The secret to a successful digital and social media campaign isn’t cultivating the biggest fan list or the most followers. A campaign can do more with 100 online zealots than with 1,000 passive Facebook fans.

That’s where engagement comes in. In 2012, smart campaigns will need to hire firms that know how to stir the emotions of their online followers and turn them into virtual ambassadors. Only campaigns that strategically and deftly employ new media can win next year and mishandling these all-important channels can mean losing digital supporters in droves.

To get your digital strategy on the right track for 2012, here are five commandments of digital political campaigning that your campaign must not break:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s media channels. Just because an opponent is posting a video series on YouTube, and drawing viewers, doesn’t mean it’s right for your campaign. Let’s say, for instance, job creation is one of the race’s top issues. Posting a video series touting your job creation plan online will likely fall on deaf ears. Why? Because the vast majority of online video consumers come from two groups: the wealthy and teenagers. Wealthy voters aren’t likely to be all that worried about jobs—compared to, say, someone in the unemployment line—and the bulk of the teenage demographic can’t vote.

The medium has to support the message for digital electioneering to work. If it doesn’t, you’ll wind up wasting money, or possibly turning off potential supporters.

Thou shalt not commit media channel adultery. When new clients come to me, I’m always interested to hear about how they approached digital media in previous campaigns. Nine times out of 10, the client recalls how he set up a Twitter account (inevitably incorporating an automated tweet program like HootSuite or TweetDeck), then built a custom Facebook page, and put someone in charge of it, then moved on to YouTube, then a blog, and so on.

This approach could not be more self-destructive. From inside the campaign, it may look efficient. But remember that the goal is to recruit support, and from the standpoint of potential voters it looks like nothing less than adultery.

Think about this. The bigwig in charge of digital media is no doubt involved in the creation of the Twitter account. Once it’s operational, the bigwig then hands it off to an underling and moves on to the next channel. Those following the channel through that transition will notice the shift in voice and feel abandoned. In a perfect world, your campaign’s social media profiles are created simultaneously and managed by someone who understands completely the voice of the campaign. That’s how to take full advantage of the interactive power of new media.

Thou shalt not lie (or be opaque). We’re not talking about bold-faced lies. What we’re talking about here is transparency. Transparency is one of the primary concerns of voters today, and one of the primary benefits that social and digital media offer campaigns. Unlike a TV spot, for example, a voter can respond immediately to the message using social media channels. Sometimes these comments are negative, but negative comments should not be viewed as a liability.

Your campaign needs to respond to negative comments in order to increase transparency. It must never bury or delete them. In fact, responding wisely to negative comments often leads not only to winning the voter back, but also creating a virtual ambassador who will promote your campaign to his or her friends. In a recent Harris Interactive study, 18 percent of respondents who posted negative comments on a campaign’s social media channels and received a thoughtful response turned into loyal supporters. Moreover, 33 percent wound up deleting their negative comment and replacing it with a positive one.

Thou shalt honor your supporters. One thing campaigns tend to forget is their digital manners. If you’re a politician and a voter takes the time to come up to you and express support, are you going to forget to say thank you? Of course you’re not. It should be no different online.

Have a system in place that allows your campaign to “thank” supporters for liking your Facebook page, for posting a positive comment or for sharing your message with a friend. All of the major social media platforms have notifications options that can alert you when such an action is taken by a supporter. If they retweet you, thank them.  If they like you on Facebook, thank them. Now, I know what some of you are thinking: “We’re a big campaign with thousands of fans and retweets a day.” No problem. Many digital firms have the tools to automate the process for you.

Thou shalt engage. Just because you built it, doesn’t mean they’ll come. And just because they come, it doesn’t mean they’ll stay. There’s a technical side to engagement, and it’s called interactivity. Just as you should thank supporters and respond to comments, so should you always keep in the fore the true power of new media. Where traditional media (radio, TV and print) is declarative, digital and social media is interactive and conversational.

All too often I see campaigns taking what I call the “digital paper” approach—merely scanning a direct mail piece and posting it in an album on Facebook, or digitizing a TV spot and uploading it to YouTube. This approach is absurd. It puts a one-way message on a two-way channel. It’s like going to play football in a water polo uniform—it’s dangerous.

Messages for digital and social media campaigns have to be uniquely crafted not to talk to the voters, but to talk with them. Make sure your online content invites potential supporters to converse with you, and if they bite, make sure you have the stuff to keep the conversation going. This is the equivalent of handshaking today. To paraphrase Harry Truman, “If you can shake a hand, you can win a vote.”

Beyond beautiful websites, NationBuilder has an insane amount of built-in tools for leveraging the passion of your volunteers and staff – at about the cost of simply hosting a website and the ease of a wordpress.com implementation.

