In the meantime, check out the pictures from the trip, which covered most of the length of Armenia and took us within a few dozen miles of the Iranian border (one funny sight — a couple of bar/strip joint/party clubs out in the middle of nowhere, basically tourist traps for Iranian men eager to get out and have A Good Time). In all of four days, we put more than 500 miles on the car…many of them as much vertical as horizontal, as you’ll see in photos like this one.

Also, the slides I used as the outline of each talk (we held four, in three different towns) are below — “social media for practical journalists”. Take a look, and let me know if you have questions.

[One funny note: I included a picture of Albert the cat in a couple of places, something that makes American audiences laugh, b/c the cat-focused nature on digital communications is a running joke over here. In Armenia, not so much -- people just looked slightly puzzled. Cultural gulfs kill jokes...though we kept 'em engaged, nonetheless. In any case, I'd go back in a second. It's an amazing country.]

– cpd

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[Presentation] Now Online: ‘Social Media for Practical Journalists’
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Exciting times in the e.politics bunker: I’m heading to the ancient country of Armenia on Wednesday, to lead a series of social media trainings for local journalists. Wow! Armenia’s one of those places I’d heard of for years (in the Middle Ages, it was a border area between the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire and its Islamic successors), but I never figured I’d actually end up there. Layers of history? Sign me up!

The trip was organized through the U.S. embassy there, which brings in a couple of speakers a year as part of its public outreach. I’ll be talking with journalists in three smaller cities, aiming to help them use Facebook, Twitter et al to develop stories and promote their work. In the process, I’ll get to see a big slice of the country — the trip starts in the Armenian capital, but we’ll drive a few hours south on the first day. Very cool.

Epolitics.com may have to take another short break in the meantime, but we’ll see — hours in the passenger seat may just yield some writing (plus, I’m DEFINITELY bringing a camera). In any case, the trip is all because of this site, and by extension because of you — you guys keep Epolitics.com going by reading it, contributing guest articles and spreading the word. Thank you!

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News: Heading to Armenia Wednesday
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Yes, that’s a Blue State Digital mobile search ad, running on search results for NGPVAN’s name and making a direct pitch to NGP’s customers. The mobile angle’s particularly devious: if someone’s looking for NGPVAN on a cell phone, it’s quite likely that they’re doing so for the same reason I was…they’re on their way to a meeting there.

Now, running search ads on a competitor’s name is nothing new in the business world — or the political one. But this example is still pretty brazen, particularly the direct pitch to NGPVAN’s existing or prospective customers. So, who in the political space will next jump into this new gladiatorial arena? My prediction: food fight!!!

– cpd

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Blue State Digital Tries to Seduce NGPVAN Customers via Mobile Search Ads
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We’ve talked about the personal nature of mobile communications on Epolitics.com before, but mainly in the context of sending text messages. Shannon expands that to other forms of communications, including advertising, and you might make a similar argument for Twitter messages consumed on a cellphone (though in that case, Twitter’s particularities as a medium might override the broader characteristics of mobile comms in general). The more-personal relationship we have with our mobile critters goes a long way toward explaining why mobile communications can have such immediacy…and why a communicator who intrudes on that circle in a way that’s perceived to be inappropriate can face blowback.

– cpd

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Why Your Cellphone is Like Your Toothbrush
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At CampaignTech last week, former Obama analytics guru Amelia Showalter used a great definition for “Big Data”, something that cuts through the bullsh*t to get to the heart of what we’re talking about. In her eyes, data is all about listening to people. Ideally, if we were trying to find out what would motivate customers (for a brand) or political supporters (for a campaign), we’d ask them one-on-one what they care about. But that’s not always practical, so we use data as a stand-in.

Sometimes we’re talking about data from polling or focus groups, where we’re using a small sample of our target population to get a sense of what the larger group is thinking. Other times we’ll use direct information: where do they live? What primary elections have they voted in? What campaigns have they donated to? What answers did they give to a canvasser’s questions? If they’re already on our list, where did they come from (i.e., through what channel did they join)? Which emails are they opening? What action links are motivating them to respond? Which website stories are they reading? Which are they ignoring? Which social media posts are they sharing, and which are falling flat? All of these data points are proxies for the bigger questions: what do people think? What do they want? What can we do to fire them up and get them moving?

