Originally posted on November 3, 2011

Do recent changes to Google and Facebook affect political and marketing communicators? Potentially a lot, so let’s take the sites in turn. First Google, which announced today that it’s making major changes to its search algorithms to update its main search index more frequently. Also, results pages for many queries will feature more recent content (including breaking news) over information that might have grown stale.

Overall, this change in emphasis is potentially really useful for users, particularly if Google can follow through on the idea of separating searches for evergreen content (“learning from Obama online campaign PDF“) from those for ephemeral content and recent news (“Herman Cain harassment suit“). One implication for political communicators: this emphasis on the new and the now gives us even more reason to jump on news stories quickly, since Google’s main search function should have a better chance of highlighting relevant recent content. Crank up those blogs and rapid response machines, kids: catch a news wave, and your words might spread far and wide.

Next Facebook, which revamped itself yet again back in September. As Farhad Manjoo points out in Slate today, Facebook’s latest changes emphasize recent content in users’ news feeds over posts from people you might actually like (i.e., friends with whom you’ve interacted with regularly). I’d also argue that the “improvements” appear to be featuring visual content over written, because my feed is now cluttered with photos posted by people I barely know. Manjoo’s article focuses on how the new feed emphasis is leading certain LOLCats-style word/picture combos to go viral, which may be useful for some advocacy and electoral campaigns to know, but it also suggests that our substantive content is LESS likely to get noticed now than before. Great!

Facebook’s solution is to have you “subscribe” to feeds and to set the amount of information you receive from them. Next up for political communicators: begging followers to “subscribe” and to become bosum buddies rather than distant acquaintances. Once again, it’s time to wonder how much it’s worth paying for advertising to get new supporters to “like” your page, potential email list members though they may be. Perhaps the company’s new marketing bootcamps will bring us around to their way of thinking — or else.

Google+ went live for the masses today (assuming you got in before the system stopped taking new users), meaning that the search giant has taken another stab at social networking — and at staving off the threat of Facebook. How should political and advocacy communicators approach this new platform?

First, as Steven Levy points out in Wired (via Matt Stempeck), today’s launch is just one piece of a process that will stretch out for months, so we’re only seeing the bones of what should be a much broader set of tools. But what’s out there now is already interesting, and definitely check out Amy Sample Ward’s excellent overview for a glimpse of how it works. Two elements jump out: first, the platform’s integrated ten-person video chat feature (“Hangouts”), which should be extremely useful for volunteer-organizing, for media/blogger calls and for campaigns whose staff is scattered across the country or the world.

To read the entire article on e.politics, click here.

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.

“For us, the biggest distinguishing factor is that every major newspaper in the state endorsed Gelber, so that’s a message we could get to voters in a few words in an ad, catching their attention on their phones as they’re going into the polls,” Christian Ulvert, Gelber’s campaign aide, told us. “Lower voter turnout was expected, so we turned to the digital world.”

Talk about in-the-moment targeting — these ads were aimed at people getting ready to vote, quite possibly as they were standing in the booth and looking up unfamiliar candidates on their cell phones at the last minute. We can imagine the kind of queries that these candidates might have purchased, for instance “voter guides,” “election,” “voting” and of course the candidates’ own names and those of their opponents (the folks at Google could no doubt help, since they could dig up information about what search terms people tend to use when they’re researching candidates).

I’d be curious to see how much an effort like this cost, both in the aggregate and per-click, and also how many people actually responded — though also note that a candidate’s ad would function as a virtual yard sign even if the viewer doesn’t click it. Obviously this tactic is about as niche an approach as you’re going to see, but particularly in a close race that hasn’t received much publicity, a handful of last-minute converts might make all the difference. Florida politics: taking late-cycle persuasion advertising to the limit!

– cpd

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.

What’s AOL offering? A combination of the broad and the specific: sites involved with Advertising.com reach a huge swath of online readers in the U.S. (more than any other content ad network), allowing AOL to put political ads in front of big pool of potential donors, volunteers and supporters, but crucially the company also has enough demographic data to let advertisers target all the way down to the Congressional district level. AOL’s political site pushes display ads for everything from fundraising to rapid response, and also includes guides to effective banner campaigns and to the specifics of their ordering system.

Will people buy it? In some ways, display advertising is both blessing and curse — a blessing because it’s easy to explain to political consultants and candidates, a curse because banner advertising rarely lived up to its perceived potential in the earlier days of the web. AOL’s new venture does have advantages over past generations of display ads, though, in part because of the success of Google and Facebook advertising — over the past two cycles, campaigns have become more and more used to the idea that they should spend money on internet ads.

And while AOL’s ability to target ads by Congressional district is useful and can only be roughly approximated on Google and Facebook, the company’s other demographic info may turn out to be just as attractive — i.e., you want to reach moms? They’ll give you moms. You want Hispanics? They’ll give you Hispanics. Again, this is targeting that can be approximated on Google and Facebook, based on what people are searching for (Google) or the interests they’ve listed (Facebook), but AOL promises to deliver it directly.

