Archive for November 13th, 2007
Just got an email from a friend in Texas who heard a Ron Paul ad on CNN radio over XM this morning. He couldn’t tell if it was a normal CNN radio spot or a satellite-radio-only ad, but it still jumped out at him enough to pass along the word. A quick search turns up evidence of Paul’s new spending spree, and the article has lots of good details about his campaign’s relative frugality to this point — even before the November 5th fundraising frenzy, he still had over $5 million on-hand. Clearly, based on the CNN radio ad, he’s at least experimenting with national media in addition to the primary-state ads that the article discusses. Maybe a massive advertising blitz will be enough to break through and convince the mainstream media that he’s a serious candidate, but probably not — he doesn’t fit the official script of how the campaign is supposed to go….
Not that I’m predicting a Paul presidency; the same factors I talked about back in June still apply (for instance, I can’t see the majority of Americans voting for a guy who’d do his best to get rid of Social Security, Medicare and most of the rest of the government benefits and protections average citizens enjoy). But, how about covering the guy as something other than an oddity and letting his ideas stand on their own? Why does every presidential race have to boil down to two or three frontrunners and everyone else, and with the “everyone else” part written off long before a single vote is cast? Not an original thought, I know, but still something that utterly mystifies me about the American political process.
– cpd
November 13th, 2007
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Cross-posted on techPresident
Time for another in our occasional series of articles chronicling dueling emails from the Republican and Democratic National Committees (very exciting, yes). Today, the Rs struck first with a quite clever message from e-campaign director Cyrus Krohn hitting Hillary over the head about the release of Clinton presidential records. Sign the petition and get your own Clinton library card! No fundraising component until you’ve actually signed the petition (Cyrus, mine’s under the name “Joe Bob Dobbs”), unlike with previous GOP messages, which seems odd. I also see no counter, ticker or other active measure of the petition’s success on the page. Still, an improvement over previous GOP efforts — at least it’s topical and fun.
A vastly different message arrived from Howard Dean and the Dems this afternoon: they’re circulating a strategy memo that (shocker) predicts major Democratic gains in 2008, assuming that we all pull together as a team and do our best to win one for the Gipper (oh, wait). Seriously, it’s a fascinating idea to talk to your list members/supporters as intelligent human beings rather than just as organic ATMs or click-happy mass emailers. Of course, there’s fundraising involved (note the challenge component), so it’s a party-building exercise in more ways than one. Nice job all around.
Update: Now with typos and bad links fixed — the dangers of writing in a hurry.
– cpd
November 13th, 2007
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A quick update from the technical side of online politics:
- Grassroots Enterprises has put out a new virtual phone-banking tool they’re calling PhoneTheVote. Virtual phone banks replace a roomful of volunteer callers with a distributed network of activists calling on their own cell phones or VOIP connections and coordinated online. Other applications like this are already around, often as custom-builds; look for virtual phone banks to become more and more common as the software becomes cheaper and easier to implement.
- The federal Election Assistance Commission has put out standards for electronic voting equipment and is asking for comments from the public. The topic is a yawner for a lot of people, but considering that we’re talking about the technology behind the most fundamental act of democracy, it’s something to pay attention to. At the very least, you can start thinking about how YOU’D corrupt the system if given the chance. Vote early! Vote often!
- For every online ad, there is a landing page — or at least, there probably ought to be. Landing pages are where people go when they click a Google ad, follow a link from an email action alert, type in an address from a TV ad, etc., and they might just be more pivotal in the process of converting curious visitors into supporters than most of us think. The folks at Marketing Sherpa have spent years studying how to set up landing pages to maximize the customer/supporter conversion rate; the second edition of their Landing Page Handbook is the result (only, um, $497). Warning: the process of tweaking landing pages may bring out the obsessive and experimental sides of people otherwise quite mild and reasonable of manner.
That’s it for today’s News 4 Nerds; if you require an antidote, try this.
– cpd
November 13th, 2007
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