Of course, the danger is that the data becomes more important to us — more “real” in some sense — than the people whose activities and interests we’re trying to use it to measure. This can lead to bad decisions, particularly if the data isn’t as representative as we think (one of the oldest ideas in computer science = garbage in, garbage out). As former Obama data manager Ethan Roeder said in the CampaignTech panel I moderated, “no targeting model is as good as asking someone how they feel.” And listening — really listening — to the response.

– cpd

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‘Big Data’? It’s Really Just About Listening to People
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DC votes today for a new at-large city councilmember — hooray for voting! And hooray for sophisticated digital tactics, which are moving down-ballot fast, judging from this race, at least.

First, advertising — around the time that early voting started, I saw ads for candidate Matt Frumin everywhere online. I spotted one first on Epolitics.com; it’s embedded to the right. After that, I noticed them on Slate.com and other sites — clearly I was geo-targeted the first time and either geo-targeted or cookie-retargeted (from visiting Frumin’s site) thereafter.

The ads led to an engagement-oriented landing page on Frumin’s site, which was run through NationBuilder (note the Facebook here’s-who-Likes-Frumin panel to the right).

I might have wrapped the text around that candidate photo and moved the email signup form higher on the page, but it’s a solid product as-is. And, the site echoes the look and feel of his direct mail print pieces, of which I have received a few. Still, as the Post article linked above notes,

But despite his aggressive print and online advertising campaign, Frumin said it has been a challenge to raise his profile citywide.

Welcome to running city-wide from a far-Northwest power base, my friend! At least Frumin has a lower hill to climb than repeat candidate Patrick Mara, a Republican who supported Mitt Romney in November in a city that went 90% for Obama. It’s a special election, though, and very few people had taken advantage of early voting as of this weekend, meaning that a candidate able to pull a core group of supporters to the polls has chance. Mara’s answer? Data, according to the City Paper:

Mara says he’s learned from his failed runs in 2008 and 2011 how to put together a data-driven campaign that clearly identifies his supporters and focuses its attention on making sure they vote. In an interview last week, Mara said his campaign has already identified 10,000 of his voters, compared to only 6,000 his 2011 campaign had identified at a similar junction.

This race isn’t Mara’s first experience with digital campaigning; back in 2009 Epolitics.com noted his use of targeted Facebook ads to recruit volunteers in an earlier race. Still, it’s a big jump from identifying a supporter (note: a potential supporter) and persuading him or her to show and vote. And as a City Paper commenter noted, trying to cherry-pick supporters via data analysis can be a sign that a candidate can’t get broader backing:

A DATA DRIVEN CAMPAIGN IS CODE FOR I NEED ANOTHER WAY TO WIN BECAUSE I CAN’T WIN BY GOING TO AN ANACOSTIA OR DEANWOOD CHURCH ON A SUNDAY MORNING AND SWAYING AUNT GERTIE AND/OR UNCLE JO-JO TO VOTE FOR ME!

I.e., Mara needs to rely on data to find his handful of conservative/white voters because he can’t make a case in majority-black parts of town. Zang! In any case, we’ll know the results by tonight.

BTW, as of yesterday, I’d received four direct mail pieces from Mara, three from Frumin and one from Elissa Silverstein…they like me! They really like me!

– cpd

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DC City Council Candidates Using Online Ads and Data Analysis to Win Today
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Just as in 2008, when the campaign saw over a billion minutes of video viewing, Obama’s staff also posted a slew of individual video clips, often several per day, and often designed to deliver a targeted message to a specific audience of voters…or campaign volunteers.

While on-stage, Benny predicted a decline in campaign videos, because he saw the viral-wannabe video idea as becoming played-out in the political space. He may be right when talking about videos designed to break out and get a wide viewership, but that’s not the only way sophisticated campaigns USE video. Smart candidates and organizers do what Obama did and what many other advocacy and electoral campaigns are doing right now: create videos that are designed for a specific and concrete purpose, whether it’s to motivate a donor, train a volunteer, or deliver a message aimed at a niche audience. Campaign video ain’t going away anytime soon…at least, I sure as hell don’t see it happening.

– cpd

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Obama 2012: 300 Million YouTube Views to Romney’s 30 Million
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Today, though, it’s time for the CampaignTech conference, where I’m busy picking up notes and other tips for future articles. Plus schmoozing, natch. If you’re at the conference, be sure to come by our 9 AM session tomorrow morning — we’ll be talking about applying 2012 lessons moving forward, in a session called “How to Act Like Obama Online When You Don’t Have a Billion in the Bank.” We’ll have veterans of Obama 2008 and 2012, plus folks who’ve worked on scads of congressional and state campaigns, and I’m looking forward to a great conversation. Hope you can make it! If the tech gods allow, we’ll have video to post afterwards.