So I bet we’ll see quite a few campaigns and outside groups try AOL this cycle, assuming the company’s sales reps do their jobs and spread the word (thinking about it, it almost seems weird that political display ads are so relatively rare). But whether or not this platform can become the third leg of a political advertising stool will depend on results — and AOL may find the ROI of Google Ads tough to beat.

– cpd

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.

Although the van tour was just one piece of a larger campaign that included district meetings, Hill visits and email-driven phone calls to legislators, it’s perfect for our purposes because it demonstrates how a group can use a real-world event to build an online advocacy presence. The tour required one rented van and some door magnets, cost about $6000 (not including salaries) and took the work of two staff and four interns to plan and execute.

The road trip took twelve days and covered six states, targeting the districts of midwestern congressmembers and the states of senators with leadership roles on relevant committees, and the activists spent much of their time at state and county fairs, talking directly with constituents of the targeted lawmakers and even getting people to make phone calls to legislative offices on the spot. Plus, they asked people to sign postcards about the issue, which they then delivered by hand to congressional district offices along the way (also great opportunities for photos).

So far, so good, but that’s only half of the action, since everything the Healthy School Milk or Bust Tour did had an online angle. Wireless cards helped the Food and Water Watch folks write from the road, letting them turn out a constant stream of blog posts, Facebook updates, Tweets and Flickr photos, all displayed on a central hub on the group’s website (now serving as an archive page). Besides their own dozen-odd blog posts, they also got six traditional (and local) media hits and collected close to 1000 email addresses along the way. These weren’t just casual recruits, either: of the 916 new list-members recruited, over 830 were active a year later, with a high rate of opening emails and clicking on actions.

The political results? A regulatory change that allows schools to use federal lunch money to buy hormone-free milk, and one achieved without arousing the ire of farm-state congressmembers who might be inclined to block a measure not as agribusiness-friendly as much of U.S. ag policy has become. Another takeaway: cow costumes work! Sarah found that people were actually MORE likely to talk with her when she was wearing the costume than when she was in street clothes — serving as a natural icebreaker, it immediately made folks smile. Plus, it set up plenty of good photographs to place on Flickr, Facebook and the blog, all helping to keep online supporters engaged and giving them something to pass along to friends. Nice work! All around, an udder success…..(please don’t hurt me).

– cpd

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.

Instead, it’s usually far more effective to take advantage of the online/offline connection and use each form of contact for what it’s good for. Online tools are a great way to reach many people at once, so it makes sense to use them to contact your advocates and point them toward a web-based interface. But mass emails aren’t a great way to get Congressional attention, so it makes sense to combine their delivery with a form of contact that DOES get noticed.

That may mean phone calls, since online activists can be asked to call the Capitol switchboard, but it also may mean printing emails out and running them down to the Hill. Delivered by hand, a stack of constituent messages have weight, both literally and metaphorically, and they reinforce an office visit by showing that a legislator’s constituents are paying attention. Thanks to Eric Rardin for bringing this idea up in an online conversation the other day.

– cpd

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

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.

Alan’s network influencers are related to an idea that’s come up around here before, the observation that niche audiences have proliferated beyond anything we’ve seen in the recent past. “Network influentials” are basically an expression of the same concept, though put in more interactive terms (Alan’s all back-and-forth; I’m by nature a propagandist). We could easily find extreme examples of either approach — some online publishers interact constantly with their followers while others effectively ignore them — but regardless of their degree of “networkitude”, we’re essentially talking about people with disproportionately loud voices.

Loud, and potentially amplified — network influentials tend to listen to one another, so a message placed in one space may spread to others, meaning that a small audience can have power beyond its numbers. For a great example, see Mark Bowden’s story in the current Atlantic showing how the work of a pair of essentially unknown conservative bloggers shaped the public debate about Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination, and in the process injected the “Wise Latina” meme into the public mindspace to the undoubted delight of pundits for years to come.

Their blog was read by maybe 30 people on an average day, but among that tiny audience was a handful of more prominent writers, and the videos of past Sotomayor speeches they unearthed began to climb their way up the media food chain. Within weeks, the footage had shown up on blogs read by millions, and ended up being played over and over again on cable talk shows — not that the guys who did the initial work got much in the way of credit.

Obviously, for every idea that catches public attention, uncounted others will fly by unnoticed, making it hard to predict which story will catch which voice at the right moment to break through the clutter. The best answer seems to be a combination of targeted and untargeted outreach: online communicators can use a rifle-shot approach when appropriate, connecting personally with targeted bloggers, Twitterers and journalists for instance, while still blasting information out via mass email, YouTube, Tweets, Facebook updates and blog posts.

Sometimes the targeted approach will work, but other times a random and potentially overlooked channel will actually turn out to be the most productive. As communicators, we must cast our bread upon the waters! While still saving some loaves to drop off at the right front doors.

– cpd

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.

