• Update: Questions About McCain’s Tech Savvy Worry Bloggers on the Right.
• Update: Should Government Employees Blog?
• Vocus Webinar Explores Bridging the Gap between PR and Media. Hey, I think we know that guy!
• Science vs. Conservapedia: Science wins. Via How the World Works.
• RightOnline v Netroots Nation.
• McCain Campaign Uses Web Spider to Sting Obama. A flip, a flop, or an edit?
• The Republican National Committee (RNC) plans to sue CafePress for permitting vendors to sell unlicensed Republican merchandise. C.f. Wired’s coverage.
• House Leadership Moves to Silence Twittering Members. C.f. Let Our Congress Tweet and Is the House going to limit the free speech of its own members?
• McCain Says He’s Learning How To Use the Internet. C.f. John McCain explores the interweb.
• Insider’s Guide to Video and YouTube for Nonprofits. Frogloop chats with a nonprofit/activism specialist from YouTube, suggested by reader Karen Graham.
• Social Networking Stats: Facebook and LinkedIn Surging in US. Via Sarah Stirland.
• Harbinger of doom — or economic opportunity? “We are witnessing a vast, globally distributed increase in the number of people with access to the means to consume petroleum-based resources.”
• Campaign media could be so much more exciting. e.politics sez, more nudity!
• Uploading the War: A Pulitzer Problem? The continuing power of video from a war zone.
• How Revolutionary is Obama’s Anti-FISA Group? C.f. A Political Agitator Finds a Double-Edged Weapon.
• Clinton wields powerful e-mail list.
• The Cold Calls Behind Those Personal Letters to Congress.
• Helms was ahead of campaign curve.
• In an Iranian Image, a Missile Too Many. A Joe Flood suggestion.
• 8 video (advertising) myths debunked.
• Pakistan Marble Helps Taliban Stay in Business.
• Associated Press adapts to changing times — but in the right way?
• Flip-Flop Flap. On the ideological purism of bloggers.
• Bloggers v. editorial writers.
• Flickr groups for the Republican and Democratic conventions, via Steve Rhodes.
• The weird science of stock photography. Everywhere Girl as metaphor — visual AND societal (dude, whoa).
• How Russia’s baby-boosting policies are hurting the population. In this case, “hurt” isn’t a metaphor.
• The latest from JibJab, suggested by Emily Douce.
• How Obama is betting on vast, corporate-style voter outreach to win the White House.
• A survey of Obama in pencil, ink and paint shows artists are struggling to get the brother right.
• Is Obama Investing Massively in Field Organizing?
• The GOP, Online Politics, and Internet Regulation.
• On the profit potential of political blogs.
• Election portal watch: PBS launches Vote 2008.
• Search marketing is good for brands, says the company that stands to profit most from it.
• Parties Issue Dueling Iraq War Policy Videos Online.
• On the cheapening of outrage. “Outrage is supposed to be extreme anger about an extreme and dignity-damaging insult. It has instead become the quotidian autonomic emotional register of most species of political actors, including partisans, campaign operatives and pundits.” Via Salon.
• Thoughts on RNC Platform Website. C.f. GOP Asks Net For Advice, Paulites Answer the Call … and Answer, and Answer and Collaborative (and Polite) Platform Crafting.
• Three Tips: How to Harness the Power of Video for Nonprofits.
• United, Delta, American, Southwest…the Airlines Move in on Moveon.
• When The Man is One of Us. Jesse’s nuts — and so is everyone else.

– cpd

Wonder how the phrase “cut and run” popped up everywhere all at once during the Iraq War debate a few months back? Email talking point. Ever seen the Daily Show edit clips of a bunch of Republicans saying the exact same words in separate interviews all over cable news? Email talking points. Repeat ad nauseum and you get consistent wording across many media outlets, helping to ram home the party’s message even to casual viewers who barely pay attention to politics. Yet another reminder of how the ‘net infiltrates its way into every angle of the political process, often in ways that are invisible to outsiders.

– cpd

– cpd

MyBarackObama

MyBarackObama is a “walled garden” social network, meaning that it’s a campaign-specific site and not a public social network like MySpace or Facebook. Whether it’s an actual social network with cross-connections among users has been questioned, but it and its million+ members are clearly extremely useful to the campaign. The critical point is that the MyBO features give participating activists tools to organize in their own communities, for instance by throwing house parties and fundraising drives, BEFORE the campaign has begun to direct volunteer activities from above.

