Politicians Seek ‘New’ New Media for 2012 Run (Internet Evolution)
Strategists on both sides have become much more sophisticated in all aspects of managing political messages in the digital age.

US Funding Youth to Drive Social Change (Daily Nation)
The U.S. is funding youth groups in Kenya, the Middle East and North Africa to use new media in driving social and political change.

Selling the Census (Tech President)
The Census Bureau, this year, has turned to new media again and again to deliver its message to Americans.

You know something has had an impact on you when you’re still thinking about it weeks after the fact. And what happened recently on YouTube got me thinking.

Members of Congress and their staffs have gotten used to a world where a constituent writes a postal letter or e-mail or calls the office and the office responds in written form to the citizen’s concerns. One of the challenges that social media creates for congressional offices is that they can no longer just wait for constituent communication to come to them. They now need to monitor external sources to capture it all.

As Congresswoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers said in our “Inside the Hill” web series, “the world has changed.”

What punctuated this for me was the flurry of activity around a Senate vote regarding the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy. Regardless of what side of this sensitive social issue you come down on, something happened that should be instructive to Members of Congress, advocacy organizations, and citizens alike.

The Service members Legal Defense Network (SLDN) is an organization dedicated to ending DADT. They recently enlisted Lady Gaga, of…well…Lady Gaga fame, to create and post a YouTube video asking her considerable fan base to call their Senators to request an end to the ban on openly gay service members. This video is interesting from a number of perspectives, not the least of which is that, when she calls her Senators live in the video, she never actually gets through to either one because the volume of calls to the Senate’s phone system resulted in a busy signal from one and an at-capacity mailbox from the other. What happens next is even more interesting.

In a dorm room in Boulder, Colorado, two college students named Ellie and Lauren decide to heed the advice of SLDN and Lady Gaga and contact their Senator, the junior Senator from Colorado, Michael Bennet. They don’t just pick up the phone though, they record a video of themselves calling the Senator’s office, much like Lady Gaga did in her video. At times laughing and a bit perplexed by the process—something they had clearly never done before—they ultimately left a voicemail message for Senator Bennet on September 14.

The following day, September 15, Senator Bennet was quick to respond to Ellie and Lauren with a short, 17-second video assuring them that he supports the repeal of DADT. While Senator Bennet is not the first Member to record a YouTube response directly to a constituent, the speed with which the Senator responded seems to illustrate a change that is taking place on Capitol Hill. Members are starting to become more adept at using social media tools to engage in a genuine two-way dialogue with constituents.

What does this mean for Congress and the citizen advocates that want to participate in the policy making process?

Implications for Congressional Offices:

1. Social media tools like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook can allow you to reach constituents that you might not otherwise reach. This may have been the only way that Senator Bennet would have had contact with these two Colorado residents.
2. I can hear staffers groaning (I know, I was one) at the thought of trying to pin down their bosses and get them to record messages back to constituents on YouTube. It will no doubt be challenging, but the Bennet video took 17 seconds to record. Most Members’ schedules can accommodate the creation of a couple of videos each week or month.
3. The best way to encourage your boss to engage in social media is to demonstrate the impact it can have. At the writing of this post the Bennet video had been viewed more than 38,000 times!

Implications for Grassroots Advocates:

1. While tempting, this outcome cannot be replicated for every one of your campaigns and for every Member of Congress. The best thing you can do is determine the best avenue of communications for each and every one of the 541 Members of Congress. If Members like Rep. Culberson and Sen. McCaskill are prolific users of Twitter (and they are), then maybe you use Twitter. If there are Members who haven’t yet embraced social media (and there are) a YouTube campaign will be much less effective.
2. Not everyone has Lady Gaga on their side, but is there someone who has the ear of a lot of other someones that you could enlist in your efforts?
3. As the Lady Gaga video illustrates, if the message to your supporters is “call your Senator” and the Senate’s phone system is overloaded (something our friends in the Office of the Senate Sergeant at Arms assures us is being upgraded to better accommodate higher volumes of calls) then your advocates will be frustrated with both you and their Members. Be more strategic in how you suggest that your members contact their elected officials.

When I first started working in Washington, in the ’90s, websites were still a novelty — a bad novelty. The average congressional website was little more than an electronic pamphlet featuring the face of a member of Congress smiling out like a trial attorney airbrushed onto an interstate billboard.

The federal agencies were even worse. Agency officials saw the Internet as a piece of technology, not a communications tool.

Website management was relegated to IT staff rather than to communications shops.

Things eventually improved, but despite the stunning advances in communications technology, most of federal Washington has still failed to grasp the meaning of Government 2.0. Indeed, much is mired in Government 1.5.

But long before the ink was ever set to paper, thousands of people across the country had already seen the ad, and were commenting on it and sharing it with friends online.

By making the ad available to bloggers before it ran in the papers, Cato was able to generate a media buzz long before our main product even existed. Most of all, we gave bloggers the opportunity to scoop old media giants like The New York Times.

Here’s how to do it:

1) Start with well-known allies: When running a campaign, make a list of the bloggers you know are not only going to post your product, but will actively help spread the word.

2) Make your product available in a number of different forms: Not everyone likes a PDF, and not everyone fancies an embed code. Give bloggers the option. Send them the PDF, JPG and the embed code of your product so they can choose how they want to share it.

3) Lead by example: Be sure to post the product on your blog first. How’s it going to look if you’re asking all these bloggers to post something, and you haven’t even posted it yourself?

4) Engage your Twitter community: Be sure only to ask for retweets when necessary. In Cato’s case, we want to make sure people know that if we ask for retweets, it’s something very important.

5) If bloggers help you spread your message, thank them: In the blogosphere, the hyperlink is the highest form of gratitude. At Cato, I try to keep bloggers engaged by linking to them on Cato@Liberty every few days.

6) Follow up: Even if your campaign is nearly over, be sure to take advantage of the opportunity by making personal contact with bloggers who helped you along the way. If they live in the area, treat them like you would a mainstream reporter and take them to lunch. After all, they helped fight for your cause.

7) Create two versions of the product for both old and new media: For example, Cato created a special online version of the ad that bloggers can put on their own site during the stimulus debate. Any blogger can simply copy and paste the code found here by clicking on “Spread the word.”

By taking a few extra steps to engage bloggers, you will keep your campaign alive long after last week’s newspapers are crumpled up and thrown into the recycling bin.

YouTube Accord Eludes House (Roll Call)
The Senate’s recent approval of third party Web sites, such as YouTube, has left the House wanting a similar resolution.

Will Social Media Change the Political Process? Has It Already? (Social Media Explorer)
With over a third of Americans having watched a political video on the Internet, could the predictions that this years election will be the “Social Media Election” be true?