Even if you weren’t invited to the one-day gathering in New York City, you can watch online here, and continue to follow our blog, Facebook, and Twitter accounts for live updates on the developments. Additionally, while we’ll provide more details once they are available, here are three things you can expect that will emerge:

1. Timeline for Pages:

Since the introduction of Timeline at Facebook’s F8 conference in September, page managers have been eager to use this new platform to enhance their brands. According to Ad Age and other sources, Timeline for Pages will make its debut next week in New York. What does this mean for you?

Creative flexibility to tell your brand’s story.

Do you have Timeline? If you do, you know that it has wholly enriched the ability to tell your life story online. For politics, where a candidate’s story is everything, Timeline will turn Facebook into a destination where voters can find out not just what’s going on now with a politician, but the entire story that led them to run for office.

Need an example? Watch the Timeline video that Facebook released at F8, and replace the subject with a political candidate. You just watched a pretty decent biographical ad.

Also on the horizon: As Ad Age said, watch out for changes in the way that apps and tabs work. You might just see them integrated into Timeline pages the way that Open Graph apps are integrated into Timeline profiles.

2. Mobile advertising

In Facebook’s S4 statement filed with the SEC earlier last month in preparation for going public, a huge emphasis was placed on the importance of mobile advertising in Facebook’s business model. Next week, according to rumors, expect them to deliver on this potential by introducing a mobile ad platform that caters to their 425 million mobile users (not a typo).

What will this platform look like? There are few details available, but look for ads to exist within the newsfeed promoting existing social content. Also anticipate the importance of geo-location in targeting. Campaign Solutions has long innovated in the mobile advertising space, and we’re thrilled to apply this expertise to include Facebook’s capabilities. Imagine targeting only people at your rally with ads to like you on Facebook. It’s a brave new world.

3. Expect the unexpected

What’s a high-profile, invitation-only event without intrigue? Facebook’s culture of innovation continues to surprise us, and I expect at least one development that will dominate the tech press for at least a few days. What will it be? Comment below with your best conjecture.

Takeaway: Timeline and mobile advertising would be huge developments in the evolution of brand management on Facebook. One might even call them giant leaps forward (It’s a leap year, I’m here all week.) In any case, stay tuned to Campaign Solutions in the next week for updates on these developments and what they mean for political brand managers.

At the Fourth Annual Reed Awards, our team took home two awards — Best Online Targeting and Best Use of Display Advertising — for our work with Michele Bachmann’s Ames Straw Poll victory. The awards were presented by Campaigns & Elections and selected by a bi-partisan panel of the nation’s leading political professionals. We congratulate our advertising guru Eric Frenchman and the entire ad team, and look forward to the next tricks they have up their sleeves! We were also selected as finalists in the only other two categories in which we competed — Best Use of New Technology and Best Use of Social Networking Technology — for a Twitter campaign we designed with another client, Ending Spending. To review a complete list of winners from this years’ event or to learn more about the awards, please visit the Campaign & Elections’ website.

We had another exciting moment this week when ClickZ, an interactive marketing news publication, published an analysis of presidential ad spending in 2011 that cites our work with Michele Bachmann.

Wondering what online advertising could do for your campaign, organization, or initiative? Contact us today and let’s talk about the successes we could share.

Write a plan and stick to it!
Successful online fundraising takes careful thought and a realistic strategy. Those who raise the most money online have an aggressive plan that is carefully followed.

It should be easy to make a donation
A donation link should be prominently listed on every page so a person never has to search for where to complete a donation. Once a donor is on the donation page, the transaction should be one click from beginning to end. And remember to ALWAYS make sure the donation page works!

Always work on building your list
The email list you build internally will be the most successful fundraising email list you will ever use! Everyone on your staff should be working together to build your email list together. Your work is never done. Collect emails at every event, use the candidate/chairman, circulate petitions, etc.

Don’t burn out or ignore your list
The bulk of online funds will come through email fundraising. That is why it is critical to come up with a realistic schedule of communicating with your supporters. Email your list with a mix of special fundraising and non-fundraising appeals a few times per month. As you get closer to Election Day, the frequency increases.