For instance, based on Chris and Judith’s presentation, it sounds as though MyBarackObama is most important in the period before the campaign has a chance to set up an official organization in an area, since it gives people an immediate outlet for their political enthusiasm. And when official campaign staff do create a presence in the area, MyBO provides them with an automatic pool of local helpers and a pool of data about online activity, making it easy to identify the all-important super-volunteers. Once the campaign is up and running in a given area, the professional staff will begin to direct more of the local volunteer activity, but even then MyBO usage does not appear to drop off significantly.

Organizing on Facebook

Of course, as we’ve covered many times before, relatively few political organizations will be able to set up a system like MyBarackObama, in part because of the difficulty of hitting critical mass and in part because of cost, so the Obama campaign’s outreach tactics for mass audience online social networks (Facebook, MySpace) are more likely to be useful as a model. Obama’s Facebook outreach breaks down into three elements:

• Profile page. The best known part of Obama’s Facebook outreach, his Page currently has 1.15 million “friends,” three times as many as any other Page (political or not). Critically, having a Page allows the campaign to mass-message its supporters, providing an email supplement/replacement whose messages are guaranteed to get through. And of course it’s a convenient catch-point, creating that initial supporter contact that the campaign can then leverage to encourage deeper levels of activism.
• Local groups. All through the primary election process, Obama field organizers were told to create LOCAL Facebook groups, which can actually grow very quickly from a small nucleus — Facebook Newsfeeds automatically promote the signup process, since your friends’ feeds are updated when you join a group. And again a local Facebook group is another email supplement/replacement for one-to-one or one-to-many organizing messages.
• Facebook Application The Obama Facebook App spreads campaign messages directly to supporters’ friends as they visit the supporter’s profile, greatly increasing distribution — like a badge or a button, but with constantly updated messaging from the campaign. So far, hundreds of thousands of people have installed the Obama App, and I’d be fascinated to know how many conversions have come directly from people seeing it on their friends’ sites.

MySpace

As anyone who’s used the two sites knows, MySpace pages allow much more customization than Facebook profiles, meaning that MySpace offers great flexibility to a political campaign. For instance, on MySpace it’s much easier to add obvious and easy email signup forms to ensnare supporters and to provide clear links back to important features on the main Obama campaign site.

It’s also relatively easy for individual MySpace users to add different features to their own profiles, and the Obama campaign has created a slew of buttons, badges and widgets to help them spread the word. Ultimately the campaign is trying to use each MySpace supporter’s profile page as a communications hub in that supporter’s own social circle, ginning up volunteers friend-to-friend.

The Obama campaign has also been active on other soc nets such as Black Planet, and in each case they adapt their approach to meet the particular rules, requirements and customs of that site. But despite impressive fundraising, the campaign’s resources are limited, and it would be difficult to have a robust presence in every place they would like.

Lessons

Though it’s good to see how a well-funded and well-organized campaign approaches online social networks, most political organizations won’t have to resources to do in-depth outreach and build a devoted cadre of super-activists — much less cultivate their own walled gardens. But as we’ve discussed before, providing supporters with the tools to promote a candidate or cause on their own is relatively simple — profile pages, badges, buttons and even widgets are easy to build (believe me, if e.politics can have a widget, anyone can). In other words, campaigns don’t have to dive right into the deep end — sometimes a dipping a toe or two into the pool of Facebook and MySpace fans will be enough.

– cpd

Of course Obama had to be officially offended, much as I’d rather he blew the whole thing off, but then we all know how sensitive politicians have to be to things that might appear ludicrous in the grand scheme (see: lapel pins, flag). But really, the fact that so many people have flipped out over this illustration tells us that the New Yorker really hit a nerve — in my life, it’s come up on two different email lists and one extended reply-to-all-among-friends discussion in a single day. So the New Yorker’s folks found an interesting seam in the culture, and they’re paying the price messengers usually pay for delivering awkward news (remember, even Dave Chappelle could only handle his own show for two seasons).

