With the PDF conference taking up a good chunk of next week and the July 4th weekend coming right after, the next couple of weeks aren’t an ideal time to drop a publication on an unsuspecting world. I’m assuming that I’ll put it out in roughly two weeks, which should be a relatively slow time in the political news world but still comes before DC disappears for August vacation. But now, off to PDF.

– cpd

This week’s example comes courtesy of the “Appalachian Trail” angle in the saga of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and his Argentinian “friend,” and it’s the Sierra Club that’s making the connection, in this case via an email to their membership promoting their Sierra Club Trails website. They want to help Gov. Sanford find the Appalachian Trail, which he seems to have lost, you see, and they need our help filling in the gaps in their trail guide…nice, even a social media angle! Despite the explosiveness of the underlying scandal, Sierra’s message is actually fairly tame all around. The only harsh note comes in a postscipt, in which we’re reminded not to forget our “(moral) compass” along the way — pretty tame compared with what Jon Stewart had to say.

BTW, “hiking the Appalachian Trail” would seem destined to become a political catchphrase, no?

– cpd

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First up, Personal Democracy Forum descends on Manhattan Monday and Tuesday, and I’m involved in two little chats there: “Email: Still the Killer App of Online Politics?” Monday afternoon, followed by “Local Campaigns After Obama: Tools and Tactics Turning Online Action Into Offline Results” the following day. Both should be great panels, and last I heard there were still a couple of spaces left for PDF, so be sure to take a look at the conference schedule and registration info. Note: I’ll be bailing out as soon as my Tuesday panel’s over so that I can get back to DC in time for the Hank III show at the 9:30 Club — would love to have you join me there, unless you have something against good music.

Next, when it’s August, you know what that means — let’s go to Pittsburgh! Well, if Netroots Nation is there, and it is. Though the exact times haven’t been scheduled as far as I know, our panel (which includes Judith Freeman, Scott Goodstein and me so far) has been accepted, so we’ll be rolling up into Steelers territory August 13-16. Our topic is “Scaling Obama: Applying the Lessons of 2008 to State and Local Campaigns” (which I did NOT steal from the PDF panel; it’s a case of parallel evolution), and seeing as both Scott and Judith saw the Obama outreach operation from the inside, it should be a fascinating discussion. In any case, if you’re at either PDF or NN, be sure to come up and say howdy.

– cpd

As the presidential race heated up, the internet grew from being the medium of a core group of political junkies to a gateway for millions of ordinary Americans to participate in the political process, donating odd amounts of their spare time to their candidate through online campaign tools. Obama’s campaign carefully designed its web site to maximize group collaboration, while at the same time giving individual volunteers tasks they could follow on their own schedules.

“Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency,” Sarah Lai Stirland, Wired.com, 11/4/2008

For all their zeal and the sophistication of the tools they had at hand, Obama’s supporters weren’t the only ones active online in 2008, nor was he the only candidate willing to trust ordinary people to carry his message. Ron Paul’s supporters made an early splash, swarming internet discussion groups and the comments sections of national news outlets. Plus, they raised tens of millions of dollars over the web, pushing the former Libertarian far ahead of his Republican rivals on that score in the last quarter of 2007. But Paul was a classic niche candidate, whose support would never spread far beyond a relatively narrow circle of activists, and his online prominence serves mainly as an example of the internet’s ability to amplify the collective voice of a small number of passionate people.

Regardless of how well they actually used it, every presidential candidate from Mitt Romney to Mike Gravel had a presence of some kind online, though none built anything as comprehensive as Obama’s. But even the best campaigns — including his — were doomed to be overshadowed at times by the voices of an unruly public. Despite their best efforts, the audience kept stealing the spotlight from the actors.

For instance, every serious candidate suffered from some piece of unflattering content spread online from person to person: McCain sang “Bomb, Bomb Iran,” Edwards had his two-minute hair-brushing episode, Clinton was greeted with children and flowers while landing “under sniper fire,” and a comparison of Mitt Romney’s past and current statements on abortion rights made for a fascinating study in contrast. Barack Obama was certainly not immune, particularly since his background set him up for persistent attempts to identify him as “other.”

In June, the alleged Obama “terrorist fist bump” went from viral to The View in just three days. Fortunately, the candidate was able to laugh it off, which was certainly not the case after the Rev. Wright videos went viral — another example of the unpredictable power of Web politics. More evidence: After wrapping up the nomination in June 2008, the Obama campaign launched an extensive Web site devoted solely to shooting down viral rumors and innuendo.