Let’s take a look at what your non-profit or NGO can do with a basic $19 a month NationBuilder site (less than 4 percent of our corporate rate):

1. Tweets, Twitter ID and site URL mentions, Facebook and Meetup RSVPs and all on-site activities in a filterable administrative dashboard stream.
2. Credit card donation pages, with affordable per transaction rates and goal thermometers for both donors and amount donated, automatic public recognition of recent donors, and auto-response thank you emails.
3. Blogs! NationBuilder supports unlimited blogs pages and subnavigations, unlimited authors and granular settings for permissions and comments – including the ability to let any logged-in user submit a post. Plus Embedly integration for rich media publishing from more than 200 sites.
4. Affordable fully integrated email blasting plans, with unlimited monthly messages to your lists.
5. Cost-effective text blasting plans with the ability for folks to RSVP, pledge and sign up by texting keywords.
6. Fully customizable calendar pages with upcoming events, optional user-submitted events, searching for nearby events and an overview map of all events. Plus multi-level ticket sales, and full integration with Facebook events and Meetup, RSVP auto-response emails with directions, and printable lists for the door.
7. Show a map of your Meetup Everywhere communities with upcoming nearby meetups.
8. Volunteer signup with detailed contact info and custom asks for assignments like hosting an event, interning, or stuffing envelopes.
9. Endorsement pages where individuals and/or organizations can publicly share their support and you can set a numerical goals and feature important endorsements.
10. Templates for frequently asked questions, and crowdsourced and official responses.
11. Free-form feedback pages for ‘tell your story’ campaigns and other submissions.
12. A “find friends” feature for people to use their Facebook and Twitter accounts to connect with their friends and followers who have already joined.
13. Leaderboard pages for recognizing top supporters from across the web. Try them with top supporters by day, week or month.
14. Petitions with signature goals, comments, pictures, and the ability for supporters to choose whether to publish their signature on the site.
15. An innovative and fully customizable “Political Capital” economy for measuring support levels and rewarding online actions like recruiting volunteers, signing pledges and donating. Get creative and reward offline actions as well.
16. Template pages for press releases.
17. Recruiting features to help supporters find friends and track their involvement. Have they donated? Are they volunteering?
18. Smooth redirects to any external pages and sites.
19. Easy embed of iframes and sites like Tumbr.
20. Customize and set up a rules page to help keep your nation civil.
21. Crowdsource suggestions and allow people to comment.
22. Solicit policy ideas around a particular topic and let people rate the ideas based on whether they are good, bad, impractical or important. Or you can crowdsource questions for an event.
23. Customizable multiple choice surveys.
24. Tight integration with Rock the Vote’s nationwide voter registration system. Voters will get printable forms they can mail in, and your nation documents email addresses of signups for follow-up.
25. Moneybomb pages to turn fundraising drives into an event. Supporters can pledge an amount to donate at a very specific time and recruit others to do the same.

That’s a lot of power. What kind of nation will you build?

How is NationBuilder different?

NationBuilder is a unique nonpartisan platform for organizing, bringing together a comprehensive suite of tools that today’s leaders and creators need to gather their tribes.

Deeply social. We don’t bolt on some share buttons and call it social media – we interweave Twitter mentions of both your broadcaster IDs and your website into the administrative dashboard and activity stream. Likewise, Facebook page activities and Facebook and Meetup events are tightly tied into your nation, helping you to create a database that reflects the true scope of your nation’s support across the social web. You can interact with your Facebook and Twitter supporters and prospects right from your NationBuilder control panel and collect event RSVPs and market ticketed events. NationBuilder profiles aren’t some sterile and contextless lists of names and email address, but rather rich social profiles with pictures and bios linked to people’s social media profiles. We also help new members of your nations find and follow their friends from Facebook and Twitter right in your nation.

Real-time activity stream. Instead of running reports once a week, NationBuilder shows recent updates from your site, Twitter, Facebook pages, events, donations, any activity happening that you should care about. This activity stream is highly filterable, and provides field organizers, finance directors, social media managers and other parts of your organization a “now time” view of activity in you nation. This real-time newsfeed is similar to a Facebook activity stream, tailored to help you track and guide the health of your nation. It’s very addictive.

Runs your whole site. NationBuilder empowers you to run your entire site, supporter and prospect database and donor recruitment and finance tracking from one site. You don’t need an extra content management system (CMS) with NationBuilder – it is one, with rich customizable themes that make it like a WordPress for organizing. NationBuilder allows you to quickly build a slick public-facing website complete with blog pages, calendars with Google maps, petition pages, customizable surveys and much, much more. Its social customer relationship management (CRM) tool is bleeding edge tech for organizing. And yes, we use NationBuilder the platform to run NationBuilder the software company.