From liberal/progressives, I’m hearing a powerful fear that the New Yorker is feeding into a narrative that hurts Obama, which to me is a clear result of 2000 and 2004 — both years in which Democrats feel as though the White House was snatched from their grasp unfairly and/or inexplicably. In this case, it’s also unpleasantly mixed up with red/blue cultural issues, since I’ve heard the word “rube” come up more than once (in the condescending “those people will believe ANYTHING!” sense). And a poll on at least one conservative site suggests that there’s an audience out there that’s perfectly willing to take this image of Obama as fact (of course, there have also been plenty of people willing to spread Onion articles as fact). I’ll just suggest that anyone who really connects with this cover wasn’t too likely to vote for Barack Hussein Obama in any case, period.

As for free expression, I’m a pretty strict Voltairian — I may disagree with you, but I’m sure as hell going to do everything I can to make sure you can say what you think. Though a satirist always risks blowback, both from those who don’t get the joke and from some who do, when it comes to social criticism, I tend to follow what we might call the Joe Bob Briggs Doctrine: think of the social critic as a machine gun spraying fire across the cultural landscape, and “when a target screams, you’ve found the sacred cow. Then you go back and shoot it 20 more times” (see also: South Park). Sacred or not, this time somebody hit a whole herd. Let’s eat some (Irish) babies!

– cpd

I shot the short clip below with a FlipVideo Mino, which is smaller than my two-year-old Ipod and will hold an hour’s worth of web-quality video. Early Saturday evening I was walking up 18th Street in Adams Morgan (DC) and stopped off at Columbia Station to catch the end of a jazz set, which turned out to be a good test for the camera and microphone, since I was sitting on a partially covered patio in the bright outdoors and shooting into a much more dimly lit space inside. The results: one minute thirty of good music in a great setting.

Overall, the camera did pretty well — actually, better than the YouTube clip shows, since the YouTube upload/conversion/compression sequence distorted the visuals quite a bit, particularly in areas that are relatively dark and have low contrast (lots of compression artifacts around the musicians, for instance). Note how well the little critter adapted to changing light conditions when I panned out into the light.

The built-in microphone performed about as well as you’d hope for something small enough to fit in a camera like this, catching the highs pretty well and not letting background noise overwhelm the music. Even when run through my beloved 15-year-old massive 150-watt Infinity speakers, the bass is almost inaudible, but then small mikes are always going have a tough time with long wavelengths/low frequencies, and standup bass can hard to hear at the best of times. So far, success! Wish this thing had an audio input, though — a provision for standalone mikes could really help out with interviews and such.

Up next: off to Netroots Nation in Austin (mmmmmm, Shiner Bock) and the promise of video chats with online politics and blogosphere notables. I’ve had all my shots, and so should be safe in a convention center full of bloggers….

– cpd

I’ve been working on relatively small and short-lived advocacy sites for so long that I’d forgotten how much work goes into an actual organization site — more content always equals more features and more customization. You’re also talking about an organization’s public front, which they’ll live with for years, so every little bit matters. Next time I do one of these, which’ll be a while, we’re crankin’ up the rate…. For now, back to consulting — design work is fun, but man it’s a tough way to earn a living.

– cpd

And not even the Daily Show to keep us distracted — those lucky bastards took two full weeks off around the 4th of July holiday. Never fear: escape is close at hand, since the Daily Show site now hosts full episodes. And you have a good excuse to go, since the June 24th show featured a double-shot of online politics. The excitement starts around minute 8:40 with a look at John McCain’s online game Pork Invaders, and quickly moves on to some online gaming options the candidates haven’t taken, namely Fetus Pong and The Obama Universal Heath Care game, Yes We Cannon (see Jon running up the score below).

After the first commercial break, it’s time to deconstruct a new TV ad funded by our friends at MoveOn.org — or as Jon says, “brought to you by MoveOn.org — ten years of making even people who agree with you cringe.” Other highlights: a bizarre campaign ad for Texas Senator “Big” John Cornyn that’s perhaps a bit more Brokeback Mountain than intended, and a video tour of the Straight Talk Express (22-inch rims? Dayum!). Check it out.

