Several interesting reads today on the email advocacy front. First, the latest article to predict the demise of email, though in this case the author makes a good point that future computers/cell phones/convergence gadgets will probably combine email, text and IM into a single interface, leaving us free to use the right medium for a given message.
In the meantime, plenty of us are using email all the time to spread nasty rumors, raise money and maybe even do a little advocacy. Once in a while it actually works, as this article from the One campaign shows: the International Monetary Fund has acknowledged that emails from the public played a role in the Fund’s moving ahead with Liberian debt relief. If that’s not enough, perhaps Chuck Norris can convince you — not only has he endorsed Mike Huckabee, but the karate expert/movie hero/star of the single most violent show on television is also raising money for the Republican candidate via email. Never let it be said that Huckabee’s campaign lacks punch…
Thanks to MSNBC for digging up a clip from a true classic — if I remember right, Chuck choreographed that fight (down to the chest-hair rip — ouch).
Okay, it’s more a meeting of the minds than a tag-team deathmatch, but Issue Dynamics has posted a virtual interview with me on their Blogger Relations site, the latest in a series of interviews they’be been doing with folks in the blog world. I told relatively few lies, for once, and we might even all have learned something before we were done. Thanks for the opportunity, y’all! I’ll be getting that tattoo right away, trust me. Though I tell ya, online politics can’t possibly compete with the previous topic: dickless marketing.
Two new sites popped up today that take very different yet effective approaches to advocacy. First, the serious side: the new CARMA.org site (Carbon Monitoring for Action) defaults to showing you the worst power plants in the world from a global warming perspective, but it’ll also let you find your own power provider and take a look at their plants’ emissions. Because the folks behind the site (the Center for Global Development) used a Google Maps interface, you can easily drill down to each plant and pop up data about how much power and pollution it puts out. Start adding those numbers up and it gets frightening fast.
Next up: satire, the highest art form, as the folks behind the Predatory Lending Association have figured out. Want to know the advantages of predatory lending over indentured servitude? Find out here! Need racial profiling tools? Try these! Quite clever — note the Military Loan Finder map application on the site front page that hooks you up with payday loan establishments clustered near military bases. The nice thing from an advocacy point of view is that both the hard-data and humor/satire approach can work if they’re done right. In these two cases, I think they were.
Update: After I finished this article, my NET intern Alicia LaPorte bombarded me with emails about the End Mountaintop Removal site, which also has great map features, video and a Willie Nelson song (can’t hardly beat that). It’s now her most favoritest advocacy site of all time.
Just got word via an email list that Green Media Toolshed’s site went down yesterday, and after the Convio hacking incident a couple of weeks ago, speculation immediately began in some quarters that nefarious happenings were afoot. Turns out, the culprit was a semi-truck, which knocked over a utility pole and knocked out a transformer (the power-grid kind, not the robot kind) in Texas, which in turn started a chain of events that ended up taking down a bunch of sites hosted by server provider Rackspace. Forget Russian hackers — it looks as though trucks will now join backhoes as the great enemy of online communications.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, two nasty online tricks on the same day, what a lucky bunch we are. First, check out this John Dickerson piece about a viral email that’s been nagging the Obama campaign like a bad cold. Apparently, word is spreading that Barak won’t say the Pledge of Allegiance and is hence all un-’Merican or some such, which is both untrue and a completely stupid non-issue, BUT it’s actually got enough people concerned in Iowa that the campaign has had to address it. Modern American politics: playground rumors + technology = fun for all.
Next up, take a look at this exposé of a global warming skeptic’s site that not only makes up fake scientific studies, it also fabricates the scientists and research institutions behind them. Nice work! If only Google weren’t, like, effective and stuff, you might be able to get away with it.
Rudy’s staff has added a “how many views has this piece received” feature to the blog, and my advice to them would be to start clicking on the articles like crazy, ’cause it sure doesn’t look as though anyone else is. Reed’s happy to point out that the November 1st “Hizzoner’s Highlights” seems to have been read 37 times, though several posts have reader counts in the hundreds.
Actually, a little experimentation shows that the “views” number reflects how many times the LINK that each article title points to has been clicked on, which is a totally different number than how many times the article itself has been read. In fact, all the blog posts seem to sit on the page in their entirety, and so an accurate reader count per article would be impossible unless you’re tracking actual eyeball motions.
What a strange way to run a blog all around — normally, an article title links to a standalone version of the post, not to some outside piece. The way the Guiliani site is set up, I don’t see how you can link to a particular article, leave a comment or trackback, or do just about anything else you expect to be able to do on a normal blog. It’s as though they decided to create a blog-like piece of communications technology without the actual blog features. The only piece of reader interaction? That click-counter, whose sole effect is to make it look as though the site is essentially unread. Nice, um, job.