No tech team required. NationBuilder is highly customizable without a line of code. If you have a designer, you can create anything you like with HTML/CSS and SCSS customization of our themes. We can refer you to great designers and consultants if you don’t have one, and have free screencasts for web play or download on how you can do it yourself. NationBuilder is not for coders who love to play around with plug-ins and integrating various tools – you’ll probably be happier with WordPress, Drupal, Django, or Ruby on Rails.

Campaign aware. We provide access to the voter file for political causes and campaigns, with tight database integration and easy to use call and walk lists, including a turf cutter to narrow down target voters on an interactive map. You can email and text your supporters using NationBuilder, whether yours is a nation for 100 or 1 million.

For more information about Nation Builder website design, please contact us.

Our survey was conducted over the November 2010 elections. At that time, 10% of Americans reported that they had attended a political rally, 23% reported that they had tried to convince someone to vote for a specific candidate, and 66% reported that they had or intended to vote. Internet users in general were over twice as likely to attend a political meeting, 78% more likely to try and influence someone’s vote, and 53% more likely to have voted or intended to vote. Compared with other internet users, and users of other SNS platforms, a Facebook user who uses the site multiple times per day was an additional two and half times more likely to attend a political rally or meeting, 57% more likely to persuade someone on their vote, and an additional 43% more likely to have said they would vote.

From techpresident.com

No matter how big or small your campaign, you need to be thinking about the size of the screen your constituents use to interface with your materials. What was once a race to make things bigger and flashier has shifted to what works best on the mobile devices that people carry around in their pockets and purses. At the same time, mobile campaigning has gone far beyond short text messages to encompass rich interactive media. Here are some tips if you want to put your buzz in voters’ hands.

Our first advice is to take a close look at your website. A display that is eye catching on a computer may be slow (or even invisible) on many mobile devices. (A word to the wise: If your campaign site still sports spinning buttons, potential voters will most likely find themselves spinning their wheels when they visit via smartphone.) Likewise, a website filled with tiny links or drop-down menus is difficult to navigate on a small touchscreen unless you have fingers like toothpicks. Your best bet is to find a developer who understands the need to test your website on the most common devices. It’s no longer enough to get it working in Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome; now you need to make sure it also performs on the iPhone, the BlackBerry, the multiple versions of Android, as well as numerous other mobile platforms.

Your e-mail needs to be crafted with mobile devices in mind as well. As tempting as it may be to include large graphics and lengthy text, consider how these will show up on the small screen. If your messages require readers to thumb through screen after screen, they may end up giving you a thumbs down. Likewise, the links you embed in your emails need to connect with pages that fit on mobile devices. Imagine how disappointing it is for a BlackBerry user to click on a link and land on a page that is unreadable.

Both Facebook and Twitter are aiming squarely at the mobile audience, and you can take advantage of the applications they offer to share your campaign activities in real time with your supporters. You can take pictures, post them on your Facebook page, and update your Twitter stream all before your candidate leaves the podium. If you toss the camera and memory card in your trunk and wait until you get home to upload, you are like the proverbial coyote outraced by the roadrunner. Just be sure to double-check before you hit send—it’s easy to hit the wrong keys on a small device and mistype (or misdirect) your message.

On the cutting edge of the technology, Foursquare and similar location-based check-in services offer intriguing opportunities to encourage supporters to mobilize in a specific location (and to demonstrate the size of their collective action). If you have a specific plan, and more importantly, a specific person who is willing to shepherd a check-in project, your campaign might generate some publicity based on novelty alone. If you’re a smaller campaign and busy with other things, you may want to hold off on this aspect of mobile technology for now.

As we go forward, expect to see campaigns and party organizations investing in custom applications for mobile devices. Games, volunteer coordination, loyalty programs, and information apps will all be put to the test in political campaigns over the next year. For now, the development cost of custom applications puts them out of range for all but the largest and best-funded campaigns. Off-the-shelf applications, particularly those that focus on voter identification and GOTV support, make more sense for today’s small and mid-size campaigns. The key is to devote the staff time to integrate these applications into your campaign plan so there is a real payoff, rather than just throwing a bunch of technology at volunteers and hoping it will magically produce results.

Text messaging may have been the original mobile app, but the richness of the Web, social media, e-mail, and mobile apps make a simple text look like the dots and dashes of a telegraph message. Still, you shouldn’t write it off completely. Sending out carefully targeted text messages to your core volunteers and supporters can be a very effective mobilization tool. After all, nothing says urgent like the buzz of a mobile device in your pocket or purse.