“Obama, The ‘Revolution’ in Online Politics — And What Happens Next,” Greg Mitchell, Huffington Post, 2/4/2009

That website launched for a good reason, since the most serious danger Barack Obama faced after he’d outlasted Hillary Clinton in the primaries was this: that he would become seen as alien in enough people’s eyes that his hopes of capturing the political middle would fail. “Change” candidates have a particular need to convince voters that they’re a safe choice, as Reagan’s experience in 1980 shows — he ran very close with Carter until the debates, which allowed him to convince enough Americans that he wasn’t a crazed bomb-thrower. This burden of reassurance is even heavier for someone young, and (especially) for a candidate identified as black.

The Reverend Wright videos were therefore a tremendous danger, though of course Obama never appeared in them himself — it was the association with radicalism (and with Radical Blackness) that mattered. But at least they set him up for his speech on race, one of the defining moments in his delicate assault on the American middle, and in that sense were a blessing in disguise. The Obama-is-a-Muslim emails were more insidious, since their effect had to be countered one-at-a-time rather than through a nationally televised speech, and the very act of denying them seemed to give them more credence in some people’s eyes. Even months into his presidency, a significant slice of Americans persisted in believing that Barack Obama was either a secret Muslim or had been lying about his religious faith in some way.

As the Macaca moment showed in 2006, unflattering content can spread particularly far and fast when it gets caught in a feedback loop involving citizen journalists, corporate media outlets and the campaigns themselves:

Early in the final Obama-McCain showdown, a leading campaign charge from the Democrats was that the Republican wanted to stay in Iraq “for 100 years.” What was the source for this? An amateur video of McCain making a remark to that effect at a small campaign gathering months earlier, spread widely on the Web — in the usual fashion, first by liberal bloggers, then by the Obama campaign itself. Soon it turned up frequently on network and cable TV shows and even in Democratic commercials.

“Obama, The ‘Revolution’ in Online Politics — And What Happens Next,” Greg Mitchell, Huffington Post, 2/4/2009

At times, the campaigns resembled ships on storm-toss’d seas, reeling from wave upon wave of words and images, occasionally buoyed up but more often all but drowned. The sheer volume of content that burst forth about the U.S. elections is astonishing, not least because of how much we have come to take it for granted. You don’t have to be very old to remember a completely different political environment.

The first political campaign I paid close attention to was in 1992, when I was right out of college and working in Texas politics. My information sources? The three major networks and PBS (plus CNN when I was around a tv that actually had cable) and the Austin American-Statesman. Maybe the New York Times when I bought it at a coffeeshop over the weekend. Once the Sunday morning news shows were over, that was essentially it for substantive political coverage until CNN’s Inside Politics the next day…

Now? Political junkies can check dozens or hundreds of news sources every hour, both corporate-owned and informal. Cable news and talk radio have expanded dramatically, and they’ve joined with hundreds of thousands of online news outlets, advocacy sites, political blogs, email lists, podcasts and vodcasts to bombard us with information to the point that the problem isn’t too little, but too much. From juicy scandals to the details of polling data and methodology, very few potential stories remain unexamined by somebody somewhere, and the biggest obstacle to a story’s breaking big isn’t the major-media filters but the difficulty of cutting through the cacophony and the clutter.

Of course this is obvious, but perhaps it’s so obvious that we tend to forget about it. Internet political professionals often concentrate our attention on the particular tools we use to get our messages out, but the real effect of the Internet and the electronics explosion of the last 15 years has been the immense deepening and broadening of the sea of information in which we now swim. Our biggest task is just to get noticed as we drift along.

“What We Can Learn About Online Politics From the 2006 Campaign,” Epolitics.com, 11/8/2006

Future candidates and causes will face this problem no less, and many will sink without a ripple for every one that sails triumphantly into harbor. For online communicators trying to navigate rough waters, the Obama campaign will serve as a beacon for years to come — both a model and a guide — and an example of the potential of technology to translate the enthusiasm of millions of people into decisive action in the real world.

A Crystal Ball is a Dangerous Toy

The Obama campaign leveraged all the tools of social media to give ordinary Americans access to resources usually reserved for professional campaign operatives. Compared with both his Democratic primary challengers and the McCain campaign, his operation was cycles ahead.

“The Social Pulpit: Barack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit,” Edelman Digital Public Affairs, January 2009

“Obama built largest recognizable brand faster than anyone in history, with his supporters feeling that they had influence on that brand.”

