Glenn Greenwald has a fascinating piece in Salon today detailing the work that bloggers and other online organizers did both in public and behind the scenes to derail, at least temporarily, the the reauthorization bill for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Senator Chris Dodd placed a hold on the bill, which would in part provide legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with government electronic eavesdropping that civil libertarians contend is a violation of citizens’ basic rights. For the moment, it’s been pulled from the Senate floor. According to Greenwald, once the initial deal was announced that seemed to guarantee the bill’s passage, a hardcore cadre of activists began working at blitzkrieg speed to derail it: (more…)
The Clinton campaign is using microsites (small, standalone sites separate from the main campaign site) for both offense and defense this week. First, the offense, in this case a clear attempt to humanize a candidate often seen as cold and calculating. The Hillary I Know presents video testimonials from people she has helped, comforted or influenced in some way. For instance, besides messages from constituents assisted by her office, you’ll also hear words like these from her dress-maker, Martha Dixon: “She’s a warm, caring person. I really got to know Hillary… I really think she’s a wonderful, wonderful person. I just love her.” Next, the defense, with The Fact Hub section of HillaryHub.com contradicting a Jake Tapper piece accusing her of improperly claiming credit for a FEMA-related piece of legislation. Considering how fast relatively trivial stories such as this one can grow legs and run all over cable news, rapid public response is a great idea and supplements direct contact with reporters. (Thanks to Mike Allen for pointing these out in today’s Playbook.)
Why use microsites rather than the main campaign site? For one thing, the campaign clearly wants to keep HillaryClinton.com zeroed-in on converting visitors into supporters, using a splash page to build the candidate’s list and keeping the site front page focused on relentlessly positive messages and filled with activist tools. Separating out The Hillary I Know into its own site puts the emphasis on the videos themselves and also gives them a distinct context — note the soft earth tones and the rolling array of faces. HillaryHub has a much different audience — reporters and bloggers — and is a good holding place for harder-edged pieces that the campaign had rather not throw in the faces of casual HillaryClinton.com visitors. The problem with microsites, of course, is that each one has to be promoted separately, diluting a campaign’s marketing efforts. When you’re trying to reach a different audience or spread a message distinct from a general campaign site’s intent, though, microsites can be an excellent tool.
EVERYBODY’S getting in on the political act these days, even the T-shirt makers. On Thursday, online shirt/gear maker CafePress sent out a note promoting their services as a political message-spreader. CafePress works by letting people upload graphics and then have them placed on t-shirts, coffee mugs, yard signs, clocks and ton of other goodies. Once you’ve put your images up, anyone can order the items. And since they’re only printed on demand, you don’t have to invest in shirts or mugs and hope the sales materialize.
Political messages are a natural match, since why wait for someone else to make yard signs or shirts for your candidate or cause? The email includes some basic tips — pick a side, make a statement, tie your products to the election schedule — things obvious to experienced political communicators but useful for someone just starting out. Not surprisingly, the Ron Paul army’s already all over the site, in some cases with excellent imagery and messaging.
BTW, the band and I have been using CafePress for a couple of years as a channel to distribute Burning Sensation gear of the greatest possible quality and taste (for instance, can your life truly be complete without a patented Ring of Fire thong?). Thus has our influence spread around the world, as this picture of a particularly fetching fan sporting Burning Sensation colors on the Great Wall of China demonstrates.
Next, the Bad: Obama, Under the Clinton Microscope. Hillary staffer Bob Nash tries a little opposition research via email, forgetting that messages might just get forwarded.
On to the Good, beginning with a pop culture/political culture mashup of epic proportions: Six Degrees of John Edwards.
Next, in a move to outflank Edwards’s Kevin Bacon connection, Craig endorses Obama! Alas, not Larry Craig, but Craig Newmark of Craigslist, who’ll no doubt be able to provide the campaign with plenty of cheap furniture and even cheaper dates.
And we just can’t get enough of Edwards today: check out this excellent Wash Post feature that takes the words that voters use to describe the candidate to pollsters and displays them as a tag cloud. Sounds nerdy, but the results are an impressively easy and intuitive way to see what people are thinking.
A little bird dropped a message off this weekend that someone’s running Google Ads for Ohio Congressmember Bob Latta and pointing them at the Republican fundraising site Slatecard. Good tactic! Latta’s raised $1900 through the site so far and is currently featured as a “Hot Candidate” on its front page.
Unfortunately, I doubt that these particular Google Ads put much extra cash in the kitty — mainly because the link to the fundraising page is broken. Since it could be fixed at any moment, I’ve take the liberty of saving the page in its damaged form for your enjoyment. Click on the Google Ad to the right with the enticing “Support Bob Latta with a donation and more at Slatecard” and see what happens — at least since this weekend, you’ll get a “file not found” [Hey David and rest of the Slatecard guys, how about a custom 404 page so that at least people can see SOMETHING useful when they request a page through a bad link?].
Rule #1 of working online: ALWAYS test your stuff. I’ve been coding HTML since about 1996, and I STILL make mistakes constantly, as the readers of this site take great joy in pointing out. You’re better off if you just assume that your links are broken and your coding sucks and test everything until you’re sure it all works. Otherwise, as in this case, you risk paying money for zero results.
This weekend, Leslie Wayne reported in The Caucus that the very successful Democratic fundraising site ActBlue is trying to expand beyond its emphasis on candidates and into the world of fundraising for political action committees and labor unions. One interesting feature of their request to the Federal Election Commission is that the organization wants to allow donations to groups from outsiders. For instance, non-union-members might be able to contribute to a labor PAC or people outside a corporation to a particular corporate PAC. The full implications of this one are a bit beyond my ken, and the FEC has yet to issue a definitive ruling on the request, but it’s an interesting move to keep an eye on.