– cpd

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Greetings from #CampaignTech!
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I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek, since you’d expect it to be obvious when someone sent “poo” when they meant “ppo”, but you never know…some folks have no sense of humor. Or proportion. For an idea of what CAN go wrong, check out more from the ever-amusing “Damn You Autocorrect” site.

– cpd

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Quick Thought: How Soon Before ‘Autocorrect’ Causes a Political Scandal?
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For a long time, when people stood up for a cause and weren’t all physically standing shoulder to shoulder, the size of their impact wasn’t immediately apparent. But today, we can see the spread of an idea online in greater detail than ever before.

The passion may have been spontaneous, but the activism wasn’t — well, not entirely. The Human Rights Campaign in particular worked hard to mobilize support online, as this short Mashable overview of its online outreach strategy shows. As for results, while the Supreme Court is essentially immune to online outreach, the broader public isn’t — and these activists were targeting a much bigger court, that of public opinion. For details on who got involved and what they did, check out Rad Campaign’s excellent infographic after the break (click for a larger version).

– cpd

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How the Internet Rallied to Support Marriage Equality
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– cpd

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New Site Tagline?
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A simple question, for sure, but one with an answer that’s straightforward at one level and complex at others. I’d argue that digital strategy is — at heart — the fine art of figuring out the best way (or ways) to get there from here. I.e., it’s the process of sifting through the huge array of available tools, tactics, techniques and channels to find the ones that are the most likely to help an organization, company or campaign reach its goals, both short- and long-term. But strategy is just the start: the success is in the execution…and in adapting to a constantly changing landscape.

Let’s look at a few of the many factors that play into a digital strategy:

1. Goals

Just what is your organization, company or campaign trying to DO? Pass a bill? Stop a pipeline? Sell a product? Elect a candidate? The strategies that make sense for you will likely differ in each case and may change over time as well. Know your goals before you start your strategy — it’s a simple rule, but one too-often ignored.

2. Resources

Once you’ve clearly identified your goals, you know where you want to go. The next step? Knowing where you’re starting from.

What are your strengths and weaknesses? Are you a big organization with deep pockets, or a scrappy start-up? Do you have nerdy issue experts who can put out the best analyses in the business, or a charismatic spokesperson who does well on camera? Can you rely on a legion of fired-up volunteers, or are you building support one contact at a time? You’ll rely on different approaches in each case…and choosing the wrong one(s) can lead to quick failure.

Weaknesses matter too. Are you big and unwieldy? Small and cash-poor? Rich in enthusiasm but short on expertise? In the electoral world, are you a scandal-wracked incumbent, or an unknown challenger? Strengths and weaknesses both play into the strategic equation, since you’ll need to choose a path that leverages the former and works around the latter.

3. The Landscape

The ground you’re crossing matters, too. Do you have a base of support just waiting to be mobilized? Or, are you starting from scratch and trying to get the public (and the appropriate decision-makers) to notice you at all? What about your opposition? Is it strong and organized or confused and chaotic? Or, is public apathy your biggest enemy?

Next, the big picture. Are large external events driving the discussion around your issue or product, or are you trying to spark a conversation that doesn’t yet exist? Are there resources out there waiting for you to claim them, or are you stuck with what you have for the foreseeable future? Are you able to leverage coalitions or corporate partners, or are you out there on your own? In a grand sense, are you rolling a rock up a big hill, or are you being pushed by the breath of angels straight to your goal?

4. Time

Time matters plenty, particularly in online organizing: many strategies take months or years to implement, while others hold the potential for quick results. For instance, if you’re trying to elect a Senator two years from now, you have time to build an email list and a social media following and to convert those people into real-world donors and door-knockers. If you’re an outside group dumping money into that Senate race two weeks before the primary, advertising — online and off — is one of the few things that that will be able to have an effect.

Devising a Strategy

Once you know where you are, where you’re going and the ground you need to cross, you can start devising a real communications strategy, digital or otherwise. Along the way, you’ll need to identify the tools, tactics and techniques that you need to use, along with the interim goals that will help advance your ultimate ends. And, you’ll need measures of success to help you see how well you’re doing.