Michael Bassik, speaking at the 2009 South by Southwest Interactive conference

My friend Nate Wilcox likes to talk about the internet giving rise to a new form of machine politics, one built on distributed armies of online activists. The classic American political machine arose in the 19th century and was based locally, with each thriving when it could deliver government services and political patronage in exchange for votes in a given city or neighborhood.

In the broadcast era, after the rise of radio, television and direct mail, the urban political machines largely wilted away, and for a variety of reasons so did much of citizens’ direct involvement in the political process. By the 1990s, they weren’t seriously expected to participate substantively in politics at all, at least in most campaign professionals’ minds. A voter’s role began and ended on election day, and he or she was otherwise mostly just a target — of direct mail, pre-recorded phone calls, and an endless array of repetitive TV commercials.

The internet, though, is a different KIND of medium — back-and-forth rather than broadcast — and the rise of such a participatory public space has completely changed the political media ecology, opening new niches to be exploited in turn by new kinds of organizing entities. Nate’s 21st-century political machines would be a nimble breed, assembling to back a candidate or cause and maintaining influence to the extent that their supporters stay engaged, involved and active. Some campaigns would be ephemeral, others would endure, but in most cases their limiting resource would be time — not necessarily their own, since staff can be bought, but that of individual people willing to donate a piece of their lives to what they see as a greater good.

Here’s the thing: despite all the attention paid to the internet’s potential for political outreach, it’s an even better mobilizing tool. Television is still the best way to reach that great mass of potential voters who are NOT political junkies; it’s a road running straight toward the Holy Grail of American presidential politics, the Independent Voter. Not surprisingly, the Obama campaign spent the bulk of its budget on television advertising, even though the money came in online, because they knew that TV commercials remain the most efficient way to reach the uncommitted and uninvolved.

But note what those Obama ads did: besides reinforcing the necessary imagery for that day and locale, they also directed people to go to a website for more information. They were recruiting tools, not just messaging tools, and like radio ads, direct mail, phone calls and an afternoon knock on the door, they played their part in building Obama’s 13-million-member database.

Once people joined that list, as we’ve seen, each became an outpost — a nexus for organizing within a social circle. Elections are won at the water cooler, at the bar, at the dinner table, over the phone and in bed, and Obama’s supporters were primed to know the messages, know the strategy and understand the stakes every time his candidacy came up in conversation.

His online supporters were actually involved in what amounted to a carefully managed relationship with Barack Obama whether they realized it or not, one nurtured by a team of people whose lives revolved around that goal for almost two years. In the process, the Obama organization achieved both a scale and a level of effectiveness unlike any electoral campaign we’ve ever seen, and all because of one basic idea: that you can trust people to work on your behalf if you give them the tools and the training.

The campaign had the vision and the technology, while the activists provided the energy and the ceaseless work — they were Obama’s key resource, the fuel for his entire ship. As Republican strategist Mark McKinnon put it at a 2009 panel discussion, Obama (and Howard Dean before him) weren’t successful because they understood computers, they “were successful because they understood how to make technology harness the passion of their supporters.”

Stephen Geer, the Obama campaign’s email team leader, applied the pith of a veteran writer to the same dynamic: “You develop a strong connection with your supporters and you give them something to do about it.” The result, as the world now knows: an election victory for Barack Obama, a sea change in American politics and policy, and a model for online campaigners around the world. Not bad for some guy from Illinois with big ears and a funny name.

A Note About Sources

Where possible, I’ve linked to the relevant sources within the text of this series, and much of the material printed here derives from either the articles quoted or from other pieces listed in the Essential Reading. Members of Obama’s campaign staff were notoriously reluctant to comment until after the election, however, and much discussion of the campaign before November of 2008 was based on what outsiders could see or on the rare glimpses given to professional journalists along the way. A more complete version had to await the lifting of the gag rule, though the Obamans are still a tight-lipped bunch eight months after the election.

Much of the inside information on the campaign’s organizing model and internal structure, along with the extended discussion of email fundraising strategy, derives from talks given by Joe Rospars, Stephen Geer, Chris Hughes, Judith Freeman, Scott Goodstein and others at the 2008 Netroots Nation conference, the 2009 South by Southwest conference, the Politics Online conference, various DC-based post-election panels, and in particular RootsCamp ‘08 and other New Organizing Institute-sponsored events. Notes are available upon request, other than for hallway conversations and other moments strictly on background.

