Archive for March, 2007
Listen to your mom: wash your hands before dinner, and don’t forget to clean your data before sending out direct mail.
Mark Harris of Students for Saving Social Security, who spoke at last week’s Politics Online panel on campaigning on a limited budget and who himself was a candidate for state representative in Pennsylvania in ’06, talked at length about what was worth spending money on and what wasn’t. His take? For starters, good design is worth the money, since having professional graphics both in print and online can help a campaign stand out. I’ll second that — amateur design can be endearing if you’re running for class president, but less so if you’re trying to get elected to public office. Cutting corners on design can cost you much more in credibility than you save in pennies.
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March 20th, 2007
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Last week, the big dog of the Internet world jumped the fence and bounded into DC: for the first time, Google was an inescapable presence at a Politics Online Conference, with a heavy sponsorship role, two full presentations and a Google Lounge (nice beanbag chair, guys). In the process, unwittingly, the company persuaded me which presidential candidate to back in ’08.
Besides the sponsorship, Google’s most visible role in the proceedings fell to Elliot Schrage, the company’s VP for Global Communications, whose Thursday afternoon presentation made a little news here, there and elsewhere, particularly his comments about the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit and the ease with which false information can spread through the ‘net (his defense of Google China got less notice).
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March 19th, 2007
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Guest article! The inimitable Susan Finkelpearl of Free Range Studios has written up a Politics Online panel discussion on the promise of mobile technology as a tool for campaign organizing. Pull you up a chair and chew on THIS for a little while:
Mobile-izing Volunteers
By Susan Finkelpearl
When I first started working in technology, each time I met with a new “guru,” I asked this question: “What is Web 3.0?” The answer I often got was, “mobility.” The March 15th tutorial on raising volunteers through mobile technology at the 2007 Politics Online conference shed some light on how this new era is coming into being.
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March 18th, 2007
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On March 16th, I moderated a Politics Online panel covering online tactics for campaigns with limited resources. Below are background materials, starting with a drive-by look at the pluses and minuses of some typically low-cost tools, continuing with video clips of two great presentations from last week’s NOI training and ending with links to pertinent articles.
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March 16th, 2007
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Through some bizarre miscarriage of justice, e.politics won a Golden Dot award last night as “Best Blog — National Politics.” I’m as mystified as you, though I ain’t exactly complaining. Seriously, I’m happy as hell — it’s an honor. Thanks to the judges for picking e.politics out of the fray, and thanks to ALL y’all for being along for the ride.
The full list of winners:
– cpd
March 16th, 2007
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You ever shocked to learn about something that you realize maybe you should have known about before? (“What’s up with this Nirvana band — are they new?”) At NOI last week, I had one of those moments when Carly Dobbins-Bucklad, Pittsburg organizer and web guru for the League of Young Voters turned me on to the fact that CVS and Rite Aid both sell disposable video cameras and have for two years.
They retail for around $30 and take 20-30 minutes of video (saving each press of the Record button as a separate clip), and you can preview and delete clips all day long. The only catch is that you have to bring the camera back to the store to have the video pulled off the device and provided to you on a DVD (the retailer of course refurbishes the camera and sells it to another customer), bringing the total cost per use to around $45.
Carly’s used these neat little critters for advocacy purposes already (nice shaky camera work there —an homage to the French New Wave?), and I can see plenty of applications. Since they’re disposable and cheap, you could buy a dozen of them and spread them throughout the crowd at an event — similar to the way people leave still cameras on tables at wedding receptions — to get footage from within the fray.
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March 14th, 2007
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The random byproducts of three very busy days online. Not all entirely on topic, but easily digestible nonetheless.
- Time reporter credits blogosphere for keeping Federal prosecutor story alive in the face of mainstream media indifference. “And we’d have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!” Via Glenn Greenwald. Another role of our beloved Internets in this rising scandal: follow the emails.
- Unruly bloggers strike again, with RealClimate and Grist ably deconstructing and debunking a New York Times article about supposed skepticism in the scientific community towards Al Gore’s stageshow. Via How The World Works.
- Those damn bloggers just won’t quit: did they also kill the Fox-sponsored Nevada debate?
- John Dickerson looks at a “clever” (disingenuous?) edit in a John Edwards campaign video (sorry to pick on your guy again, mom). In other Edwards news, he now has a presence on Twitter, a site I haven’t quite figured out yet (maybe I should ask Josh Levy). And, his hair is coming back to haunt him.
- More video fun: Giuliani 2007, meet Giuliani 1989 — “There must be public funding for abortion for poor women.”
- Two takes on last week’s NOI training, with Matisse Bustos pointing out the over-abundance of white men in the room (but I’ve been losing weight!) and Jason Z revealing the deepest secrets about this reporter’s writing methods (he shall feel the sting of my wrath in due time).