Steve Pearson is the president of CivicNEXT (www.civicnext.com), a provider of practical online communications and social networking solutions for campaigns and organizations. Ford O’Connell, a C&E2010 Rising Star, is the founder of ProjectVirginia.com, winner of the 2010 Reed Award for Best Use of Twitter.

Challenge: Breaking out of the crowd

But with everyone on the social media bandwagon, it will be more difficult for candidates to stand out, experts say.

“This will be a year where it’s not enough to just have these things, campaigns need to be using them strategically,” said Trevor Montgomery, founder and president of Watch Street Consulting in Chicago.

Effective campaigns will place more emphasis on mobile peer-to-peer communication models, Montgomery said. These models encourage “third party validation” in which voters share their political preferences with other voters.

“Communication is more valuable when it’s coming from someone you know and trust,” Montgomery said. “I think all candidates will be able to use third party validation on a much larger scale with Facebook, text messaging and mobile apps.”

Other trends experts expect to see in 2012 will include text message donations, more Facebook town halls, and an influx of live streaming video debates.

“In 2012 I think we will see a major presidential debate on Facebook,” Trice said.

Trice also predicts the emergence of more specialized social media jobs in campaigns. For example, there will be designated positions for Tweeters, Flickr picture takers and YouTube videographers.

But no matter how much content candidates produce, they will always be competing with third parties for attention.

“You can’t control user generated content that goes viral,” Trice said. “That’s just the nature of the Internet. Campaigns can’t be afraid of it – they should just embrace it.”

So how can you effectively use Facebook?

Facebook recently launched a new streaming channel called Facebook Live. One recent video was particularly helpful for facebook marketers, it is called “Five Steps to Hitting a Home Run on Facebook”. The five practical steps are discussed amongst a facebook expert and two professionals who have used facebook to benefit their businesses.

The Five Steps to Hitting a Home Run on Facebook are:

1) Targeting Your Message

2) Investing in Killer Content

3) Being Authentic

4) Not Doing it Alone

5) Having Fun and Learning

Watch the Full Video Below:

Voters want to be able to access their elected officials, they want their concerns to be heard, and they want to know what their elected officials are doing. The demands are very straight forward but some elected officials just don’t get it. They’re neglecting the simplest (and most affordable) way of appeasing these demands – through the internet!

Below are three simple, web-based steps elected officials can take to serve their constituents and keep their offices transparent:

Start a Service Website – The website your neighbor built you isn’t going to cut it, you need a service website that is worthy of being your constituents first stop. They need to be able to file service requests, learn about government services, find answers to common questions, read your news updates, find community events, and read about your initiatives at a bare minimum. There’s also a lot more you can do, like using an Instant Message client on your website to save constituents a trip to your office and allow your staff to handle simple requests faster.

Send Regular eNewsletters – What is the easiest way to be transparent? Tell your constituents what you’re doing on a regular basis. You’ll also save time, and a tremendous amount of money, by communicating via email. Building an email list is easier than you think. You can get started by collecting email addresses when people visit your office, using sign-in sheets at community events, and by pulling emails off of that giant stack of business cards you have.

Keep Your Social Networks Active – Facebook has over 500 million users and it is growing every day, there is a good chance that a lot of your constituents are using it. So why not engage them where they are? However, it’s not good enough to start a facebook page and never use it again. People are communicating and getting their news from facebook, keep them updated. It’s also possible to create a custom page so your constituents can fill out service requests, sign up for you email list, and read custom content on facebook.

I hope this helps. If you’d like more information, feel free to contact us.

The Municipal Election represent a great opportunity for local campaigns to take advantage of new media strategy. Using new media as a part of your earned and paid media plan is extreme advantageous no matter what the size of your campaign.

Advertising online is extremely affordable and you can target people by district, age, sex and interests. New media allows you to reach voters without paying for those who ignore your ad. And, the people you engage can go on to instantly find more info, volunteer or even donate which is impossible with other forms of media.

Take a look at this article from stltoday.com that highlights how new media played an unprecedented role in Roy Blunt’s victory in the Missouri Senate race.

After you’ve finished reading, please take a look at a few of our highlighted projects from the past cycle. If you have questions or if you are interested in working with us in the Municipal Election cycle, feel free to give me a call of shoot me an email.

Sincerely,

Trevor Montgomery, President
Watch Street Consulting
Cell: (773) 510-0540
Email: Trevor@watchstreetconsulting.com

Take a look at a few of our featured projects:
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New Media Strategy | Website Design
Custom Facebook Pages | Campaign Consulting