In This Series:

• Learning from Obama: Lessons for Online Communicators in 2009 and Beyond
• Learning from Obama’s Campaign Structure: How to Organize for Success
• Learning from Obama’s Online Outreach: How to Find and Build Support on the Internet
• Learning from Obama’s Volunteer Army: How to Put People to Work on Your Behalf
• Learning from Obama’s Financial Steamroller: How to Raise Money Online
• Learning from Obama: How to Move Forward
• Learning from the Obama Campaign: Essential Reading

– cpd

So, one of the pieces of the project I was working on this week (which is different from the project I was working on LAST week) was to put together a quick online advocacy strategy overview for a website I’m designing and spec’ing out (another company is building it in Drupal). It’s a two-page summary of conclusions from phone and email conversations that I’ve had with the client, and parts of it are specific to this organization’s resources and orientation.

Though it’s short, it might be a good enough model to help someone out there who has to plan an online outreach campaign but who’s completely lost about where to begin (hint: start with what you want to happen in the real world). At the client’s request, it also outlines a sequence in time as well as the usual list of tools, with check-in points after one month, three months, six months and a year.

Here’s the plan as a PDF; note that I pulled out any references to the organization or the issue along with some other random words, which gives it that timeless Mad Lib feel (particularly in the paragraph about online video…). If it helps, let me know. And if you need help putting it into practice, I got just the guy to help you out….

– cpd

– cpd

Alas, not all of those model ships themselves got the same full and complete treatment, and quite a few languished on the shelf with that last 10% remaining undone. One (big) motorized PT boat sat in the closet for years, never able to get its motors mounted and itself under way, though I had managed to glue a very nice 57mm anti-tank gun from some other kit to the foredeck, actually a reasonably historically accurate hack (not bad for a ten-year old) and even to scale.

But I digress — which is exactly the point. So remember that Obama article series? A friend wrote in on Friday to ask for a link to the concluding piece, promised since March or so, assuming that he just couldn’t find it. And of course he couldn’t find it because it’s sitting safely right here on my hard drive, reveling in its current status as my Unfinished Symphony — though at the moment it’s more of a minuet, or a haiku…perhaps a limerick, only without the rhyme. Anyway, we don’t want to leave that series with those last words unwritten, particularly with the PDF conference only a couple of weeks away now.

So I’ll make a deal with you: I’ll write it this week, if you all promise to read it. Not bad, eh? Your part’s the easy one…. So: draft (to myself) by Wednesday; final publication Thursday. On my honor. Now mush, doggie, mush!

– cpd

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The current fun has involved the combination of a new-to-me Content Management System on the one hand and standards-based design (in practice, Cascading Style Sheets) on the other — two things you’d think would be fairly bullet-proof 15-odd years after the Dawn of the Public Internet. You’d be wrong, of course, since no system run by human beings existing outside of the immediate personal orbit of Barack Obama will function in practice with anything resembling rational efficiency.

I’ve been using Drupal as a CMS, and it’s actually behaved in a much more civilized manner than some of its open-source colleagues have in the past (I’ve also built sites in Wordpress and Joomla recently). In fact, many of my initial problems came FROM my experience with other web-publishing methods, since I would often trip myself up with inherited assumptions that kept me from noticing that Drupal employed a more elegant approach and bypassed a common problem entirely. But each CMS inevitably comes with its own internal logic, with quirks often obscure and poorly documented (the downside of distributed software development), and Drupal of course drove me quite mad here and there.

CSS stylesheets also bring their own particular brand of hell, since they’re exceptionally powerful when everything works right — which no doubt has happened on the first try at least once somewhere on this fair, green Earth. In the real world, a combination of inevitable coding errors and the differing behavior of the two major (and several minor) web browsers means that it’s almost always impossible to avoid serious troubleshooting on any complex design. And when you turn me loose with Photoshop and a coupla six-packs, the results can be a true joy to build, I tell ya.

When your work product is a CMS template rather than a static page, too often the biggest problem is simply figuring out what’s causing a problem in the first place. I.e., why is the sidebar showing up on the wrong side of the page, or not at all? Is it because of a definition in the stylesheet? Or is it something in the CMS — often, a simple button pushed or not-pushed. Some problems start out hard and end up easy, but those are all too rare, and the ones that absolutely kill you usually seem trivial at first but end up fatally crippling some key feature of the site.

Small example: in the case of the project I’ve been finishing over the past couple of weeks (to go public shortly), a weird rendering issue that only appeared in Firefox forced me to change the way I was planning to handle the appearance and behavior of the sidebar navigation elements, a fairly major piece of the initial design. But that turned out to be a plus, since I only spent an hour trying to figure out what was wrong (you can waste an afternoon or more digging around in that rabbit hole) before bypassing it entirely with a different approach that actually turned out much better in the end.