– cpd

Articles

• Helping Your Videos Stand Out on YouTube
• Creating Effective Political Video for the Web
• Weaving Text and Video into a “YouTube Storyboard”
• Oh Nine, Eff Nine: Strategic Mnemonic and Protest Song for a New Medium.
• A Perfect Video Camera for Online Advocacy?
• Leveraging Real-World Actions for Online Exposure: Kleenex Gets Punk’d
• Presidential Campaigns Aren’t the Only Ones Using Online Video for Political Purposes
• Terrific Collection of Online Video Resources
• Viral Video Case Studies
• Using Online Video to Bypass Media Filters

– cpd

Want to get an idea of the REAL cost of social networking outreach, for instance? Eric recommends a certain company’s social networking return-on-investment calculator. Another example would be advertising — Google Ads or BlogAds may be a cheaper attention-getting tool than spending staff time trying to reach people online through more hands-on means. Video? Cheap to shoot, free to post, a serious pain to edit.

The same logic often applies when you’re building websites. For instance, open-source software such as the Joomla platform I’ve been using lately doesn’t cost anything to download and install, but it can be extremely time-consuming to get set up — and there’s no manual. Yes there’s documentation, but it’s sparse at best and written by tech nerds for whom English is rarely their first language, even if it theoretically is. I’ve spent hours digging around for solutions to what should be relatively simple problems, when if I’d bought any of several $100-$200 content management systems, I’d get a manual, an online product support forum run by the guys who built the software AND a tech support phone number. Maddening. Free is free, except when it ain’t — and if you’re planning a web technology or outreach project, be sure to count the REAL costs.

– cpd

– cpd

Note: dig the “jump to a scene” feature — drag the slider along and you can move quickly from one interview to the next (I’m the next-to-the-last one, Mom). I don’t remember seeing this feature before, but I’ve also never used the site Viddler, where this thing is hosted.

For a full list of interviewees, head on over here.

– cpd

• Update: Auto-replace as a political tool — with blowback.
• Did Google use its network of online services to silence critics of Barack Obama?
• Obama Network Organizes and Revolts Over Spying. Via Make Something Happen. C.f. When your organizers organize you and Telecom Amnesty Foes Lobby Obama Using Obama Tech.
• How Obama can lessen the intensity of the opposition.
• On the Web, Supporters of McCain Wage An Uphill Battle.
• McCain’s ‘Dr. No’ Web Video Meets With A Collective Shrug.
• Freedom’s Watch Hits Obama for Delay on MoveOn Statement.
• Canadian military defends the planet! At least someone’s learned from Tunguska.
• Scholar Looks for First Link in E-Mail Chain About Obama. Complete with an Obama E-Mail Timeline. C.f. In Flag City USA, False Obama Rumors Are Flying.
• Republicans Offer Online Lunchtime Chats To Answer Convention Questions.
• Netroots Nation Organizer Says McCain Welcome to Attend.
• Nonprofits Look for New Ways to Shape Campaign.
• Advocating for Obama on a Second Life community site. When I saw the site, there was a McCain ad on it — contextual advertising strikes again.
• In 2008 election, the Internet goes local, local, local.
• Fundraising is for the birds, let’s see some real action.
• Note this observation in a long piece on demographic changes and the political parties: “The trend generally bodes well for Democrats. Major metro areas are growing faster than the country as a whole, the party’s strength with young voters promises a lasting edge, and well-off, highly educated urban voters are valuable campaign contributors in the Internet age.”
• Army’s History of Iraq After Hussein Faults Pentagon. Released early on the website, natch.
• Looking at the Future of ‘E-Politics’. Let’s hope it involves tons of booze. But first, ePolitics: What’s happening right now?
• 10 SEO myths debunked.
• 9 widget myths debunked.
• Down to the Sea in Ships, and Then Some. You think YOU have an interesting life?
• Political Freelancers Use Web to Join the Attack. Via TechRepublican.
• Three Keys to Successful Online Campaigns.
• The Web Is Where It’s At for Youth Vote. Via PoliticsOnline.
• How to get Web 2.0 resourced at your organization.
• A look at Al-Qaeda’s Growing Online Offensive, while While Extremists in Tribal Areas Use Gory DVDs to Celebrate, and Exaggerate, Their Exploits.
• MySpace Teams With NBC To Continue Citizen Journalist Craze.
• CBS Finishes Acquisition Of CNET.
• Camping out in space. ISS crew gets a new tent and a cool soundtrack.
• Boss Hu avoids tricky questions in online chat. Via PoliticsOnline.
• ‘We don’t want to go to another friend’s funeral.’ Citizen activism — the kids get off my lawn for once, form local anti-drunk-driving Facebook Group.
• Learning from YouTube Masters. YouTube’s Steve Grove goes through online video Shao-Lin training.
• On luxury bottled water and the madness of crowds.
• Now, a REAL energy crisis: Fuel Prices Hurt Brothel Business.

