Archive for April, 2007
This Saturday, I happened to catch an episode of NPR’s On The Media, an excellent show that I’m going to have to start following as a podcast (it’s on at 4 pm on Saturdays here in DC, a time when I’m usually out on a bike or drinking heavily or both). In the first segment that caught my ear, writer Matt Bai talked about structural changes that the online revolution could bring to the way we do politics in the U.S.
On the current system:
Essentially, consultants keep driving up the costs of a race by insisting that it has to be fought over the air at high expense. The networks keep raising the money to astronomical rates for these ads, ’cause they know that the campaigns are raising it, and the ad guys are making out like bandits. And I don’t think they’re going to be quick to tell anybody that that business model no longer works, but I do think it’s going to become apparent.
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April 30th, 2007
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Ailea Sneller over at Frogloop has written up a nice summary of the presentation on cell phones and advocacy that Katrin Verclass gave at Alan Rosenblatt’s most recent Internet Advocacy Roundtable. A sample:
Unlike telemarketing, mobile campaigns offer something a bit more fresh, fun and cutting-edge than old-fashioned cold calling. A surprising percentage (35%) of adults are already willing to receive incentive-based advertisements on their cell phones, especially in text message format. Katrin expects that number to grow as successful mobile campaigns become more common. With 212 million cell phone users in the US — about 75% of the population — the potential for using mobile phones (“mo-phos,” as the kids call them) as a tool to grow your organization’s visibility and spread your message is enormous. This is especially true when, unlike a PC or a mailbox, people carry them around “like their keys and their wallet,” Katrin said — you can literally put your message into someone’s pocket.
She also touched on some of the downsides of mobile advocacy, though not in detail, finishing on a more positive note: “at its best, mobile activism and advocacy offers the potential for great interaction, much more personal communication with supporters, and gobs of viral potential.” Check out the article, and also see this past e.politics guest piece to read more on mobile advocacy’s pluses and minuses. For some details about mobile’s use in the 2006 elections, take a look at this review of a Mobile Monday event from a few months ago.
– cpd
April 27th, 2007
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Kevin Reid with IDI wrote in yesterday to highlight an ongoing series of Second Life events that the International Fund for Animal Welfare is holding to try to mobilize public opinion against Arctic seal hunting. I’m normally a bit of a Second Life skeptic, but this is the sort of mass-appeal campaign that’s most likely to get some benefit from venturing into the virtual wilds. Cute seals! It’s hard to beat charismatic megafauna for getting attention, though in the Second Life context they can get a bit distorted: it looks in one of the photos as though there might be some delegates on hand from a Furry convention. The site has a transcript of a prepared statement, and I’d be curious to see how many questions came in from participants.
I’ve heard of other groups that use Second Life as a virtual meeting room to allow people from around the world to participate — an example of using the strengths of the medium rather than trying to force it into being a mass-communications device.
– cpd
April 25th, 2007
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A new study from the Pew Center for the Internet and Public Life finds that 36% of online Americans use Wikipedia, roughly half the time getting to the site from a search engine link. Better-educated folks and broadband users were more likely to turn to Wikipedia than their less-educated and slower-connected brethren, meaning that the collectively-written online encyclopedia is disproportionately likely to reach potential voters (since voting tends to rise with education). Hmmmmmm, the presidential campaigns are reputedly already monitoring Wikipedia just as they monitor blogs, but what about down-ballot races? Coverage of big-city mayoral, senatorial and congressional elections may start popping up in its pages, and candidates had better be aware of what’s written about them. Thanks to Micropersuasion for pointing the study out.
Update: by focusing on political races, I forgot about issue-advocacy. What are people writing about YOUR issues? You might wanna check….
– cpd
April 25th, 2007
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For an example, let’s take a quick look at the front page of yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer: “After weeks of blogging about the Philadelphia mayor’s race, Sam Katz has taken a step toward jumping into it.” Would that sentence have made any sense whatsoever ten years ago? If you’d have used the “b” word in 1997 (or 2001, for that matter), most people would have wondered, “what the hell is ‘blogging’ (and is it legal)?” Now, most readers would pass right over it without really noticing. New tools lead to new practices lead to an entirely new vocabulary.
White House email scandal? Email’s an older technology and an older word than “blog,” but it’s still only become ubiquitous in the last decade — I can remember talking to folks in DC in 1996 whose organizations were “going to get email in the next six months or so.” Now, electronic mail might just bring down some folks at 1600 Penn.
(See previous article on this theme here.)
– cpd
April 25th, 2007
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In a meeting of pop culture powerhouses that surely foreshadows the coming Apocalypse, Mark Burnett, the guy behind “Survivor” and “The Apprentice,” has teamed up with MySpace to create a competition to find “the nation’s next great politician.” Viewers of the broadcast component of the contest, to be called “Independent” and currently looking for a network home, will help eliminate one competitor per week, as on most reality shows, until a winner is left standing — and holding $1 million to give away to a “worthy” cause.
For once, the tv show will only be a part of the action, since the budding politicos will compete throughout each week to build friends on MySpace using promotional videos and similar tools. The show’s planners have high hopes for its influence on the political system:
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April 25th, 2007
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Quick Hits Returns! (And this time it’s personal…)
- Al-Jazeera launches YouTube channel, apparently leaving film editor at home. On a related note, American conservatives launch a site to keep House Dems “accountable.”
- Internet Now Infested With Offensive Content. I believe my work here is done.
- Presidential Debates Go Online. See previous item.
- But wait! Is porn losing the popularity contest, or simply penetrating the popular?
- MySpace Launches Site For U.S. Spanish Speakers. Candidates, hitch up your translators and let’s go for a ride on the bilingual social networking frontier.