Along the way, I went back again and again to the simplest of resources: a straightforward list of CSS elements and the possible values they can have. At first I’d Google it when I needed it, but for the past week or so the page has been open in a window on my desktop most of the time. It’s been absolutely essential, in part because my biggest problem when using CSS is figuring out whether I’ve made what amounts to a typing mistake or have committed a much more fundamental error in logic.

Like any computer-read language, the CSS-HTML combo has very little tolerance for bad grammar. For example, how many times have I used a “:” instead of a “;” and blown the whole thing up — hell, we could write a blues tune about it. Browsers are no more tolerant of lapses in (my) memory when rendering (my) code, and this kind of stuff will make you nuts: in some older versions of HTML you could use “clear=all” to solve a couple of problems, which trips me up when I’m trying to remember the modern conceptual equivalent, “clear:both.” (Exciting, eh? You can see why technologists get ALL the hot chicks).

That reference page didn’t just show the limitations, though — it also showed the possibilities, and several of the visual effects on the site derive from more-obscure CSS features I learned about in passing while trying to figure out why something else had blown up. The element list helped prevent and diagnose more problems than I can remember over the course of this site’s development, which in turn left so much more room for banging my head up against I’d REALLY done wrong — usually, to cause some element on the page to bump uglies with another. When that happens, if you’re lucky it’s caused by a simple bug, but too often it reflects a fundamental problem in the logic of your page layout.

This is not something you want to discover when your deadline is hours away, and that’s where crowdsourcing entirely saved my ass: Thursday afternoon, with a major site milestone due by the end of the next day, certain images in the content section on the front page started behaving badly, appearing in absolutely the wrong place. Of course, it was only in Firefox, only on the front page, and it occurred for reasons that some four or five hours of increasingly stab-in-the-dark experimentation could not turn up. It didn’t help that after a week of intense work on the site I was a little fried out; and with strippers and blow strictly off-limits by doctor’s order, coffee would only take me so far.

But I also couldn’t feel comfortable showing the project to the client with a problem like this unresolved, since who knows how it might look on a different computer or some obscure browser variant — it’s kind of hard to get informed approval when you’re not even sure what the other person is really seeing. Before turning to the shotgun method (i.e., shooting the computer to dispel the offending spirit), I decided to ping a very valuable backstop, an email list of several thousand online communications people of a progressive bent.

Right after lunch Friday, I cast my remaining bread upon the waters and begged for help figuring out what I’d done wrong. When it came, it came fast — within ten minutes, a guy named Paul Kittredge (whom I’ve never met in person that I recall) had not only diagnosed the problem, but I’d fixed it on the development site. Turns out I’d left an extra specification in a couple of secondary elements in a sidebar at some point in the development process, and they’d ended up clashing with the images when I built out the frontpage content section several days later.

I didn’t see the problem in part because I was paying attention to the wrong parts of the code, but the fact that the results showed up only in Firefox clouded things immensely, since the behavior was so weird that I wondered if I’d run afoul of some obscure browser rendering error. In fact, Firefox was actually applying the rules MORE strictly, while Internet Explorer would have let me get away with it entirely, that raging slut. The upshot — help arrived, problem solved, current site iteration approved, and the prospect of a weekend spent entirely AWAY from software and its discontents suddenly real, and welcome.

Thanks go out to friend-of-e.politics Ha-Hoa Hamano, who also sent over a partial solution several critical minutes after Paul (such are the cruelties of the race for technology) and to other folks who made suggestions of greater or lesser applicability. So now, with clients under control and the music bug soundly bitten, let’s see if we can get some writing done around here. For a change.

– cpd

What matters at the polls? The candidate, the message, and the moment: everything else just sets the stage. You can have every endorsement in the state, tons of money in the bank, a flashy online volunteer-mobilization center (see screen-capture below), the endless attention of political observers around the country — and still lose badly.

In this year’s Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary, Terry McAuliffe’s national prominence and fundraising prowess had one measurable outcome: he spent $90 for every vote he received, and no doubt made a lot of local television stations very happy in the process.

The political class in this country (the pros as well as the journalists, pundits and bloggers who follow them) tend to emphasize the mechanics when they talk about politics, I’m sure because it’s something that fascinates them (and me). But voters make choices based on a lot more than television ads, and in McAuliffe’s case they don’t seem to have wanted to take that package home. Like so many candidates before him (Phil Gramm in 1996, Hillary Clinton in 2008), he found that endorsements or a large starting bank balance don’t guarantee enough votes to win. And like Ron Paul a year or two ago, he found that a strong online organizing effort only works if you’re selling something that enough people want to buy.

