of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, etc that matches their model. Not just voters, mind you, but every single citizen that fits the mold.

Online activists are given tools like online phone banks, walk tools and handouts to go door-to-door reaching out to other voters who support their guy. More importantly, though, they match the consumer data for unregistered voters against their voter data to determine who is NOT registered to vote. An intensive campaign is run among online activists to reach them.

When activists are engaged, but nobody else is (say January through October of 2007) the campaign has their people working to register those people. The activists are brought in at the ground level to begin building what will be a long-term relationship with these folks. Geotargeting will allow the activist to find people located very near them, and reach out to them not just as a campaign volunteer, but as a neighbor – as someone who shops at the same grocery store, whose kids go to the same school.

The campaign would ask those volunteers to “adopt” those non-voters and urge them to a) drop off registration forms, b) follow up to make sure they get registered – which the campaign would verify by tracking voter registration additions against it’s internal database of targeted non-voters, c) deliver news and information about the campaign, and d) get them to vote in the primaries/caucuses/general.

We had, with the Bush campaign, developed tools along two separate lines. We called them all “Virtual Precinct”, but they were comprised of either your friends and family (to whom you could e-mail info) or targeted voters living near you (to whom you could walk, call, etc). This year, I had expected to see the two merge as campaigns used microtargeting, geotargeting, and online activism in synchronicity.

You have given your activists incredibly powerful tools to build the campaign. By explaining the goal, building a community, empowering them to be involved, and fostering a sense of ownership in the outcome, you have given them the instruction manual and a way to judge their success.

In addition, you could have volunteers in states with late primaries reaching out to those with early primaries – not in the way Howard Dean attempted with outsiders identified by their neon hats tromping through town, but via phone, e-mail and mail. Personal messages of support for a candidate delivered with passion by a voter in the comfort of their surroundings, are more effective that any stale script repeated over and over by an underfed, underappreciated volunteer jammed into a tight space with 85 other people on phones two feet away.

Think of it as the difference between telecommuting and working in a sweatshop.

That’s what I had expected to see and that’s where I think campaigns are still missing what’s possible. Campaigns in 2008 are, for the most part, still stuck in the mold of the 1980s and 1990s.

We can buy groceries from home and never have to go to the store. We can buy any product we want from Amazon, Buy.com or others and have it the next day without ever leaving the couch. We can play video games with friends we have never met a half a world away. We can engage in whatever pursuits we choose with others who share our hobbies regardless of where we all reside.

But despite all of that, campaigns stil force us to go to their office, to use their phone, to drink their old, cold coffee and eat their leftover doughnuts. Campaigns are still about me doing what they want, when they want me to do it. They miss the simple fact that there is no better spokesperson for the campaign than a single dedicated supporter talking to their friends, neighbors, and family in comfortable surroundings.

Update: Apparently the Clinton campaign actually does have an online phone bank tool. That actually makes the plea for me to appear in person even more confusing. I have not, at any time, received an e-mail asking me to make calls using that tool. I, as a would-be volunteer, was sitting here untapped. I could have made countless calls into states that voted earlier, and states that vote after Virginia. The campaign, however, never mobilized me to use the tool they built. Instead, they waited until after my primary, and until it was almost too late. to ask me to make calls at all.

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GOP Campaigns Online

Feb 22 2007 Published by under Bloggers, Candidates, Democrats, Elections, John McCain, Operatives, Politics, Republicans, The Internet

Since I was called out specifically by name (along with my good friends Patrick and Mindy) in a recent post by William Beutler, I felt compelled to reply, so I left a comment on his blog.

Days go by and I was having lunch with Mindy today. We got to talking about the nature of Republican campaigns, and the people in them. She touched on a valid point that brought Beutler’s post back to my mind. Her point was the same point she made in a TechPresident post on candidate use of e-mail. I’ll get to her point in a moment.

There are two aspects to why Republicans aren’t doing very well online – we do not engage in the same types of activities online, and our campaigns largely do not yet see the value of the Internet.

What Republicans Do Online

First, and most important, is the fact that we simply do not engage in the same type of activities online. At the RNC and on the Bush Campaign, we took a look at the type of sites that were more commonly trafficked by voters from each party. We did polling to look at partisan behavior on the web in an effort to determine why the Democrats were successful at raising money online.

The nature of the polling was aimed at answering a simple question. We had data that indicated Republicans were more likely to spend money online with e-commerce sites. There was a great comfort with buying online, but that had not extended to giving to campaigns. Needless to say, this seemed odd. If people were willing to give their credit card info via a website, why wouldn’t they contribute that way?