Break through the clutter
With so much incoming email and online advertising, focus on coming up with creative subject lines that grab attention and ideas that can spread virally.

Use premiums as incentives
Donors love to get “exclusive” merchandise as a premium for a donation. Bumper stickers, lapel pins, autographed books, t-shirts and mugs will appeal to a wide variety of donors. Don’t be afraid to ask for a higher gift to receive a premium.

Utilize search engine advertising
This is a low-cost way to prospect and collect email addresses and donations for your organization. This type of prospecting virtually sustains itself and more often than not, turns a large profit.

Use social media
Use Facebook and Twitter to engage your supporters and convert them in to donors. You can utilize Facebook polls or petition functions to collect email addresses from supporters and email them with fundraising appeals. It is also important to include an ask for donations when you are running a special fundraising campaign around fundraising filing deadlines.

Use the Internet to lift results of your other fundraising efforts
Send email invitations and provide registration links for all events. Send lead or chase emails for all direct mail packages and telemarketing phone calls.

Finally, whatever amount you ask for, you will get
If you only ask for $5, donors will give you exactly $5. The average online donation is around $60. So when making an ask for an online donation, be specific and ask for amounts like $25, $50, $100, up to the maximum legal amount.

Numerous websites are protesting two bills facing Congress: SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate. While some websites went fully dark (Wikipedia, Buddy Roemer’s campaign site, among others) to demonstrate what the Internet could become if these bills pass in Congress, Facebook and Twitter are full of discussions covering this topic.

Google may have been the smartest site of all though with an online petition linked from their homepage along with a black box commonly seen on censored material on TV – an iconic symbol to make clear the company’s view on the anti-piracy legislation.

With an estimated 1 billion unique visitors per month, Google did exactly what any political campaign or group should do: they capitalized on a hot news issue and are capturing information from all petition signors. After the information is gathered, the subsequent interactions with the site are sometimes worth even more than the initial sign-up. For example, as long as an individual is on Google’s website, she likely will click around, possibly search the news on these bills, check Gmail and further build on her direct interaction with the search engine. This helps Google know the users’ habits to retarget ads — and it snowballs from there. Google does include a “how we use your information” blurb on the page so it is (mostly) clear where one’s information will go from the petition.

It’s worth nothing from a tech perspective that Wikipedia has a contact Congress tool on their English site (the foreign language sites appear to be operating normally with an informational blurb across the top of the page). They should have bug tested the tool a bit more though: after entering a Virginia zip code, the site displayed Delegate Eleanor Holmes-Norton (DC’s representative) along with Virginia’s Senators.

No one argues online piracy is a huge issue, particularly in the music and movie industries, and we are all in uncharted territory in regulating the Internet. The protests, petitions and discussion make one thing very clear though: there’s a very vocal online movement dissatisfied with PIPA and SOPA today.

In a critical election year, it will be interesting to watch the political ramifications of this online protest and public reaction. President Obama has stated he will not support the bills and there have been a number of defections already from House and Senate supporters on both sides of the aisle. Others are holding firm to their support. Will we end up seeing modified legislation with more bipartisan support? We don’t know.

Regardless of the politics, it’s an interesting situation to observe from a technological lens. It would be intriguing to know the numbers of how many signed Google’s petition, not to mention how many came from Facebook and Twitter discussions and track the resulting impact. Call it wishful thinking, but the power of the Internet is only growing stronger by the day. In summation: well done, Google.

For more information on SOPA and PIPA, check out Politico’s article.

Full disclosure: We acknowledge that we work with clients on both sides of this issue. We’re not writing today to take a stand on the issue – that’s just not our job – but to examine what’s obviously a hot topic in technological and political worlds today, and to look at the digital responses to it.

In the 3 weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses, a few members of the Campaign Solutions team packed up and headed out to Iowa to work with Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign to project images, video and stories of the 99 country tour online. It was an honor and a privilege to work along side a true consistent conservative candidate, an amazing Iowa and National team, and to spend time getting to know so many Iowans along the way. It was an unbelievable journey, filled with many laughs, numerous memories and 20 pizza ranches, but sometimes a story is best told by a photo- or in this case a video. Watch this video recap of the adventures along Michele Bachmann’s 99 county tour.