A broader lesson for Republicans and others out of power — yes the mechanics matter, but having the right tools is no more important than having the right person with the right message at the right time. Build the tools, certainly, but build your base of strong candidates right along with ‘em. Smart politicians think years (decades?) ahead, because you never know when that opportunity will come.

[BTW, my apologies for the paucity of recent posts on e.politics -- the cat's been cryin' for her dinner, too, but I should have a couple of solid Drupal-based advocacy websites to show off shortly.]

– cpd

• An online hub (usually a website although it could be a MySpace profile, a Facebook fan page or a blog)
• Some way of keeping in touch with people (usually email though it could also be Twitter or a social network)
• Online outreach (everything from blogger relations to video to social networking)

The great thing about this idea is that it breaks online communications down by function, into a structure that’s easy to digest. People often get overwhelmed by the sheer number of communications options available online — paralyzed by the plethora of channels! But the tripod model puts the pieces in context without isolating them from each other, since each reinforces the other: online outreach sends people to the website, where they’re captured on an email list, which in turn keeps them involved in online outreach, and so on.

Once a campaign has the basics down (the website’s doing its job, the email list is up and running), outreach should be a natural extension, with the choice of tools being driven by an organization’s goals and capabilities. While a policy-driven campaign might benefit from publishing a blog, for instance, a group that’s more focused on media outreach might find blogger relations a good fit, and a campaign with a strong spokesperson could score a hit with online video. Just as long as the pieces work together…

– cpd

Pull out your earbuds and listen, DC — that distant rumble you hear is the sound of Rock and Roll, still echoing around Foggy Bottom and its environs after Friday night’s Burning Sensation show. Only one thing could put out a fire like that one: a flood of booze…which in turn washed up one very happy group of Tonic bartenders (sample quote — “you and your friends can come back ANY time you want”).

Thanks to all 120 people(!) who made it, and if you were somehow tied to a chair and unable to come, here are a few shots to show you what you missed (try the Picasa version if you’re anti-Facebook). Note in particular the massive black-lighting in the second set, washed out alas by the camera flash. Mmmmm, black light — feel those retinas smolder.

So, when will your next chance come to Feel The Burn? Only DC’s show-bookers know….

– cpd

– cpd

But overnight sites don’t have to be ugly or feature-poor, and for a good example check out the excellent piece Duane Raymond wrote this week about the experience of launching the 64 for Suu site, intended to drum up support for Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi, in just six days. Besides the time constraint, the planners also had to fly completely under-the-radar until launch, which made it hard to ask for help in public!

The site takes a social approach, encouraging visitors to leave 64-word messages in support of her either through the site or via Twitter, and is careful to feature text and video messages from politicians and celebrities (never hurts to have the pretty people on your side). The site is generally well-designed, particularly considering the time constraints, and the separate blog shares similar graphics for a good branding tie-in. All in all impressive, and Duane does a great job of explaining the strategic thinnking that drove the site’s planning and construction.

BTW, here’s another campaign site that caught my eye today, in this case via a video ad on washingtonpost.com — General Aviation Serves America, designed to fight new fees on light aircraft and featuring a video from actor and pilot Harrison Ford. Though it has a little more of a cookie-cutter feel than 64forSuu.org, it incorporates the right features (email signup, social networking links, video, a blog, and even text-message alerts) and definitely gets the job done. We’ll no doubt see endless numbers of smaller sites like these over the next few years; it wouldn’t surprise me if a few of them helped pay the mortgage on the ol’ e.politics bunker.

– cpd

“In response to Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court, mobile music site mSpot.com has pulled together a list of five (and certainly there are many more) ringtones that speak — or rather, sing — to the big news. The beauty of these ringtones is that mSpot.com allows you to edit up to 30 seconds of your favorite law-abiding tone — you don’t have to download what the carrier pre-selected.

“We went ahead and selected a few choice lyrics for you…”

• Daughter of Justice — The Undecided
  “We live in a world with so few answers, where is the justice that she seeks? Who will end this poverty?”
• Courthouse — Chris Isaak
  “People take their places, down at the courthouse / People stand in line to see you fall.”
• Ladies’ Choice — Zac Efron (from Hairspray)
  “…shop around little darlin’, I’ve got to be the Ladies’ Choice, Ladies’ Choice.”
• Judgement Day — Whitesnake
  “With only love to light the way.. on the road to judgement day”
• She’s the One — The Ramones
  “Yeah yeah she’s the one.. When I see her on the street, you know she makes my life complete”

————————————–

Hmmmm, not a bad start (the Whitesnake and Ramones tunes counter Zac Efron, if barely…), but let’s see if we can do better. How about one for the Republican talking points?