Rob Miller, Wilson’s 2010 Democratic opponent, is rapidly closing in on a $1,000,000 haul, a ridiculous amount of money for a congressional challenger to have on hand a year out (hint: if you’re an out-of-work Democratic field organizer with a Southern accent, give ol’ Rob a call). How did it happen?

First, as Nancy points out in her tPrez piece, the Dems have a robust online fundraising apparatus in place, something that the Republicans are still scrambling to replicate. Wilson’s currently attempting to capitalize on his new-found heroic status among some conservatives, but he’s lagging far behind the Democratic blitzkrieg (of course, considering that most of the liberal money is coming from outside his district, he’s set up for an anti-carpetbagger message during the general election, but I doubt that’ll offset the value of Miller’s actual cash).

Second, the anti-Wilson reaction happened in public, where people could see what others were doing and get excited about it themselves. Judging from personal conversations and the discussion on my own Facebook post, it created almost a carnival atmosphere among progressives, and as Miller’s totals went from $100,000 to $200,000 and finally all the way above $600,000 over the course of Thursday, bloggers and activists could urge people to push the number just a little bit higher. Traditional political fundraising happens behind the scenes, but internet fundraising can be very public — and its public nature can create a self-reinforcing spiral.

Finally, liberals were PRIMED to act — they’ve spent all August and part of September under siege from conservatives, at least judging from media coverage. With cable news dominated by discussions of the Birthers, Townhallers and random gun-toters, the public impression has been been that the Right is on the rise, and progressive frustration has been building toward a slow boil. When Wilson finally gave them a concrete enemy, they let fly, using his opponent as a concrete outlet. Obama’s online army may have been AWOL throughout most of the healthcare battle so far, but it looks as though they’ve just been waiting for the call to arms.

We’re in a fundamentally different political world than we were just a decade ago. Blogs, email lists and other online communities gather us by the millions, and easy e-commerce and online organizing technologies give us something to do with our enthusiasm. Just as MyBarackObama.com let the future President’s supporters go to work on his behalf well before paid campaign staff arrived in their communities, the availability of distributed and effective online political tools gives ANYONE with an audience the means and opportunity to spark collective action. Political actors at all levels ignore this new reality at their own peril.

– cpd

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.

The results can be ludicrous at times (at least one member of Congress is reputed to hold her seat because her colleagues in the state senate so despised her that they happily tailored a Congressional district to her needs — to get rid of her), but they can also be flat-out obscene. Redistricting in the early 1990s was bad enough, with certain Democratic urban legislators teaming up with suburban Republicans to sketch sprawling monsters linking scattered pockets of (presumably) like-minded voters, in the process often creating a slew of safe Republican districts enveloping a handful of others packed to the gills with minority and other reliably Democratic voters.

Those early efforts were the first to benefit from database modeling of proposed districts down to block level, and even though new plans often took hours or even days to run through the mainframe, the practical political results were impressive at the time. But compared with what Tom DeLay achieved in Texas in 2003, they were strictly amateur. Pushing the new Republican leadership of the Texas Legislature to RE-redistrict for the 2004 elections (even though they were only in power because of lines newly drawn in 2001), he managed to eliminate enough incumbent Democrats in Congress to shift the state’s delegation in Washington from rough parity to a 21-11 Republican advantage. By contrast, Texas voters split about 55-45 Republican overall in 2004 — hooray for democracy!

If I sound cynical about the redistricting process, I have a right: my first substantive political experience was working for a member of the Texas House of Representatives during a special session devoted to redrawing those precious political lines in 1992, during which at one point I quite literally walked into a smoke-filled room. Right out of college and drenched (not wet) behind the ears, I glimpsed a world I didn’t really understand — but watching the rubber meet the road of politics was a most enlightening experience all around.

Redistricting can be ugly regardless of which party is in charge, but it’s also going to happen, regardless of which party is in charge. So if you really want to influence the political course of this country over the next decade (at least), you have the chance — if you work to elect state legislators whose views align with yours, and if you get started NOW.

For starters, individual donors, volunteers and voices can often have a much larger effect on a local race like one for state representative than they can on a state-level or national election. Legislative races may be more expensive than they were 20 years ago, but they still run on a much smaller scale and usually with much less money to spend on television. Consequently, individual donations matter more, as do individual endorsements and individual volunteer hours. So does direct voter-to-voter outreach — with fewer messages filling the airwaves, the contents of an email from a friend may be the only thing someone remembers when he or she goes to vote.

But WHEN you help matters as much as HOW you help, since time and money spent early in the campaign process usually pay off disproportionately — donating 10 hours a week NOW will probably help a candidate much more than donating 10 hours during the week right before the election. Plus, the primary elections are all-important across much of the country, again in part because of gerrymandering, and they’ll start up next Spring. So get cracking! If you want to see a particular brand of congressmember populate Washington, now’s your chance — provided that you’re willing to put in the time and/or the money.

Let’s explore the implications of this idea for online politics a little further, in a couple of upcoming articles.

– cpd