We began to look at the patterns of behavior for partisans on both sides. On the GOP side, the sites visited tended toward e-commerce and sites that reflected individual pursuits. On the Dem side, we saw a lot more sites like Blue Mountain Greetings or social sites (blogs, greeting cards, and collective activities).

Those differences drove my pursuit of tools and activities that freed volunteers to participate from home without ever looping through the campaign. There just wasn’t a lot of interest, among Republicans online, in social networking activities via the web. There was a lot of interest in social networking offline through house parties and such. That was illustrated by the fact that we had upwards of 5,000 to 8,000 Parties during our national party days (versus 2-3k for MoveOn and the Dean campaign).

Republicans were simply not as interested in virtual networking – they do most of it in the real world. (Understand, like any polling, this was a snapshot in time. These findings may not hold true today, but I believe they do).

The Role Of The Campaign

The obvious question all this begs is this: would Republicans be more likely to engage if they were given the option?

As I said, on the campaign, and at the RNC, the tools I was involved with building were aimed at a specific demographic – one that seemed to fit the typical Republican online – those who wanted to engage in the campaign, wanted to be involved, but didn’t want to participate in the process. I wrote about this in a post on PDF almost two years ago, but skipped the polling discussion because it was still fresh enough to be sensitive.

Some of the tools we developed were intended to be more open. There were concerns raised that the insight gleaned from our polling would presage an inevitable failure since our people, according to the data, were simply not likely to use them. They were, however, meant to be more engaging, and more inviting. They didn’t end up that way and the end result was bureaucracy heavy tools.

So we have a bizarre catch-22 that Beutler recognizes in his post. Do you build tools for the audience you have or the audience you want?

Mindy’s post indicates that the answer, in practice at least, is the former. Republicans are still pursuing a strategy of closed, top-down systems. The people in campaigns still see campaigns as top-down and that’s largely due to their perception that our people are not engaged. GOP campaign professionals (and I’m excluding Internet strategists) ignore the fact that people may be disengaged because the few opportunities available for participation in a top-down paradigm are not engaging.

The Internet is still, unlike in many Democrat campaigns, being treated as an extension of the communications/messaging apparatus. It is a very expensive glossy brochure. Republicans have not learned the value of including the eCampaign in the candidate’s inner circle.

If positioned properly, the eCampaign should have an online complement for every offline activity. Nothing should happen on the ground in Iowa or New Hampshire that doesn’t resonate through every voter following the campaign in Montana or Idaho. Most campaigns, despite their use of YouTube, still see the Internet as a novelty.

Looking back to Beutler’s post, his claim is the 2004 campaign didn’t include a competitve primary, so the people doing online campaigns did not have their skills honed. Frankly, it’s kind of a BS argument. There were enough competitve, Internet influenced elections at the congressional, state and local level in both 2004 and 2006 that even if the Presidential election hadn’t produced anything, there should be a decent farm team in place to step up now.

As for the presidential election, I heard the same criticism of the GOP leading up to 2004. I had calls from consultants telling me that Bush was going to lose solely because of what we were doing online. After the election, after making half a million calls through our online phone bank (the bulk of which were in Ohio and Florida) and after delivering GOTV messages, with maps and driving directions to poll locations, to millions of voters (which contributed to significant improvements in voter turnout), I heard a different story.

I heard we did everything right because we focused on the one thing that mattered. We didn’t focus on socializing. We didn’t focus on some feel-good notion of “fighting against the tendency to bowl alone”. We didn’t focus on using every fad technology just so people would think we were cutting edge. We focused on the role technology could play in attracting supporters, giving them the tools to communicate (on their terms) with their friends and neighbors, and getting them to turn out and vote on election day.

In short, we focused on actually winning the election.

The campaign’s shortcoming, if there is one, was the fact that in the two years since, nobody has learned from that lesson and built on what was won.

The RNC, rather than expanding on that, building new tools, spending time marketing them and building awareness of what was available, instead retreated into a world run by the NY Times and Washington Post. Everything they did online (read: web video commercials) was done for a media hit, not to attract visitors or supporters.

The campaigns today are similarly top-down. McCainSpace is a perfect example of that. It has been 14 days since I created my page, and it still has not been approved. I have received no rejection, no e-mail indicating there is a problem, and no request to change the content. There is simply stony silence.

The trouble is not the Internet strategists, it is a party that doesn’t believe its people will step up and participate if they are invited to do so. If you’re cynical, you could make an argument that it is a party that doesn’t trust its people enough to let them participate.

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MittTV And GOP Failure To Think Outside The Box

Jan 10 2007 Published by under Candidates, Democrats, Elections, Marketing, Politics, Republicans, Technology, The Internet, The President

In a comment on my post about Mitt’s site, David All posed a question about the site.