– cpd

Cheap, Quick and (Sometimes) Dirty: Creating Integrated Online Campaigns Using Off-The-Shelf Parts

(Delivered at the DemocracyInAction Conference on June 26, 2008)

Featured Advocacy Websites

• Sportsmen for Responsible Energy Development
• We Are Wetlands

Overview Articles

• Online Politics 101. Introductory articles on a broad range of topics
• Free Online Political Advocacy Tools
• More Than Nerd-Cool: Online Collaboration Tools Have Political Uses

Blogs and Blogger Relations

• How Blogger Relations Differs from Traditional Media Relations
• Working with Local Bloggers
• How to Build Traffic to a Blog: Ten Tips
• Discussion: Spreading the Word About Your Issues in the Blogosphere
• Organization Blogs: What to Think About Before You Start One

Social Networking

• 42 MySpace Advocacy Tips — And Counting
• Facebook is Both Online Advocacy Tool and Online Advocacy Target
• What it Takes to do Effective Facebook and MySpace Advocacy
• Viral Marketing/MySpace Case Study
• Ten Commandments of MySpace Advocacy

Advertising/Promotion

• Getting the Most Out of Google Ads and Other Pay-Per-Click Advertising Campaigns
• The Presidential Campaigns Can Sell Your Issue! (Through Google Ads)
• Spreading Your Message in Wearable Form
• Dueling Political Advertising Models: Is Online Video Better than TV?
• Leveraging Earned Media for Your Online Campaign
• Tossing Emails into the Spin Blender

Video

• Helping Your Videos Stand Out on YouTube
• Creating Effective Political Video for the Web
• Weaving Text and Video into a “YouTube Storyboard”
• A Perfect Video Camera for Online Advocacy?
• Leveraging Real-World Actions for Online Exposure: Kleenex Gets Punk’d
• Presidential Campaigns Aren’t the Only Ones Using Online Video for Political Purposes
• Terrific Collection of Online Video Resources
• Viral Video Case Studies
• Using Online Video to Bypass Media Filters

Maps and Data

• Enlisting Google Earth in the Budget Earmarks War
• An Introduction to Using Google Earth for Political Advocacy
• Why Think Tanks and Nonprofits Should Be Thinking Like (New Media) Newsrooms
• Satellite Images Darfur Internet = Crowdsourced Human Rights Monitoring
• Google Earth as an Agent of Political Change in Bahrain
• Wired News: Web Mashups Turn Citizens Into Washington’s Newest Watchdogs
• Money Web: See Who’s Contributing to the Presidential Candidates, Social Network-Style
• Using Yahoo Maps to Fight Global Warming

Social Media/User-Generated Content

• Dueling Social Media Campaigns: Mitt Romney vs. the DSCC
• MoveOn Launches Radio Ad Contest
• Learning about Social Media from a Horny Manatee
• Resources for N-Ten Panel on Social/Participatory Media
• Dems Forming Distributed Online “Rapid Response” Team
• Making Your Supporters Part of the Story: Learning from Minnesota Public Radio

It was the first time I’ve seen that at a conference, and it was remarkably effective. Her projected image was much easier to see than she actually would have been on-stage, and the back-and-forth was quite natural. Of course, it was difficult for audience members to ask Edwards questions directly, but she could hear enough for the system to work. The audio did crap out at one point, but a quick “hang-up” and a new Skype call got things moving again.