Jackie, a Senior Director at Connell Donatelli, is being honored for her innovative targeting and online advertising work on behalf of Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s historic, write-in victory. Jackie’s resume reads like a “who’s who” of high-profile statewide and national center-right campaigns including McCain-Palin 2008, California’s Prop. 8, California’s Prop. 19, Maine’s Yes on 1, The Republican National Committee, and scores of other major candidate and public affairs initiatives. Oh, and did I mention she’s only 27?

At 29, Jen is already a nationally recognized online fundraiser. She was a key player on the McCain-Palin online fundraising team that raised a record $100,000,000 online. Last cycle, Jen raised nearly $3 million for Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s successful reelection campaign and political action committee in only three months – more than any other Congressional campaign in the country! She also led the online fundraising efforts for Carly Fiorina’s U.S. Senate campaign in California, raising nearly $5 million online – over forty percent of the campaign’s overall fundraising haul.

So the streak of Rising Stars continues at the Campaign Solutions/Connell Donatelli family. Jackie and Jen join their colleagues Ryan Waite and me, along with two other Campaign Solutions alumni, bringing our total to 6 Rising Star awards in 6 years.

They’re refining them, testing them, communicating them. But politically speaking, what is a message? Or more importantly — what makes an effective message? Surprisingly, there’s no one definition of what a political message is although every consultant will tell you can’t survive without one.

First and foremost, campaign messages mustn’t be confused with campaign slogans or taglines. Your message defines your core argument and drives persuasion while a slogan just neatly encapsulates it in a more memorable fashion. It is not the message. A message can be more than one sentence, but shouldn’t be more than two to three.

I’ll offer this as my definition of a political message:

How did I come to this? My definition has four key parts — effective messages are emotional, values-based, targeted, and contrasting. Let’s look at each part.

Emotion
“The emotional quotient is key to helping ideas propagate and survive” says idea expert Chip Heath. That’s the most empirical explanation you’ll ever find. Everyone is fighting for voters attention. Voters will listen to and repeat only the messages they share an emotional connection with. People often forget the specifics of what you say but, they remember how you make them feel.

Values
Many campaign make a critical mistake — attempting to communicate their message by listing ideas, and not by sharing values that create common ground. A laundry list of issues and plans is not a message. A message is rooted in universal truths and ideas that people can use as tools to understand and relate to you. Values transcend confusion created by insufficient knowledge of issues, to evaluate plans or understand jargon. Value statements assign importance without explaining facts.

Targeting
Targeting has dual meaning. First, every message needs an audience. Know who you’re trying to persuade, instead of trying (in vain) to be everything to everyone. The second meaning is emphasis. Include just what is needed and omit the rest. For example, in just forty-five words, the founding fathers were able to articulate the bedrock principles of democracy in the First Amendment. It doesn’t take a whole jumble of words and flowery language to create something that’s effective. Sometimes the most important decision you’ll make is what you chose to leave out.

Contrast
The principle job of every campaign is to define a clear choice. For a campaign to be successful it’s message must demonstrate its distinctiveness from competitors or there’s no reason to select it over others. To achieve this, your message must first actually be different from your opponent’s; and second demonstrate the difference clearly, and memorably. Decide ahead of time on what ideas you want your voters to choose.

Whenever examining effective messages, I continuously revisit the challenge of clarity. A message that offers too many choices, too many contrasts, is just as ineffectual as one that offers no choice at all. Studies have proven that when people are over exposed to choices, paralysis prevails and choice demotivates. So be selective and win people on the terms most favorable to your campaign.

Does your campaign have a message or is it sneaking by with only a slogan? Can you define your message in 2-3 short sentences and know who it’s targeting? Is it values-based or just laundry-listing? Does it offer a clear, compelling, emotional choice?

If not, you should be asking yourself, “What is my message?”

Step 1: Go back and learn the lessons from last cycle.