I’d be interested in your thoughts on MittTV and the site Рin general.

I started to reply about MittTV in the comments, but it became long enough to make a post… so here it is…

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The one issue I have with MittTV is the fact that it looks like a PBS documentary. Republicans put together stuff like this, expect it to go viral, and act surprised when it doesn’t (unless you count 10k forwards as viral, which I don’t).

People don’t watch video online to look at stuff that looks like smaller versions of the same stuff they watch on TV. How much of the stuff you see on YouTube looks like TV? Almost none of it. The selling point to YouTube is the fact that these are real people doing real things. Mostly…

LonelyGirl15 didn’t reach her degree of notoriety because she put together some mock PBS documentary with cut shots of her friends offering testimonials. Even the fact that there is nothing at all real about her videos, doesn’t change the appeal it had. The production value wasn’t bad. The lighting was decent, the set was sparsely decorated. Most importantly though, it felt real.

Most of the stuff Republicans do online has none of that. It may have a flashy set, and an anchor straight out of Central Casting, and be professionally edited and polished, but it comes across like a used car salesman. I will say the only videos I have seen in GOP politics that I felt differently about were the stuff Justin did for the Bush campaign and the RNC’s Off the Record series with Mindy and Katie (before it was pulled).

Justin’s videos were great because they didn’t focus on selling the President. They focused on his interaction with real people. They focused on the President’s tours and the things he did on the road and the crowd enthusiasm. They captured the near total lack of reality about Presidential campaigns by demonstrating these ridiculous amounts of staging he has to endure to be a candidate, but the fact that the people still warmed to him.

Justin was given creative freedom to express what he saw and experienced on those trips. He wasn’t told to stay on message and make sure everything presented the President in the best light. He was given the freedom to experiment. Occasionally he produced something that looked like Andy Warhol’s nightmares, but they almost always were very, very good.

Mindy and Katie did a phenomenal job given the set we had. They demonstrated the power of video. They made the media take notice of the fact that the RNC was doing something new, different, bold, and yes, a little odd. They proved a video series featuring two unknown staffers interviewing elected officials could get attention and get people chattering.

Unfortunately, the studio was dilapidated (it was left over from the days of GOPTV back in the mid 90s), the lighting was poor and the equipment was old. Oddly, when viewed on RNC PCs, or tape, the videos looked fine. When viewed online, however, they were dark and dingy. But they still got attention in a way that nothing else the RNC did in the last two years was really able to do. Mindy and Katie were recognized in airports and the open rates on those e-mails were as high as the open rates on notes from the President.

Of course, the plug was pulled because the series wasn’t “Presidential”. The professional communicators felt the media attention it received reflected negatively on them. They said it needed to be more sophisticated, look less like Wayne’s World and more like Meet The Press. The RNC invested a bunch of money to upgrade the studio, hired a former news anchor and professionally created an almost completely unwatchable propaganda series.

The other thing the GOP likes to do is the webmercial. They create what would be a sketchy spot if it ran on TV, and promote it online. It’s like a cross between an ad and a press release. They’re done to generate media, not to attract viewers. It’s really sort of a cynical tactic because it assumes people can be spoken to only in sound bites and will regurgitate on cue.

That’s the one thing the Democrats are doing better online. They are embracing technology and trying different things. They’re willing to take a chance at doing something goofy. Would any GOP Congressman ever consent to giving a press conference in Second Life? Absolutely not!

The GOP tends to look at online trends like vlogging or Second Life and make comments that, “I’ll look cartoonish. I won’t be taken seriously.”

Well a lot of people said the same thing about Presidential candidates going on late night TV until Clinton played the sax on Arsenio. People were watching late night TV. The Clinton team tapped into a world that people related to and connected in a real way. What was “Presidential” didn’t factor into the equation.

Did it matter that Arsenio was cancelled? No. Should it matter if Second Life is a fad? Probably not. The fact is people are responding to it. Suddenly the concept of what may or may not be “Presidential” is shifting. Should Mitt Romney or John McCain do a press conference in Second Life. Hell no! But they should be willing to have fun with online media.

One thing I wanted to do on the Bush campaign, that was rejected every time I brought it up, was to do a series about life in the campaign. How does a major event like a rally for 100,000 people come together? How does a TV ad go from concept to buy? We had a videographer in house to do the shooting, we would do all the editing in house, so our exposure was nil. We could make sure that nothing sensitive was released (unlike inviting the media to follow us around all day).

The upside is you create something people respond to because they see how hard the staff is working, how creative they are, how much fun they are having while working 20 hour days. The downside is nobody has done it before.