Some highlights from the talk:

• Despite the success of online fundraising, most campaign money is still going to the same old expenses (i.e., TV), even if it’s raised over the internet.
• Internet presence must be coupled with real-world work — each feeds the other, with real-world activity helping to drive people to the web. Otherwise, you keep going back to the same pool of people over and over again.
• Connectivity limited the internets effectiveness in some early states such as South Carolina — not as many people were online in those states.
• Small donors and big donors will continue to coexist, with big money being particularly important helping to get a campaign started. I.e., small donors won’t entirely replace people who can write a large check.
• Will Obama’s army of supporters hold him accountable? His trick will be to turn his list into something that “provides muscle for him” in legislative battles. She hopes he’ll take the step of asking people to act rather than just donate.
• When asked how the next president should use the internet, she said that there’s no point in collecting political capital if you’re not going to spend it. Also transparency — government information is out there, but it’s too hard for people to get to. Government too often doesn’t make it easy enough for us to find information that should be public, from relatively mundane consumer information to vital access to the legislative process. Would better information lead to more involved citizens?
• Would like to see every agency have a plan to provide information to the public (certainly a step beyond a Freedom of Information Act request).
• When asked whether the “YouTube dynamic” makes it more likely for candidates to speak the truth, she was not so hopeful — even after Bill Clinton, we still had Elliot Spitzer. “Politicians aren’t as easy to train as we would like them to be,” at least when it comes to certain errors.
• About her role in crafting Obama’s health care policy going forward — she’s “delighted” to be able to continue to advocate for universal health care, and is open to different methods of getting there.
• She did not endorse Obama at the time her husband did because of a promise to Hillary Clinton to stay out of the race.
• She does not see an assured victory for Obama, though the current poll numbers certainly look good. But she’s learned the lesson of 2004 — Obama can expect a lot of incoming fire, whether from the McCain campaign or from outside individuals and groups. One particular burden on Obama will be to live up to the idea of change. For the Obama campaign, she recommends more small, personal discussions from the candidate to supplement his big speeches — more personal events might help to break down the perception that he’s different from “regular folks.”
• If you’re a celebrity, it’s difficult to generate a “real” social network on a site like Facebook — too many people want to glom on to you. Her daughter, for instance, has a private social network profile for her real friends and a public one for people who want to be “friends” with a daughter of John and Elizabeth Edwards.
• Update: John dropped in at the last second, spending some time on the floral-patterned couch in their living room. He felt that his campaign did some things online while, others not, but that the ‘net will “make an enormous difference in the Fall.” For example, Obama’s foregoing of public financing depends entirely on the ‘net, but it will also be used to motivate voters and volunteers.

– cpd

– cpd

– cpd

The primaries are dead; long live the primaries! Before we plunge into the inevitable frenzy of the Fall campaign season, let’s take a few minutes to draw some conclusions about the world of online politics from the candidates’ experiences in the race so far.

1. We’re in a social media world, whether you like it or not.

Before we crown Barack Obama the King of internet Politics, let’s ask him how he feels about all those Reverend Wright YouTube clips scattered at the base of his throne. Sure, the Democratic nominee-to-be benefited from the ‘net in significant and almost certainly decisive ways, but he also got kicked around plenty online. Just about every candidate suffered similarly, from the anti-Hillary “1984″ ad and the John Edwards haircut video to that great footage of Rudy Giuliani in a dress. By feeding true believers a steady diet of similar red meat, blogs and online discussion sites helped to spread these and other less-than-flattering tidbits far and wide, with the most “successful” ending up in endless rotation on cable news. Of course, for every “1984″ video, someone created a “Yes We Can” — the double-edged sword of social media.

The message is that candidates don’t control the discussion and neither do traditional media gatekeepers — both are competing with an army of amateurs. And with tens of millions of monkeys banging away on keyboards, it doesn’t take long for some true gems to float to the surface of the resulting sea of schlock. The trick for campaigns is to make it as easy as possible for online supporters to make a candidate or cause’s case in whatever online (and real-world) channels they use, while realizing that there’s always a chance that a candidate can be blindsided by a citizen creation (or inopportune supporter comment) and thrown off-message for days.

2. Video may be killer, but behind-the-scenes email is poison.

At least, if you’re Barack Obama and if that email is accusing you of being a muslim manchurian candidate. Video may have emerged as a powerfully persuasive online communications channel (not surprising considering the effectiveness of television), but don’t overlook the staying power of certain first-generation online tools, namely email. Email has helped candidates engage supporters and raise tons of money, and it’s been absolutely key in the process of mobilizing volunteers and voters. But it’s also sometimes been a river filled with boatloads of lies and distortion. Fighting the viral emails and the whisper campaigns has taken more time and resources than Obama would like, and it’s still unclear how many votes they’ll sway in the end.