Turning Strategy into Action

Here’s where where the rubber meets the road, where strategy gets specific: strategy’s important, but unless it translates into concrete steps to get you where you’re going, it’s not doing you much good. Depending your specific strategy, you may be building your email list, converting social media followers into donors and volunteers, reaching the journalists, bloggers and other opinion-leaders who set the public debate, hiring a good lobbyist, creating a destination website, advertising to the right audience, meeting with the right Congressmembers, building the right partnerships…or any of approximately a zillion potential steps to help you to reach your goals.

As we alluded to earlier, online communications strategy may be easy in concept (let’s get there from here!) but it’s far trickier in the application. And as the old military aphorism says, no plan — no matter how good — survives contact with the enemy, and you’ll need to adjust your strategy to match circumstances that will almost inevitably change.

If you have questions about your OWN strategy, let’s talk. I might just be able to help you get there from here.

– cpd

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What IS Digital Strategy?
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– cpd

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The Return of Comments, and Other Tech Upgrades
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– cpd

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Victory is Ours!
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Email Marketers: Are You in Spam Jail with Gmail & Hotmail? (And How to Bust Out)

By PowerThru Consulting

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been seeing more and more PowerThru clients reporting some version of trouble getting mail delivered to Gmail, Hotmail, or both.

The problems range from the relatively benign – 1-3% of the list not getting email that they should — to the extreme, where up to 90% of all Gmail messages are not delivered. We’ve also talked to several spam and deliverability experts, and I’m personally indebted to Brett Schenker at Salsalabs for patiently talking me through some tense moments and bringing me up to speed on all this. If you haven’t read his posts about deliverability over at Salsa Commons in the last year, it’s worth a look.

We’re putting up this post because, based on research we’ve done with our biggest clients (lists over 100,000 records) suggest both some simple technical fixes, and also a mindset shift around how we think about our online lists, and the strategies for growing our audience.

The underlying principle is to treat your email program like a library that needs a curator, instead of a newspaper that needs to get published daily.

In the newspaper model — we try and publish the best stuff we can every day (good writing, nice images, well designed templates) and trust that a decent percentage of people will pick it up and interact if we do that well. But in the new paradigm, we can’t assume that everyone wants to read the same paper every day — we have to treat each member like a beautiful unique snowflake and respond to their interests as expressed by which emails they open, read and act on. In the new paradigm, we suffer a consequence for putting out news that people don’t read and act on. So even if you’re certain you’re publishing the New York Times every day – great writing, amazing photos, solid design — if nobody buys it at the newsstand, you don’t just fail to get the customer — you get banned from distributing your news to 20-30% of all readers.

So instead, think of your job as being a curator. You have all this information, but you’re not just going to shove it at anyone who walks in the door. Instead, you want to direct people to the specific stuff they’re most likely to be interested in. You always read mystery novels? Try aisle 4. But just because I like sci-fi doesn’t mean I get to stock the library with hundreds of titles you won’t read.

It also means that if people aren’t reading at all — not opening any emails — that it’s ok, in fact it’s essential, to stop emailing them. It’s better to have an email list of 10,000 people who really care and are interested — than to pretend to have a list of 100,000, 90% of whom aren’t paying attention because pretty soon — the 90% will get you flagged as spam and then even the 10% won’t be able to read what you send them any more.

Getting real

Right at the start, we should acknowledge that if you’re running a blast email problem, you HAVE a problem with Gmail and Hotmail. These are the #1 and #2 email platforms in the US and in the world, and odds are they’re the email provider for 20-30% of your members. Consider the stats from these 2 organizations:

Organization 1
Total list: 772,000+ — Gmail and Hotmail records: 173,000+
22% of the list impacted

Organization 2
Total list: 124,000+ — Gmail and Hotmail records: 44,000+
36% of the list impacted

So what’s up?

Over the last year Gmail and Hotmail have changed the way they track spam emails, and in particular the sub-set of ‘spam-like’ emails referred to as ‘bulk mail’.

Even Yahoo is getting into this now too.

In brief, these 2 providers now evaluate the behavior of individual email recipients — whether they open the mail, click on links, add the sender to their address book etc — in evaluating the message as spam or not spam. This is a significant departure from previous rules that evaluated only the content of the message (subject line, code and words in the email). The effect is that even if you do everything ‘right’ in your writing, code and email design, and even if the Email on Acid test in Convio or a spam assassin score in Salsa rates your emails as ‘safe’, you can still be evaluated as spam if people do not react by opening, clicking, etc.