How great would it be to see life inside a major Presidential campaign as it unfolds? To see the process for creating a new ad at the same time the ad is released? To see the work that goes into creating a rally and playing the video that shows that as the teaser for a live webcast of that same rally? To ride on the bus with the candidate as they role through middle America.

We need to adjust our concept of “Presidential” behavior because the public, while respecting the office, responds well to people that appear to be “one of the guys.” That’s why Bush always won in polls of “which candidate would you like to have a beer with?”

As long as we hold the President to a fundamentally different standard than the general public, and let that standard dissuade us from being innovative and force us to produce uninteresting uninspiring pabulum, we’ll continue to be behind.

In answer to David’s question, MittTV is only as good as the idea behind it. If the idea is to use video to put up otherwise stale issue material, I say they’re right on track. If the idea is to get people to connect with the candidate and the campaign, they need to rethink their approach.

One example would have been a video featuring their big call-a-thon the other day. Show what it took to make that happen, the excitement of the people there, the tireless hours the candidate, his campaign, and his friends worked to make it happen. That will resonate with more people and get passed around more than a video telling my why Mitt’s health care program is a great thing.

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Politics, Blogs, and Time Magazine

May 09 2006 Published by under Politics, The Internet

PoliticsThe InternetOk, so my last post was a bit hard on bloggers. To even it out, I’ll go with something that takes it out on the politicos and their “outreach” toward the online community. Time Magazine covers the role of the “Internet Specialist” within the offices of elected officials.

As somebody who has been doing the online thing since Andreesson released the browser, I found the article really amusing. What it told me is the powers that be don’t get it, they don’t really care to get it, and they’ll hire some kid who does get it to try and make it look like they do get it.

From my experience in online politics, that’s just about accurate.

On the campaign, we were largely left to our own devices. We created the content that we wanted. Showed it to everyone when it was ready to go, they occasionally made minor changes, and we pushed it out the door.

All of that changed after the election. Much of the post-election buzz was about the role of the Internet and blogs specifically, how well the Bush campaign had done organizing online, how well Kerry/Dean had done raising money online, etc., etc. Suddenly everyone in the building had opinions on what we should do, and everyone had to be included in the approval process.

To his credit, Ken Mehlman really gets this stuff. He and I had conversations about the “MyGOP” concept, viral fundraising, party branded XMPP chat applications that featured RSS aggregation and much, much more. Unfortunately, these things make those who don’t get it very nervous so I ran into trouble with just about everyone else.

The biggest problem those “Internet Specialists” face. You have two or three generations of political operatives ahead of you, many in their 40s, 50s, 60s, or (in the case of candidates) 70s. They understand direct mail. They went to work for a direct mail house out of college and that’s their perspective. It’s simple. You label it and drop it in a box.

They understand telemarketing. You pay a guy to make a call and ask for money or a vote. That’s easy.

They understand TV, and how to craft a broad message.

They even understand databases to some extent. That’s where we keep all the data on voters – how they vote, how they’re likely to behave based on the scotch they drink. Ok, we get it.

Try to have a discussion about targeted online ad buys versus run of site buys and they can keep up for a bit.

Explain why you need more staff to monitor blogs, create MySpace/Friendster (a dated reference, but bear with me) profiles for your candidate, and they see no value.

Start talking to them about geographic information systems and why you need to ask for more than e-mail address and zip code when someone signs up, and they get a far away stare.

Engage them in a discussion on the relative merits of a .Net versus open source platform, and they tilt their head like a confused dog.

Explain to them that people don’t go online to watch video that looks like Meet the Press, but instead prefer the grainy homemade quality of videos on YouTube, and they shake their head. “But, But… It should look like a commercial. It should look like a TV news show…”

Talk to them about new technologies that let you buy ads in online games so the billboard you race past will display your campaign logo, and you have lost them completely.

We’re really at a nascent state in online politics. Those who came to power through their skills in other media – mail, phones, television – understand that there is a new tool. They understand that they need to pay attention to it, but they don’t speak the language, and they don’t relate to those that use the tools. I firmly believe that the people who will run politics for the next 20 years are those that understand the convergence of media, and how to effectively blanket coverage online. With more and more people ignoring mail, turning off the TV, and hanging up on telemarketers, the savvy “Internet Specialist” will be the next generation of political power broker.

Now, I’m 36, and realize I am rapidly becoming a relic in the world of online politics. But I know there is a wave of very talented people coming up behind me that will do things that make your head spin. My deputy at the RNC – Mindy Finn – will, in the next ten years, do some amazing work. She has done a great job with Santorum, but will really shine when someone gives her the budget and spotlight of a Presidential campaign.

My hope is that those who fought for the last 20 years to bring politics online will pave the way for those “Internet Specialists” to bring about the change in politics that we know is possible.

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