Yes, e.politics launched on July 17th of this past summer, a date so far back in time that dinosaurs roamed the Earth and Republicans ran the country. In honor of the occasion, let’s go to the numbers, Harper’s Index-style:
Add comment November 17th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
So, you’ve launched that blog you’ve always been dreaming of and now you want someone to actually, you know, read it. How do you build traffic to a blog, whether it’s a personal project or a site written for an organization, institution or campaign?
I’ve learned a thing or two over the last few months about hoodwinking/cajoling readers into looking at blog pages, much to their chagrin, and Monday’s blogging bootcamp really got me thinking about how to do it in a systematic way. Here are ten basic steps bloggers can take to help the world notice what they have to say:
6 comments November 16th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion is widget-crazy, and he has a whole series of articles to prove it. What am I talking about? Widgets are little applications designed to be inserted into people’s start pages at Google and similar portals as well as into MySpace pages, blogs or normal websites. Widgets can do everything from display headlines to play music to show a little calculator or clock.
Why should campaigns care? First, as Rubel explains, widgets allow people to customize start pages on their favorite sites to an unprecedented extent. Start pages can become such a rich experience that users spend less and less time on other sites. Instead, they tend to view other websites’ content on their own start pages, with RSS providing the transmission mechanism. More and more, content is becoming separated from presentation, and your words can show up in contexts that readers control, not you. If you’re not distributing your words in a format that others can use (i.e., RSS), you run the risk of missing some readers entirely.
1 comment November 15th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Post-election, back-to-our-normal-lives edition.
– cpd
Add comment November 14th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Hi folks, yesterday’s IDI-sponsored Blogging Bootcamp was great fun and I think we all managed to learn a thing or two before it was done. Despite my best efforts, I survived the panel discussion with Pat Cleary from the National Association of Manufacturers (whose Shop Floor is a great example of an effective trade association blog), Milo Sybrant from Amnesty International and Eric Rabe from Verizon with dignity and reputation reasonably intact. Some quick takeaways now, which I’ll follow later with a more comprehensive piece on building blog traffic:
(more…)
Add comment November 14th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Peter Deitz has written an overview of a promising fundraising tool on his site, First-of-its-kind. ChipIn lets activists set up fundraising campaigns without having a merchant account or going through a traditional fundraising vendor. The company can host the campaign completely for those without their own web pages. ChipIn is also trying to optimize its service for viral spread, creating a web widget that campaign organizers can embed in their own websites, MySpace pages or blogs and that other supporters can use to promote the fundraising effort. I couldn’t find anything on the site about the transaction percentage that they charge, however (update: see Peter’s comment below). Still, this kind of easy online fundraising tool could make a huge difference, particularly for small campaigns or individual people trying to raise money for an issue or cause.
– cpd
4 comments November 13th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Alan Rosenblatt has written an excellent article on his Dr. Digipol site responding to my campaign wrap-up from the other day. One thing he brings out explicitly is the need to think of online campaigning and offline campaigning as fundamentally intertwined — integration, anyone?
There will come a time when we no longer talk about online strategies and offline strategies, but rather strategies with online and offline components. I suggest that that day has arrived, maybe not universally, but certainly noticeably.
Add comment November 12th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
An article from The Nation questions whether bloggers had a significant effect on the 2006 election. Money quote: “There is no doubt that bloggers leveraged money and political buzz to make races more competitive and put Republicans on the defensive, but it was simply not the decisive factor in the elections.”
Well yes, of course. A blog is just a blog — it’s not a multi-gazillion-dollar television ad campaign. Even the really big blogs and online communities reach 1% or less of the population of this country, and asking more of blogs than they can reasonably do is silly. BUT, blogs can and did raise the profile of candidates who otherwise might have been written off, and they certainly helped keep activists on both sides deeply involved as the campaigns unfolded. They’re an excellent communications and community building tool. Just don’t ask them to cure the common cold, find your car keys or make the sun shine on a cloudy day. Thanks to i-blog for pointing out the article.
– cpd
Add comment November 10th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Hi kids, if you’ve been meaning to start that blog for your organization but don’t quite know how to go about it, IDI is hosting a Beltway Blogger Boot Camp on Monday. For the low, low price of $150, you can find out more about the process of blogging as part of your communications strategy, through case studies, best practices and advice from experienced bloggers (including, well, me!). Go to the Issue Dynamics site for more details.
– cpd
Add comment November 10th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
– cpd
1 comment November 9th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
We made it! The 2006 campaign season is dead (well, mostly), and it’s already time to dig up the bodies and see what they can teach us. Here are some lessons I’ve taken away from the last few months of online political frenzy.
This year, YouTube and online video really came of age: a slew of campaign ads, embarrassing candidate gaffes and satirical commentary pieces ended up on the web and some were seen hundreds of thousands of times. Online video could highlight a candidate’s troubles, provide an outlet for supporters’ creative enthusiasm and even raise the profile of an otherwise obscure campaign.
8 comments November 8th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Well, the elections are over except for the wailing, moaning, gnashing of teeth and of course the recounts and lawsuits. Now it’s back to the business of actually making politics work — proposing policies, persuading people that they’re good ideas and getting them passed. This year’s electoral frenzy has popularized a whole new set of electronic communications tools, from video to social media to text messsaging, and issue advocacy campaigns are busily incorporating them into their strategies. One set of campaigns has ended, but thousands of new ones are just getting started. Coming soon: what we’ve learned this year.
– cpd
Add comment November 8th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
The website of Republican Mike Bouchard, running against Debbie Stabenow for Senate in Michigan, claims that his campaign has been the victim of a distributed denial of services attack and names the IP numbers that seem to be the source. Here’s a screenshot of his replacement site front page as of 9 p.m. Eastern, with basic information about the attack.
Update: the FBI is investigating it.
– cpd
1 comment November 7th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
I’m leaving blow-by-blow coverage of election results to the approximately one million sites that will be looking at them in detail all through the night, but in the true spirit of election day, here’s a really nasty trick to consider. As an article by Scott Berinato in this month’s Wired magazine describes, distributed denial-of-service attacks can shut down the web servers of companies and organizations within minutes, even if they’ve taken measures to protect themselves.
1 comment November 7th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
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