Step 2: Read this Campaigns & Elections article from two of the best in the business – our own Jen Stolp and Eric Frenchman.

Find out the 5 lessons you need to learn before jumping into the world of political online fundraising.

Whether you choose to consume news from Fox’s “fair and balanced” reporting, head to CNN because it’s the “most trusted name in news,” or look elsewhere, you’ll probably agree with me that every journalist and media personality adds his or her own slant to coverage. But whether or not the majority of news coverage slants to the left or right is an entirely different story.

I’m on the side that believes there is a liberal bias in the media. Now I don’t go around blaming the “Lame Stream Media” for everything, but it does irk me that when George W. Bush fell off of his bike it made headlines for days, but Barack Obama said there were 57 states and news outlets didn’t bat an eyelash! Still examples like this do not prove anything.

However, a little background on one very influential man brings into question the fairness of the news reported by the majority of the mainstream media. That man is George Soros. You probably already know that Soros gave National Public Radio $1.8 million and spent $27 million trying to defeat George W. Bush in 2004. But did you know that he has ties, both financial and personal, to more than 30 major news organizations?

According to the FoxNews.com report, Soros has given more than $48 million to various media organizations. And his ties are much deeper than ABC, NBC and the New York Times. He’s spent money to develop journalism schools! In fact, the level of funding George Soros has provided the media is so complex that it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint an exact number.

I’ll let you come to your own conclusions. But next time you’re looking for news, keep George Soros in the back of your mind.

In public opinion polls, as a constant media presence, and on NBC’s The Apprentice, Trump seems to have been cornering the media with talk about his future political prospects. In fact, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that Trump is ‘trumping’ the GOP field in media attention. In the last week of April, voters reported seeing or hearing more media coverage about Donald Trump than the entire Republican field combined. As cited by Pew: “Trump is standing out in a contest that has yet to draw much public interest or media coverage.”

Several national opinion polls taken during April focused in on Trump, demonstrating that the public was seriously considering him as a contender for the Republican nomination. That was in spite of the repeated barrages of dismissive pundit ramblings struggling to downplay his prospects at the time. In a field of contenders that (depending on whose counting) includes close to a dozen candidates, Trump was the one standing out without ever being a declared candidate.

His popularity rise had a lot to do with the fact that Trump, a master of modern media, was doing everything and anything he could to engage in relevant debate with direct, frank communication tactics with the American people.

Now, with the news that he’s not planning to run for president, what does this mean for other candidates?

At their core, elections are about choices. And choices are defined by contrasts. Regardless of your opinions of Trump, one thing is certain; with every single comment, he painted a clear difference between himself and the status quo. He wasted no time linking every problem to its cause and reminding people in no uncertain terms how he’s the polar opposite. The result was that people understood his positions; they were identifying, and responding. The choices were clear.

Tough talk and transparent opinions helped Trump appeal to voters that desperately want change. Republican primary voters are close to revolt over what they’re seeing in Washington, and the Obama administration has them steaming over bailouts, healthcare, spending and deficits. His clear positions on hot issues are engaging their support by eliminating ambiguity. While you may question where others stand, Trump’s position has been crystal clear in comparison.

What’s shocking has been the relative absence of other messengers countering Trump’s rapid rise. The same polls that have showed Trump surging also reveal a mostly tuned out electorate. More than half of the people Pew surveyed “could not name anyone when asked which GOP candidate they have been hearing the most about.”

But just last week, a poll emerged telegraphing the first Trump slip, sliding behind more known quantities like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, though Huckabee himself has also stepped out of the ring. It’s a reminder that short term popularity doesn’t always translate into long term gains. In the end, voters have to like what they find to stay on board.

Donald Trump’s short, energetic rise is a lesson to all candidates in the power of effective communication. While Trump’s competition avoided sharp distinctions between themselves, Obama and the status quo, Trump did the opposite. The result was a rapid increase in popularity, buzz, and support.

Elections are about contrast and explaining clear choices for voters. Voters will gravitate towards candidates who communicate clearly defined differences.

Does your campaign offer a clearly defined choice? If it does, it could be your ‘Trump card’ on Election Day.