- Campaign Design Review: McCain for President Let us spend a moment “staring at the grim, unblinking visage of John McCain.”
- User Generated Animation Site MyToons Launches. Another place to post those advocacy animations? Unfortunately, no NC-17 allowed.
- Apple unveils new product-unveiling product, finally realizing its true skill as a company.
- P&G Gives Tampax a Social Spin. Social media tampons = fun with cheerleaders.
- From Junk Mail to Junk World. A not-so-happy look at consumer microtargeting.
- Hydrocarbon glaciers and seas may dot Titan’s poles. Perhaps Halliburton should consider relocating there instead of the Persian Gulf. In other news from Saturn, the subprime mortgage market is planning to stage a comeback by financing waterfront property inside Enceladus.
- One Hit Too Many: the most bizarre image I have seen all week.
– cpd
March 14th, 2007
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An excellent presentation at last week’s NOI training examined the power of using your online campaign to gin up “earned media” (free media coverage as opposed to paid advertising), with Adam Green of MoveOn and Trevor Fitzgibbon of Fenton Communications looking at ways to create news hooks and to attach your campaign to unfolding stories. Much of what they covered should be familiar to experienced press relations folks, but they did an excellent job of showing ways that an online campaign can fit into a comprehensive press strategy.
Adam Green started things off by looking at WHY campaigns should try to get themselves in the newspaper, on television or in blogs — because it works. Media coverage can give a campaign instant credibility (“I read about you guys just the other day”), can help you reach a new audience, and is free (in money, though it can be VERY expensive in time). In particular, local media attention matters: it’s often easier to get than national coverage, it lets you leverage your local activists and it can lead to much broader distribution of your story if it gets on a newswire (even local blogs can help, since they may be disproportionately read by elected officials and other opinion leaders and can also serve as a source for national blogs — see this article for details).
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March 13th, 2007
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A couple of groovy events are looming in DC’s near future and you’ll hate yourself if you miss them, I guarantee. First off, tonight is the second Tuesday of the month, a perfect time for Hank Dearden and the Capital Cabal’s Second Tuesdays New Media & “Dot Com” Networking Party. It’s way out in Clarendon, so bring your tourist visa for the Old Dominion and schmooze away with the local online community’s best and brightest. Don’t forget to remind Hank to be on time for his Politics Online panel (I’ll be running the hour with a stern eye on the clock and a firm hand upon the whip).
Next, you’d damn sure better make it to Democracy in Action’s Thursday night dance-and-beverages party up in Columbia Heights — they’re releasing a new product version (codename: Salsa) and don’t mind serving up food and booze to celebrate. Despite a serious lack of salsability (I grew up on 4/4 time, kids!), I’ll be there as soon as we’re done drinking the Politics Online reception dry.
– cpd
March 13th, 2007
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Last week’s NOI online advocacy training turned out to be a real hoot and quite informative to boot. Our little Wired/Tired/Expired exercise was a hit, with participants dividing into groups to come up with their own WTE matrices for common online advocacy tools. The NOI trainees’ creations aren’t available on the web yet, but I’ve pulled together the responses from online political professionals who did an online version of the same exercise — we amused the NOI folks last week by doing dramatic readings from the list after they’d presented their own versions. This exercise turned out to be hard, with only a handful of people out of hundreds asked filling out all five categories on their own. See the results, some of which are quite funny.
– cpd
March 12th, 2007
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Hey kids, I’ll be helping out with an online advocacy training for the next few days — should come out of it with a slew of new articles.
March 7th, 2007
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I’m not entirely sure how this happened, though it may have had something to do with the hundred-dollar bill I stapled to the application form, but e.politics has been chosen as one of three finalists in the “Best Blog — National Politics” category for this year’s Golden Dot awards, to be given out next week at the Politics Online conference. Wow, very cool! Thanks, y’all! I’m just tickled pink, particularly since the idea of doing this site first started brewing at LAST year’s Politics Online. The category contains an interesting mix, with one group-blog/wiki from the Daily Kos community joining e.pol, which I would consider a practitioner’s site, and Extreme Mortman, a political opinion site. Keep your fingers crossed!
– cpd
March 6th, 2007
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Hey kids, the New Organizing Institute needs your brain — what do you think is Wired, Tired or Expired in the use of email lists, video, blogs, websites and social networking sites for advocacy? We’ve put together a simple online survey to tap your creativity along with a couple of examples to get the juices flowing. Humor is welcome; substance even more so. We’ll use the results in a session at this week’s NOI training for nonprofiteers. Thanks for your help! Take the survey now.
– cpd
March 5th, 2007
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