Compounding the challenge, once you hit a certain threshold of Gmail or Hotmail users who are not responding, the mail services begin treating all email from your address as ‘bulk’ or ‘spam’ mail. So even if some people open and click on every email, if the ratio of people opening and clicking is too low as compared to those deleting the mail without reading it, you will be less likely to get delivered to ALL Gmail and Hotmail users.

Note that the changes discussed above are proprietary to the companies involved. So while we know Gmail and Hotmail are evaluating behaviors like opens and clicks, we cannot know exactly how they are weighing those different actions (is a click twice as good as an open? Or the same?). We also can’t know exactly what ratio or how many people need to behave in a ‘good’ way before more or all the mail gets delivered.

Holy crap! Is this happening to me?

Here’s a quick test to see if you are having trouble getting mail delivered to Gmail or Hotmail:

1. First create two groups: one that identifies all users with an email address that contains the txt ‘gmail.com’ and one for Hotmail users where the email field contains the text ‘hotmail.com’ OR ‘msn.com’.
2. Next, use the Salsalabs stats by group (email — summary click for screenshot) or Convio’s Email Group Performance by Message Report to evaluate the open and click rates of the Gmail and/or Hotmail group compared to a control group of all the people who got the emails.
3. If Gmail and/or Hotmail users report a meaningfully lower open rate — you’ve got a problem. Note — you may want to grab a statistical significance calculator to make sure the results you’re observing are really about deliverability, and not just the normal variation in open and click rates.

O Nos! What do we do now?

If you see a drop of 20% or more in open rates compared to the general population, odd are that you’ve been sent to “spam jail” by Gmail or Hotmail. If you’re seeing a consistent lag of 5-15% in Gmail/Hotmail open rates, you’re not in jail yet, but you’re at risk.

But either way, don’t panic, we can spring you from spam jail (or get you back on the straight and narrow) with a few simple steps:

1. Make sure you’re set up to automatically disable addresses that hard bounce, or soft bounce 2-4 times. This will prevent you from sending email that we KNOW can’t get delivered (and dragging down your response rates overall). If you’re a Salsa customer a lot of this is already built into your system (yay!), but there is an additional free package to add – the bounce limits package.
2. Be cautious in targeting mail. Set up groups and opt-ins for your top campaigns or issues areas (one group might be “medicare” for example “or climate change” or “oil subsidies”) and then send most email on those campaigns to people who’ve taken an action on that campaign in the last 3 months. When you want to launch a new issues area or campaign, send it as a test first to a sub-set of your most active members — people who’ve taken 2 or more actions in the last 12 weeks, for example. If it goes well with that group, send the new campaign more widely AFTER the test (having a high open rate on Monday will make the Tuesday email more likely to get delivered, even to inactive people)
3. Stop sending mail to users who are unlikely to open them. We recommend marking all users who have not opened an email in the last 6 months as undeliverable. Now, this can be scary since it amounts to taking thousands or tens of thousands of addresses off your list. If it helps, it’s fine to just take these people ‘out of circulation’, and not delete them. You can do that by adding inactive addresses to a group that gets excluded from most of your email sends. But especially if you’re already in spam jail, it’s really important to stop the bleeding by re-shelving these people into an unused part of your list until you can solve the broader deliverability issue, and then re-activate them later. Note that this is also a really good way to avoid “spam traps” (an increasingly prevalent method of marking your address as a spam sender if you’re not following the rules and curating inactive emails out of circulation), as we’ve talked about before.
4. Just for Salsa Users — since you can target emails based on past email opens (email history), it’s also easy and smart to make a smart group of “live” emails, by querying or blast targeting on “last open date greater than or equal to 3 months ago” — you can even get super-targeted by requiring people to be a member of your Gmail and Hotmail groups, so you’re only excluding inactive people whose inactivity will penalize you.
5. Re-send emails that perform well above average to Gmail and Hotmail users outside their usual issue and active groups in order to improve the open and click rates on those networks. If you think of list management like ‘curating’ this is like putting the best-sellers on a table display near the front of the store. By putting our most popular stuff in front of members, we improve the open and click rates on that campaign, and consequently get more mail delivered all the time.

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Related posts:

• (Late) Friday Fun: Microsoft Pitches Hotmail as Antidote to Palin Email Hack
• Spam Alert: Is Rick Santorum Buying Email Addresses?
• How to Reach Unsuspecting Voters via Email — No Spam Involved
• Reputation Matters: Keeping Your Advocacy Messages Out of the Spam Filter

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