- But we’d better get there quick or people might think you’re a weirdo. Why come you have no MySpace? “In the future, those without profiles risk being ostracized. Privacy not as privilege, but as crime.”
- MoveOn vs. McCain: It’s Smackdown Time. Hotline has the numbers on MoveOn’s primary-state ad buy, and Slate thinks it might just backfire.
- Up the revolution — No More Landing Pages! (via AdRants). But wait, here’s an AdRants story worth landing on: short shorts return.
- Digg.com reveals news stories fade after 1 hour. I can think of quite a few that I WISH had faded after an hour.
- Is advertising being supplanted by conversation? Another AdRants find (clearly on a roll).
- 2,914 MarketingSherpa Readers Can’t Be Wrong. At least, if they’re talking about viral marketing.
- Why RSS can make your life better: singing the praises of Netvibes, and Jason Z. finds that stick people make the best RSS explainers of all.
- One hit too many: Bizarre photos from White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Wonkette readers unsure if Julia Allison was replaced by a wax dummy or just photoshopped herself into the pics. My, what a nice (and consistent) back-arch — you simply MUST refer us to your personal trainer.
– cpd
April 24th, 2007
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Bring me the head of a web intern! (and cart along the rest of the body while you’re at it). Yep, I’m fixin’ to lose a long-serving intern at my day job and am commencing the hunt for the next one. The officialese: I’m looking for someone to serve as a web intern in the communications department at the National Environmental Trust. The job would pay approximately $1100/month and would involve work on websites, email advocacy campaigns, social networking outreach, blogger outreach and whatever else comes to mind that day. The position is full-time, starting in early May and running through August, with a possible extension through December.
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April 23rd, 2007
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Update: Politico.com’s publisher responds. See below.
The recent discussion about Politico.com’s traffic “stickiness” got me thinking about the different strategies behind building a niche audience vs. building a mass audience. What differentiates the two? First and formost, niche audiences are, well, niches — they’re groups of people drawn together by a common interest or set of interests. Because of their concentration, they can be valuable to advertisers trying to reach exactly that niche. Because of their relatively small size, they tend to be manageable, both in terms of the technology required to serve their needs and in terms of the time needed for customer service/reader contact.
Most money-making/popular blogs are niche sites, as are many more traditional online magazines and publications. Display ads (banners, blog ads) on niche sites that host a desirable audience are often carefully targeted to appeal to those exact readers and hence can command more money per ad impression. Sites usually supplement targeted ads with lower-cost run-of-site ads, though, if they have unfilled inventory. Google Ads and other context-sensitive text ads are a special category, since they’re linked to a page’s content and are theoretically always targeted, but the amounts site owners earn can vary immensely depending on the value of their niches and on how “clicky” their readers are.
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April 23rd, 2007
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At a presentation last night to the assembled journalists (and a few randoms like me) at the Knight New Media Center online politics seminar, Politico.com editor Bill Nichols mentioned in passing that in March, the Politico site had six million page-views and two million unique visitors. That ratio really jumped out at me, since for most sites, the average reader hits two-ish pages per visit — sometimes painfully less, and for sites like YouTube on which people browse extensively, significantly more.
Doing a little math, Politico’s averaging three page-views per UNIQUE VISITOR for the entire month — in other words, their average reader only looked at three pages over the course of the whole month of March. Not the healthiest of ratios! Why does this matter? One classic measure of a site’s long-term success is its “stickiness” — the extent to which it keeps people on the site for long periods and also keeps them coming back for more. So far, at least in terms of traffic, Politico’s not looking so sticky.
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April 20th, 2007
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[Cross-posted on the Covering Politics in Cyberspace blog.]
More from sprawling depths of Los Angeles — in a lunchtime presentation at the Knight New Media Center online politics seminar, Michael Skoler of Minnesota Public Radio gave a glimpse of an promising approach to integrating social media and traditional media to broaden a news outlet’s coverage. It’s potentially a good model for organizations or campaigns planning to use supporters to help tell their stories and to support their messages. Plus, they have some neat games you can play — for instance, why not build your own fantasy Minnesota Legislature (what more could we want from life?).
MPR’s Public Insight Journalism project builds a partnership with public radio listeners by bringing them in as both cited journalistic sources and as a channel for finding under-reported stories. MPR has created a network of over 40,000 people who have volunteered to help with stories and regularly contacts individual members or groups of members if their expertise might be useful.
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April 19th, 2007
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Internet/politics legend Mike Cornfield, who’s also here in LA for the Knight New Media Center seminar on Covering Politics in Cyberspace, just shot me a link to a groovy new application from OpenSecrets.org — it’s a browsable, graphical representation of who’s giving money to which presidential candidates. In a classic network-analysis format, it represents candidates and donors with circles and connections as lines. It’s also a Flash application with lots of nifty interaction: for instance, click on a candidate, then click on a big donor or on a category of donor, and up jumps the web of THE DONOR’S political links, along with the amounts they’ve contributed to each candidate (hmmmmm, Goldman Sachs LOVES Obama and Romney — a winning cross-party ticket if I ever heard of one — but doesn’t have quite as much juice for Hillary, Edwards and Dodd). Here’s a snapshot of a sample page; go dig around and see what you can find.
– cpd
April 19th, 2007
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Steve Rubel recently pointed to an article from Google’s “Consumer Packaged Goods” blog (a niche most of don’t contemplate regularly) that covers the question of damage control in a crisis, a situation that absolutely never ([cough] Macaca [cough]) arises in the political world. The article is aimed at companies trying to recover from a product recall or similar brand-disaster, but campaigns can learn from it as well. The author’s observations:
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April 19th, 2007
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