The Obama campaign says that 68 percent of the people who signed up for tickets in South Carolina had never communicated with the campaign before, producing a bonanza of e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
Mmmmmm, list members — delicious AND nutricious, part of a healthy, balanced breakfast for any ambitious politician. Collect enough, and you can trade them in for volunteer work and donations, no proof-of-purchase seals required. Thanks to Ben Smith (who is not the Politico’s Ben Smith) for the tip.
Friday Fun comes a day early this week, with a terrific video mashup courtesy of the CamPain2008 YouTube channel. Excellent work! It doesn’t tell us much about the political world, but that does nothing to detract from a standalone piece of genius.
Well, let me take back what I just wrote, because this video DOES tell us something significant about the political world: that it’s no longer an isolated part of our discourse, standing apart from the other endeavors with which we distract or enlighten ourselves. Politics is a part of pop culture, so a guy like Barack Obama can become a pop culture icon. Of course, you’ve got to have the right je nais se quois je ne sais quoi — can you imagine a similar piece featuring Chris Dodd or Tom Tancredo? Sure, but only with a healthy dose of irony. Via How The World Works.
A friend told me that the song is called “Chori Chori Gori Se” and it’s a love song. So, I guess it’s a take off on the Obama Girl video.
And…
A friend found a Chori Chori video with English subtitles. This song has a
lot of versions, remixes etc. It’s also in an english movie called the
Guru.
A couple of interesting scandal-related stories today: first off, as Wired and others are reporting, some excellent research by an expert with the company SecureWorks has found the spammer behind the recent barrage of unsolicited Ron Paul emails. Still unknown: who hired him.
Stewart’s detective work identified the botnet as part of a criminal operation in Eastern Europe called Reactor Mailer that offers spammers a convenient web interface to manage their illegal campaigns. The Ron Paul spam was managed by a spammer-for-hire who goes by the handle “nenastnyj.”
The political messaging was a departure for nenastnyj, and for the Reactor Mailer network, which is normally hired out by scammers offering fake watches, work at home opportunity and male enlargement products.
Was an over-eager supporter footing the bill? Or was someone managing a convoluted scheme to discredit Paul? Next, on to the Democratic side of the race, where a Hillary Clinton county chair in Iowa has lost her volunteer job for forwarding around an email accusing Obama of being a Muslim manchurian candidate bent on fomenting an Islamic revolt in the U.S. Thanks to Salon for the tip.
Hey kids, don’t forget about tonight’s political marketing panel discussion — if you haven’t registered yet, you can still show up, though you’ll have to pay a few bucks extra (tragically, I ain’t gettin’ a cut).
In other e.politics news, I’m doing a call-in show on Minnesota Public Radio tomorrow morning about YouTube debates, chatting with academics from Princeton and Wake Forest (hope my Palestine (Texas) High School degree is up to the challenge). Here’s the link if you want to listen (click the “News” link in the blue box at the top right) — the segment should start at 10:30 Eastern.
Money Could Stretch Out Campaign. Interesting idea — even though the primary season is compressed this time around, online fundraising might help candidates stay in the race even if they lose the early rounds (somebody call Ron Paul).
Facebook has also been a target lately of online advocacy rather than just a conduit for it: MoveOn.org and others have been smacking the company upside the head over its Beacon application, which shows on your profile and news feed the products you’ve recently purchased from participating vendors (hmmmmm, wonder why he needs all that itch cream?). After running into significant user opposition (organized in part through a Facebook Group, of course), the company has switched Beacon from opt-out to opt-in, meaning that users must now choose to use rather than have it installed automatically.
Before we get too much into the social networking weeds, take a look at this Sunday Post piece on kicking Facebook addiction. Burnout has been a real problem for plenty of online communities in the past, and I suspect that a lot of inveterate Facebook and MySpace users will eventually choose to live more of their life in private — particularly after more people get zapped for things they say or do online. Update: See also this Bivings Report piece on integrated Facebook marketing and advertising.
Brinson is the keeper of a massive e-mail list of much-coveted Christian voters that Huckabee is using to reach and organize people in early-voting states such as Iowa.
Brinson’s list numbers about 71 million contacts, with 25 million identified as belonging to “25 and 45 years old, upwardly mobile, right-of-center, conservative households,” he said. In other words, a target-rich environment for a candidate such as Huckabee, who is preaching a compassionate conservative message heavily infused with religious sentiment.
…
In Iowa alone, Brinson’s list has produced 414,000 contacts for the Huckabee campaign, a stunning number given that less than one-quarter of that total is expected to vote in January’s Republican caucuses.
Randy Brinson, an Alabama doctor, built the list while helping to market The Passion of the Christ, a movie that drew huge audiences of Christian conservatives and whose success shocked the hell (hah!) out of Hollywood.
Of course, there has to be a lot more to the Huckster’s rise than one email list: if he didn’t walk the evangelical walk, people would see through his conservative talk just as fast as they do Romney’s (whose positions are apparently held together with duct tape). Mike Huckabee isn’t just “reaching out” to evangelical Christian conservatives; like George W. Bush in 2000, he IS one of them, something that you can’t fake forever.
To a guy like Mike, a list like that must be immensely valuable, particlarly because it’s going to contain some of the most active Christian conservatives, including people who were willing to help organize their congregations to show up en masse for Mel Gibson’s Passion. We already know that Huckabee’s counting on viral emails to build support beyond the initial primary states, and this list clearly gives him access to a huge number of potential opinion leaders — the kind of people whose friends and family listen to them.