• She’s a Rebel — Green Day
  “She’s a rebel, She’s a saint, She’s the salt of the earth, And she’s dangerous”

Or one about Obama and identity politics?

• Black Dog — Led Zeppelin
  “All I ask for an’ all I pray, Steady rollin’ woman gonna come my way”

You’re next! Leave results in the comments…

– cpd

Update: We’re back in business after a relatively simple fix, but I’m still not sure what caused the underlying problem, which briefly made the site essentially unreadable. What were we saying about the glories of technology?

Update: Check out Henri Makembe’s related piece for a different angle on the topic.

Fascinating experience a few days ago — I got to do a presentation/discussion about online fundraising with a group of Democratic state-level staff, most in their 20s and 30s and most affiliated with state parties, state legislative caucuses and the like. The upshot: man, does it seem as though that world has changed since I worked for a member of the Texas Legislature in the early 1990s, and judging from this experience, we’re on the verge of a real explosion of online state-level U.S. politics.

In talking with these folks, it became obvious right away that the resources behind state-level organizations and candidates have expanded perhaps 10-fold since I was in that world, with a legislative campaign that might have cost $50,000 in my day now needing upwards of half a million dollars to be competitive — rising faster than the cost of health care! And since more money feeds more people, state-party organizations seem to have juiced up their staffs significantly over the same period.

Second, state-level staff seem eager to learn the lessons of Obama’s online fundraising, with the benefits of long-term list-building becoming obvious. Though many of the folks I spoke with were really just getting started in the online world, their questions focused on practical matters: mainly, how do we expand our fundraising, which almost always led to classic issues of list-building, list-maintenance and supporter-activation. Notably, plenty of their organizations are also already invested in blogger-relations and are including bloggers in their media outreach as a matter of course.

One thing that immediately became obvious were the differences between building a list for a party organization and for a candidate: candidates can follow the Obama model and rely at least in part on personality and charisma to attract followers, but it’s pretty hard to turn a state legislative caucus into a super-hero or a messiah. Campaigns also have the luxury of aiming for a definite end-date, which they can leverage to impose on their followers far more than an ongoing organization can usually risk. Party organizations are usually going to have focus much more on long-term list-development, and in that sense their position is more like that of a nonprofit or advocacy group than of a candidate.

Some great ideas for building supporter databases came up during the breakout discussions. For instance, besides the usual tactic of asking friendly organizations to promo your organization in their e-newsletters, people immediately warmed to the idea of developing and promo-ing content targeted to particular audiences (many already work with politicians who regularly contribute columns to political blogs). Example: education-funding issues are going to be big in the upcoming legislative session, so you prepare a column by your caucus chair and pitch it to the state teachers’ union newsletter, with of course a link back to your website.

Much of what we discussed, however, will be familiar to online communicators of any stripe:the need for websites to convert visitors into followers, the power of video to create a connection, the importance of delivering value of some kind to list members (”inside” information, emotional satisfaction, raw-meat partisanship), the usefulness of adapting content for many different channels, and the tendency of online outreach to be trench warfare more than blitzkrieg.

Looking ahead, these political staffers and their counterparts across the country seem likely to be taking up the Obama lessons in a big way in the coming years, at the very least because so many worked for, with or against his campaign in 2008. Should be fun to watch!

