Originally published on Epolitics.com
Update: See also Kate Kaye’s earlier coverage at ClickZ.
Politico’s Morning Tech column has highlighted a clever use of mobile advertising in last week’s Florida primaries:
As the Sunshine State headed to the polls yesterday, down-ballot candidates bought Google online ads on mobile geo-targeted to specific districts, hoping to capture people who are doing last-minute research while waiting in line at the polls. Democratic State Senator and Attorney General hopeful Dan Gelber, who easily won his primary, used mobile Google ads for a 24-hour blitz on primary day. Lisa Small, likely soon to be declared winner of her circuit court judge race, also used the strategy, Google told us.
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Cross-published from Epolitics.com
Maybe not yet, but AOL would certainly like political professionals to start thinking that way — with Google monopolizing search advertising and Facebook dominating the social space, AOL wants to own political display (banner) ads through its Advertising.com platform. Judging from conversations with AOL staff at a launch reception for the company’s new political advertising dashboard, AOL sees what Google and Facebook have done in the political space and sees an opportunity to build a new constituency for online display advertising, something that campaigns have tended to drop in favor of search and social advertising in recent years.
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Originally published on Epolitics.com
Integrate or die: words seen on Epolitics.com before and for good reason, since standalone online campaigns rarely work as well as ones combined with concrete action in the physical world. For a good example of how the virtual can combine with the real to yield results, see Food and Water Watch’s campaign last year to get federal approval for schools to buy hormone-free milk through the National School Lunch Program. As described by Sarah Alexander at a June 17th Digital Capital Week presentation, Food and Water Watch followed a strategy that wound online and offline action tightly together to get the best out of both, in part through leveraging the results of a van trip through the states and districts of crucial legislators. Note: the cow costumes didn’t hurt.
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Cross-posted from Epolitics.com
Here’s a quick point that never hurts to repeat: asking people to send a message to Congress through an online advocacy system mean that you have to DELIVER the emails via the internet. In fact, it’s usually more effective to print them out and hand-deliver them, particularly as part of a visit from a lobbyist or citizen activist. This idea isn’t new — it shows up in the Online Politics 101, for example — but it’s easy to forget in an era when the default setting for online advocacy too often is to fall back on email alone when communicating with decision-makers. But as both hard experience and Congressional Management Foundation research have shown, a Congress that’s flooded with hundreds of millions of messages a year may well fail to notice when they get a few more.
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Cross-posted from Epolitics.com
Though the New Year’s formally begun, we still have plenty of time for some 2009 retrospection. ClickZ’s Kate Kaye provides the latest installment, beginning with her own observations about what mattered in digital politics in the past year and moving on to extended quotes from a number of online politics observers (including e.politics and plenty of friends in the field). Twitter’s front and center, as is online advertising, so check out the list and the results of Kate’s interviews and see what you think about what she (and we) had to say.
– cpd
Cross-published from Epolitics.com
Another Twitter-inspired idea from Thursday’s CAP/Internet Advocacy Roundtable discussion: when Alan Rosenblatt talked about Tweeting to “influence the influentials,” he didn’t just mention policymakers, the press and policy professionals. He also brought up the idea of “network influentials,” by which he meant people who reach large numbers of others either publicly or behind-the-scenes. Alan specifically included national and state-level bloggers, prominent Twitterers, individual activists with large personal networks and administrators of sizable email lists, but he basically meant anyone with a following.
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Also published on e.politics
The most fascinating aspect the fallout from South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You Lie” moment during Barack Obama’s healthcare speech? What it reveals about the changed world of politics in an internet age.
Since Wednesday evening, Democratic and liberal organizations, websites and email-list-owners ranging from Daily Kos to Wesley Clark to MoveOn to the the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have pounced on Wilson’s outburst, pushing their readers or supporters to donate to Wilson’s Democratic challenger. In a pre-internet era, this could not have happened so quickly, effectively or visibly:
How many of those offended by the heretofore little-known Wilson’s outburst — a sense of offense riled up by not only progressive blogs but the DCCC and other Dem organizations — would have, in the pre-Internet age, have searched for a stamp and sent a check to Miller for Congress? Not many, that’s how many. Now, that outrage can be channeled with a few clicks.
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Cross-published on e.politics
Plenty of people are already looking ahead to the outcome of the 2010 elections, in particular what happens to the Democrats’ control of Congress. The party of an incumbent President almost always loses seats in Washington in an off-year election, and with the Dems having just enough votes to stop a filibuster in the Senate, Republicans have a powerful incentive to stall Barack Obama’s agenda as long as possible: they know full well that these few months are likely the high point of his influence in his (presumably) first term.
But if you really want to see a shift in power in Washington for the next decade or longer, pay attention to who wins the STATE legislatures next November. The state representatives and state senators elected 15 months from now will preside over the rawest political act in America: the redrawing of congressional and legislative district lines based on the results of the decennial census. Redistricting is legislative sausage-making at its finest, with members jockeying to preserve or extend their own power-bases at the expense of enemies. In the process, they usually try to forward the overall interests of their particular party or faction as best they can.
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As you might have guessed from the big graphic to the left, the “Learning from Obama: Lessons for Online Communicators in 2009 and Beyond” article series (which ran here on K Street Cafe) is finally edited into convenient e-book (PDF) format, just in time for last week’s Netroots Nation panel discussion on the same topic.
The promo campaign’s kicking into high gear now, and I’m trying to get this sucker into the hands of as many journalists, bloggers, Twitterers, texters, smoke-signalers and flat-out political junkies as possible. I’d owe y’all bigtime for anything you can do to help get it in front of interested eyes. Makes a great beach read for your entire communications department!
The useful thing about doing it as a PDF is that OpenOffice (which I used for the layout) neatly kept all the links in place, so it connects instantly to supporting materials around the ‘net and on the e.politics site itself, giving the thing a lot more depth. Plus, I picked a font that’s easy to read on the sand…
– cpd
The Conclusion of a six-part series, which will be collected into an e-book and released in early July. Cross-posted on e.politics.
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.
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