More From Politics Online

Mar 16 2007 Published by under Bloggers, Candidates, Democrats, Elections, Operatives, Politics, Republicans, The Internet

I was planning to do more live blogging from POLC yesterday, but the breakout sessions were in fairly small rooms and I ended up standing most of the day. That’s not terribly conducive to breaking out the laptop.

Morning Plenary Sessions

At any rate, day one was pretty decent. The first panel on using off-the-shelf business software in a campaign was almost entirely uninteresting to me. I sat in for part of it, but it was just too painful. If you’re looking for a CRM solution, then sure, Salesforce.com will probably fit your needs. If you want to go beyond an electronic Rolodex and integrate your donor, voter, and microtargeting data, then you really need someone who understands how all of those pieces fit together.

That’s actually the problem a lot of people have buying software from political application developers. Take Vocus, for instance. They’re a good group of guys, but they developed their application around a PAC. If you’re managing a PAC, it’s a great fit. If you’re managing an advocacy group, or a campaign, you’re S.O.L. If you’re looking for a good package for candidates and, to a lesser extent, state parties, then Aristotle is great. It’s not so good for PACs.

I would never use Salesforce to try and run my campaign or an organization. If I were running a business, they would be high on my list.

The second plenary I touched on yesterday. It was a good discussion, but the people who most needed to hear it, as I said, were nowhere near the building, let alone the room.

Google’s Keynote

Google’s SVP for Government Affairs (or some such title) took the stage just after lunch. I honestly expected him to launch into a diatribe about net neutrality, but he didn’t. He did pontificate on the “information should be free” movement.

He also made some comments to the effect that Viacom’s copyright infringement suit against Google was being done solely “to gain attention”. He also joked that people think Google knows everything there is to know about them – and they do. He followed that up with a quip about how that would be a bad thing to have circulating via YouTube. I’ll make the video available to anyone who asks…

Afternoon Sessions

I was on a panel for the first session. It was sort of an odd mix of folks with me, Mike Liddell from the DSCC, and Neil Hare from an outfit called ISupportThisMessage.com. Neil suggested that the web could supplant direct mail and should be considered for low dollar races. I don’t agree.

I think the Internet is certainly a cheaper means of reaching people, but everyone has their preferred means of contact. If your campaign calls me on the phone, I’m likely to hang up on you. Send me a piece of direct mail, and I’ll read every word. I probably won’t respond, but I will read it. Send me an e-mail, and I’m likely to act.

The best campaign should a) incorporate everything you do offline – whether it’s political, fundraising, polling, communications, or anything else; and b) use every available medium to reach you. The old adage was a voter should wake up and hear your name on the radio, turn on the TV and see you, drive past a billboard and see your face, hear your name from friends at the office water cooler, see a bumper sticker on the car ahead of you while driving home, and see you again on TV that night. The only thing that has changed in that mix is the Internet.

Those water cooler conversations have gone online and are now the blogs we read. The Internet is the focal point of word of mouth marketing in the world today. If you ignore it, you ignore the greatest marketing tool known to man.

The Internet also gives you the greatest advertising medium known to man because you can so carefully target your message. Why buy an ad in the local paper that relies on generic simplistic messages when you can move that ad online and target exactly the person you want to reach with exactly the message you want to deliver?

Need to reach people in precincts 415-421? Buy weather.com and accuweather.com for that zip code. You’ll probably spend about $30/M, and I can almost guarantee you will reach only the people who are in those precincts. Your creative can talk to them specifically about the local streets and the need for a speed hump.

That’s a capability that direct mail, television, and telemarketing (for the most part), do not offer. That doesn’t mean there is no place for other media.

The final session I attended largely repeated sentiments from the others. I sat in on a session on the “technology candidate”. Mike Connell, who I have worked with for several years, made the best point I heard at the conference.

I’m paraphrasing, but he said the one thing a candidate who gets technology really needs to do is surround himself with people who get technology. I could not agree more. There is nothing on earth as annoying as working for a guy who gets it, but knowing that almost everyone he has hired doesn’t.

If you understand the transformative power of the Internet in politics, one of the first questions you should ask any potential campaign manager or communications/political director is how they see the Internet playing a role in what they do. If they offer you platitudes about the Internet, and tell you how important it is, show them the door.

They should talk to you about integrating cell phones and PDAs into a walk program, making call and walk lists available via the web, being able to register people, and track the status of that registration to ensure it gets completed, and the importance of bloggers to both spread and amplify the campaign message as well as to attract and mobilize activists, hire them.

The “technology candidate” cannot continue to hire people who have no understanding of the capabilities of a modern campaign, and expect to be successful.

That’s the takeaway from POLC this year. The conference is going on today, and I may head over this afternoon. If I do, I’ll offer more thoughts later.

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Scott Cleland on Google’s Partisanship

Jan 30 2007 Published by under Net Neutrality, Politics, The Internet

Scott Cleland runs an outfit called NetCompetition.org that is opposed to Net Neutrality. He and I have crossed paths on the net neutrality debate and he’s a good guy – he’s also a solid Republican (in the fiscal conservative, responsible government way). On his company blog he took a look at Google’s plans to insinuate itself into the political discourse and to become the measure of what’s true and what isn’t in candidate debates.