– cpd

– cpd

• Congratulations to Adam Conner and Tanya Tarr!
• 6 in 10 Twitter Users Jump Ship Within a Month.
• White House Reaches Out via E-Mail on Health-Care Reform.
• 2009 email fundraising and advocacy benchmark report released. C.f. Highlights from the 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study.
• Auto Buzz: Toyota Has Strongest Online Advocacy.
• Study Shows Social Media Releases Are Less Effective Than Traditional Press Releases, via Amanda Chapel.
• Be honest: We don’t want young voters. “Online politics is a big fat myth” (in Canada).
• Despite Tools, It’s About the Story.
• The day the bloggers won.
• House GOP using YouTube-based strategy against Dems in floor debate.
• The YouTube Confirmation: What Supreme Court shortlisters are saying when they think nobody is listening.
• BBC Twestion Time Takes Off with bbcqt hashtag: 3000 Tweets in one Hour.
• New York Congressional Campaign Used Rare Google Ad Tactic.
• Major Front in Va. Race Is Online: Candidates Court Facebook, Blogs in New Political Era.
• Tasteless tactics and the brands that use them (e.politics sad not to make the list).
• When Did Your County’s Jobs Disappear? An interactive map of vanishing employment across the country.
• Social Media Study Finds Most Nonprofits Have Presence on Facebook But Raising Little Money.
• Political strategists launch online ad network for issue advocacy.
• Scourge of political cyber-squatting.
• U.S. Department of Blogging: What the rest of the government can learn from the TSA.
• Little Brother Is Watching You.
• Funny Anti-Gay-Marriage Ad Sparks YouTube Revolt.
• LEGO Battleship Yamato Completed!. Now we’re talkin’ AWESOME.
• Social Networks For 2009 That Web Workers Need To Pay Attention To.
• Dissenter on Warming Expands His Campaign to the Web.
• If politics were more like the internet… that would be a good thing.
• Turkish TV Anchor Dons Blackface to Address Obama, Internet Responds.
• The YouTube Presidency (good piece, though e.politics grows weary of the construction “the [insert web 2.0 trend or website] presidency/election/revolution,” but not quite as weary as of the phrase “perfect storm,” which now stands in for “perfect inability to avoid cliche”).
• A Clinton Carnival of Prizes.
• Choosing A Database? Mistakes To Avoid.
• Corporations see need to respond to Twitter.
• How Technology Won the Presidency, Part I.
• Email Compliments For Nonprofits (from the corporate world).
• Twitter for Activism Tool VS Strategy Debate and A New Twitter Activism Guide.
• Broken bloggers (in the UK) meets Don’t write off blogging.
• Liberals swap Wii fun for online fluff (in Canada).
• New Journal: International Journal of E-Politics. The academics want to play on our turf!
• Is Part of the United States in the Third World? (via Brad Terrell).
• Meet the brands that ‘get’ Twitter.
• Downing Street website hosts petition calling for Gordon Brown to resign.
• Obama & Fundraising: Lets get real!
• Always consider the source….
• In Egypt, a blogger tries to spread ‘culture of disobedience’ among youths.
• Palin’s online army marches on.
• So, why should I care about Facebook? Choosing the Right Social Media and Web Tools for Your Organization.
• A Tweeter in the White House.
• Candidates utilize Facebook, blogs in a new political era.
• LabourList: a turnaround strategy?
• Twitterjacking’ — Identity Theft in 140 Characters or Less.
• 10 Things Every Nonprofit Should Know About Social Media and Online Communications.
• Feds Go Online to Brief Masses About Swine Flu.
• Facebook copies Twitter, opens API to developers.
• Older Users Help Facebook Grow.
• Liberal blogs vs. the Obama administration.
• Beating Somali Pirates at Their Own Game.
• 7 ways to get more out of your creative.
• Victory gardens and online advocacy.
• Mobile Advocacy and Fundraising: Live Blogging 2009 NTC.
• Oklahoma Man Arrested for Twittering Tea Party Death Threats.
• Online Video: Viral Isn’t Everything.
• Flash activists use social media to drum up support.
• All You Need to Know to Twitter, via A Loyal Reader (thanks Pops!).
• Barack Hussein Obama’s un-American mustard choice riles the blogosphere.
• MySpace to Drag SocNet Ad Spend Down 3%.
• The View from Stanford: Why Video Marketing and Email Marketing Make a Perfect Match.
• 10 Things Every Nonprofit Should Know About Social Media and Online Communications.
• Nuts and Bolts of Online Social Networking.
• Middle-Agers Help Hulu Grow 490% Tivo killing your television ads? Maybe you should look somewhere else.
• ‘Power Moms’ Comprise 20% of Online Population.
• How Changing a Button Increased a Site’s Annual Revenues by $300 Million, via Violet Bliss Dietz.
• 13 Essential Social-Media ‘Listening Tools.’
• April’s Top 50 Websites: SocNets, Swine Flu Top-of-Mind.
• China and Russia v. the US Grid! Or is it just hype?
• Big Ivan, The Tsar Bomba (”King of Bombs”). Now this is real AND freaky.
• Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face. Yes, it’s satire.
• Maps of the Seven Deadly Sins in the U.S., another Brad Terrell find.
• Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to peer into history. A beautifully layered story, with an unexpected coda.

– cpd