Finally, someone on the Republican side (other than Ron Paul) is exploring new ground online: a great article in the today’s Times looks at how some Mitt Romney online display ads showed up on sites that the campaign didn’t exactly plan for, including Gay.com. Big tent indeed! Apparently, Advertising.com’s content filters didn’t work quite as planned, allowing the ads to end up on sites that the Romney campaign would have preferred to avoid. This brief bout of lifestyle experimentation doesn’t seem to be scaring them away from online advertising networks, though, according to Facebook-friend-of-e.politics Mindy Finn:
Mr. Romney’s campaign said the Gay.com spot had been placed in spite of a request to keep its ads off dating and alternative lifestyle sites, a request that may have been lost in communication with Advertising.com. (Aides said they also asked that Romney ads be kept off Web pages with pornographic images, gambling or left-leaning political content.)
Ms. Finn said the Romney campaign was becoming more careful, sticking to more artfully chosen “subnetworks” within the Advertising.com system.
“We have learned,” she said. “It provides a danger, but there is also incredible opportunity.”
C’mon, Mitt! There’s a potential Romney ARMY waiting in the ranks of gay porn aficionados (I’d make a niche-audience joke, but that might be considered in bad taste). Thanks to Alicia LaPorte for the tip, though she’s probably regretting it now.
The Sunlight Foundation has just put Google Earth to an excellent advocacy purpose: letting us follow the (budgetary) money. As the Foundation’s Gabriela Schneider writes:
Mashing up Google Earth and with the companies, universities and nonprofit recipients of earmarks in the House Defense Appropriations bill (available from Sunlight and Taxpayers for Common Sense on EarmarkWatch.org), citizens can get a bird’s eye view of where members of Congress are shipping our defense dollars, and zoom in close on recipients. Each plotted earmark links to a corresponding page on http://EarmarkWatch.org so you can investigate the earmark to determine whether it addresses pressing needs, favors political contributors or is simply pure pork. You can search for earmarks by city, state or zip code.
Now, Google Earth’s just about the most fun online tool to play with (Zoom in! Zoom out! Zoom in! Zoom out! Repeat as necessary), but this is a good example of the serious uses to which it can be put. Earmarks are those little “extras” that congressmembers slip into appropriations bills and are the eternal bane of budget hawks. Since they’re outside the normal budgetary process, publicity is often their worst enemy, and Google Earth really lets you see how they’re distributed in a way that text alone can’t. Let’s look at an example, courtesy of a couple of screen-captures and some Photoshop magic:
Writing in tPrez and his own site, for instance, Patrick Ruffini argues that:
Candidates like Paul and Huckabee are better able to capitalize on offline momentum because of the vibrant grassroots ecosystems that exist around them. These campaigns deliberately nurture these ecosystems not by bringing them in house, but by giving them prominent placement on their Web sites and access to inside dirt that was previously the province of finance staff only.
Many things in life benefit from a little parody, but some cultural artifacts are so extreme on their own that there’s no over-topping them. The silliest ’70s retro party you ever went to has NOTHING on the real thing, as you’ll see in this excellent little gem from 1977:
Who knew that you could do so much with terry cloth! It’s a goddamn miracle, and it’s also only the beginning — polyester and chest hair in immense quantities await you at the site 15 Minute Lunch, and I must implore you to scroll all the way down to the matching his-and-hers bathing suits. Yowza! Now THAT’S hotttttttttt. BTW, my parents got both the Penney’s and Sears catalogs throughout that glorious decade; who knows what works of art lurk in the backs of their closets.
Interesting new development in the world of social networking, with Google announcing the creation of a platform for Facebook Application-like tools that can run on more than one social networking site. The initial partners include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. TechCrunch goes into some detail about the implications; be sure to check out the comments thread.
When I first heard about it, I didn’t realize that MySpace was involved, as you can see in my quote on page 2 of the current Campaigns & Elections magazine Campaign Insider, where I’m a bit skeptical about the immediate political effects. Having MySpace involved could really make OpenSocial a more useful tool for U.S. political advocacy, since the site’s audience in the States is so much larger than those of all the other social networking sites besides Facebook combined.
Still, Facebook apps have yet to revolutionize online political advocacy, though Facebook groups certainly have their political uses (alas, not enough oomph to get Stephen Colbert on the ballot). As I said at the end of the C&E article, “Honestly, we don’t know how much these things matter…we haven’t gone through an election cycle [yet] in which MySpace and Facebook are going to play a major role.” My prediction: soc nets will have their place, but most campaigns will raise more money and organize more volunteers for real-world action using good, old-fashioned email.