Given the fact Google’s contributions to political candidates in the last election leaned Democrat by a ratio of 49 to 1, that thought should scare Republicans. At what point do Google’s “impartial” search results become nothing more than an indoctrination into liberal philosophy? What the Democrat says is true but the Republican lies. Is that how it will work?

At any rate, Scott has an interesting take.

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The GOP Online

Jan 23 2007 Published by under Bloggers, Congress, Elections, Politics, Republicans, The Internet

Hugh Hewitt has a post up at Townhall that comments on a Wall Street Journal piece bemoaning the GOP’s lack of prowess at online organizing. Both are amusing in that they have missed the target but hit the tree.

In 2004, I kept hearing that the Bush campaign’s online operation, and the GOP in general, was so far behind what Kerry, Dean, and the Democrats were doing that it was possible we would lose the election based solely on our Internet capability. This comment was repeated by many people. Among them was a widely respected internet consultant who is now giving wine tours of Italy or some such thing.

After the election, our online effort was awarded IPDI’s Golden Dot for the best national internet campaign and people spent a great deal of ink explaining how our “under the radar” operation was brilliant and powerful.

In other words, “We spent so much time telling people that the Democrats are winning, and then watched them get their ass handed to them, and had to come to terms with the fact that an online echo chamber is not necessarily a winning strategy.”

Even the examples they list from 2006 (Lieberman, Webb/Allen, Burns) are not about the Internet and any great or creative use for it.

Lieberman proved that a small piece of the Democrat party (let’s call it ‘the base’) can impact intra-party elections (let’s call them ‘primaries’), and ultimately have their voice trampled by the larger majority in a later election (let’s call them ‘general elections’). Wow! Those Internet activists are crafty! They have figured out a political system that existed for years before anyone owned a computer.

As for Allen and Burns, saying or doing stupid things in front of cameras is hardly news. Politicians do it every day. I’m amazed that half of Congress isn’t featured on YouTube for things that are twice as dumb as Allen’s and Burns’ mistakes. The fact that parties run empty suits simply because they have name ID or a good pedigree is not a surprise either. Neither the utterance of stupid comments nor the lack of gray matter would be of much consequence if the cameras weren’t rolling. There are more cameras now, but moving an offline story via the Internet still requires an offline story.

Al Gore has a reputation for saying and doing more dumb things on a daily basis than Dan Quayle was ever accused of. In 1996, I attended a rally in the South Valley of Albuquerque to heckle Gore. He had been told to come out and pander to the mostly Hispanic crowd by saying, “Muchos gracias,” as they applauded. Instead, he said, “Machismo Gracias”. Unfortunately, Gore was PYT (pre-YouTube) so he got a pass from the media that should have given him half the grief they gave Quayle.

Getting back to the article, Hugh’s first guess about the disparity in GOP versus the democrats was pretty close to the target.

Occupying the White House leaves certain political muscles undeveloped. The president gets all the attention he wants, even if it is unfavorable. It tends to make its inhabitants less hungry, or overconfident of their abilities to generate interest.

That’s sort of the problem, but not really. It has more to do with the GOP’s tactics as a result of what had been their majority status – not just the residency in the White House.

The GOP had begun to think, and largely still is thinking, like a mega-company. Large companies are obsessed with reputation and deathly afraid of doing anything that will damage that reputation. They move slowly, and awkwardly, because they constantly strive to avoid doing anything that might upset the apple cart.

The Democrats, as the minority, were willing to try new things. Think of them as the guerilla marketers. They would try off-beat or risky approaches to get attention. They knew they would trade some degree of seriousness to get seen. They were Burger King’s subservient chicken ad compared to the GOP’s McDonald’s. When was the last time McDonald’s did a risky campaign?

The second problem we have, as a party, is our tendency to take our cues from the national committees. We tend to look at things like ActBlue and ask, “why isn’t the RNC doing that?” That’s largely because the RNC has generally been a very effective institution. The Democrats, on the other hand, have looked at their party structure, their candidates, and their institutions and come to the conclusion the national committees are unable to find their ass with both hands and a flashlight.

I think that’s why the Democrats rallied behind Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy. The Democrats winning in 2006 had little to do with the 50-state strategy and more to do with Republicans defeating themselves – regardless of what the left blogosphere claims. If nothing else, though, at least Dean’s approach wasn’t a retread of past failed efforts.

The GOP sticks to the same playbook because it has usually been a winning playbook. Will it continue to be in 2008? I don’t know. Personally I believe we need to start engaging in the type of guerilla warfare and guerilla marketing that we’ll need if we’re going to overcome our minority status.

If we look at the 2006 elections as a fluke and assume we’ll be swept back in next year, and if we believe we can act like a majority and win, we’ll lose even more.

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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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Someone Else’s Rant Against Net Neutrality

Jan 08 2007 Published by under Congress, Legislation, Net Neutrality, The Internet

Forget just for a moment the fact that this guy looks like he recorded this on the set of Mel Gibson’s apartment in Conspiracy Theory. He does, however, make some valid points in a kooky, the-government-is-out-to-get-me kind of way.

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