3. Guess what: the internet can be a massive cash machine.

If there’s one thing that political professionals have paid attention to in 2008, it’s online fundraising. Money is a language these guys know how to speak, and when you start raising $60 million in a month, they start to notice. The really critical factor is how replicable online fundraising success seems to be. I.e., it’s not just Obama, since Hillary Clinton also raised sizable amounts online this season, as did Ron Paul. And once he sealed the Republican nomination, even John McCain started bringing in sums that in any other year would be more than respectable. Easy fundraising sites like ActBlue and Slatecard promise to extend online donations to candidates up and down the ladder, a phenomenon already common in the world of online advocacy — nonprofits of all sizes maintain email lists and social networking presences in order to raise money online.

4. Speaking of, online social networks are potent tools, but “walled gardens” are a more risky proposition.

Facebook and MySpace have been critical tools this political season, particularly for campus and other local organizers and as an email replacement. Interestingly, social media sites so far don’t seem to have been as effective as mass communications tools as some predicted — they generally seem to work best one-to-one or one-to-a-few. Once again, the onus is on campaigns to arm their supporters with the tools they need to persuade and motivate in the public social networking space, though campaigns can also create their own networks, so-called “walled garden” social sites.

Some analyses have pointed to the MyBarackObama feature as playing a role in Obama’s success, and it’s certainly true that hundreds of thousands of his supporters have created profiles in his campaign-centered network. I’d be curious to see how much more likely MyBarackObama members were to donate or to volunteer, particularly compared to email list members, numbers that should creep out eventually. But don’t forget that this season we’ve also seen evidence that custom social networks aren’t guaranteed to succeed: witness the quick implosion of John McCain’s original edition early in 2007 (critical mass is critical indeed!).

5. In any case, how you keep in touch is less important than THAT you keep in touch.

Email vs. social networks as an organizing tool? Who cares! Use whatever works in a given situation — just stay in touch. Email, Facebook, MySpace, RSS widgets, Twitter, blogs, text messages and YouTube all have their places, along with plenty of others I can’t remember right now. What matters is that campaigns and organizations actively stay in touch with their supporters to build relationships over time.

Once you’re communicating, the next mission is to get people motivated to act, either in the real world or online. As of now, Obama-style integrated communications/volunteer-management is relatively rare, but some CRM (customer/constituent/contact-relations management) systems are beginning to incorporate multiple-channel features, and these should become increasingly common over the next election cycle or two.

6. As for the results, can you say, cult of personali-tay?

Okay, bad joke but serious idea. One thing that’s absolutely fascinated me over the past year or so has been the internet’s role in the growth of standalone political followings. From Ron Paul to MoveOn to DailyKos, certain people and certain groups are using the ‘net to draw supporters together and keep them mobilized and active, often long after the campaign they originally joined to help is over. These movements have broadcast-world counterparts — Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Jon Stewart, Lou Dobbs — but the ‘net allows both consumers both action AND absorption, since a follower can DO something to help MoveOn or their candidate of choice rather than just listen and watch. Interaction builds loyalty — and staying power.

Still, most online followings will fade over time, just as any email activist list gradually dies off without an influx of new activists, but some (like MoveOn) will settle into being semi-permanent parts of the landscape. For an example of the longer-term effects, let’s say that Obama wins the presidency and serves a term or two. After that, will his personal fan base (maintained and solidified online) lend him a disproportionate voice in the politics of the following decades? “Like Mussolini, and Kennedy/I’m the cult of personality.”

What’s really fun is when one online cult leader runs head-on into another, as when Obama went around the top-level bloggers to pick off their readers directly this season. Disintermediating the would-be disintermediators!

7. The final lesson: the internet CAN really matter, but it doesn’t ALWAYS really matter — yet.

I agree with Mike Cornfield and Sarah Lai Stirland that without the internet, it’s very unlikely Barack Obama would be the Democratic nominee. But it’s also true that without the internet, John McCain almost certainly would be the Republican nominee — if the internet so overpowered other political considerations, Ron Paul ought to be standing in his place. The ‘net IS key to modern politics, if only because it’s so often the primary way of moving news and opinion these days. But it still isn’t the ONLY key, and it may never be — at least, not until we all have wifi chips implanted in our brains and join the hive-mind. Which at this rate should be just in time for the 2020 primary season…scheduled to begin early in 2016.

– cpd