e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

December 5th: Organizing 2.0 Conference in NYC

In the New York area and looking for something interesting next weekend? Check out Organizing 2.0, “a grassroots-led conference of social justice organizers primarily from labor and the community organizing world.” I’ll be a lunchtime keynote speaker; should be a hoot. A whole day of training and discussion on new media tools and tactics in the political space for only $15? That’s crazy talk! Still a few spots left…

– cpd

Add comment November 30th, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Quick Hits — November 25, 2009

A few stories to be thankful for:

• Where Obama is Losing Support. Turns out, crossover Republicans are souring on him, not independents.
• The Perils of Texting (oopsie!)
• Online Advertising In The U.S Begins To Stabilize.
• White House video team readies Thanksgiving turkey-pardoning spoof.
• Google’s Michelle Obama fail: The first lady gets an unflattering online makeover.
• Why reconciliation might not save the public option (or, bloggers attempt to run the Senate w/o understanding the rules).
• Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute . C.f. Climategate!, Stolen e-mails reveal venomous feelings toward skeptics, Explaining ClimateGate: A history of distrust and Browner Shrugs Off Hot Debate on Climate Change Emails.
• EPA tells workers to tone down YouTube clip about climate bill. C.f. Dark messages of climate change ads around the world.
• How Alan Rosenblatt saved the Daily Show.
• Let’s go on a friendly ChurchOuting! Oh, wait…
• BlogTalk: Taking Sides on Afghanistan.
• Mention Palin, get a traffic boost. C.f. DNC raised $11 million in October — and is raising more off Sarah Palin.
• Conspiracy website WND teams up with House Republicans at the Capitol. C.f. Socialized medicine intrudes on the march against Obamacare.
• Iraqi Government on YouTube.
• Russian policemen turn to YouTube.
• A Web of Lone Wolves: Fort Hood shows us that Internet jihad is not a myth.
• Obama Runs into the Great Blogger Wall of China.
• China proves to be an aggressive foe in cyberspace.
• 84,448 Fans and Counting. Lessons from a Heritage Foundation online campaign.
• Apocalypse Then: Was Y2K a Waste?
• Twitter: Time’s ‘Person’ of the Year?
• What’s the future of online advocacy?
• Idea – #FollowFriday for #HashTags > #HashTagTues.
• The dizzying ambition of Wolfram Alpha.
• At 15, Salon.com Tries Once Again to Reinvent Itself.
• Patrick Ruffini sees Cuomo Google Ads.
• No Energy Tax site misleading?
• Gene change in cannibals reveals evolution in action.
• Communicating with ‘A Woman’s Nation.’
• Stuff white people tweet.
• Depressed woman loses benefits over Facebook photos.
• A Friend’s Tweet Could Be an Ad.
• Sideswiped by scandal, trapped by the past. A blogger tries to reinvent.
• Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s Web site can’t make up its mind about the public option.
• Sudan Ads Target Obama’s Circle.
• GOP leads new media charge. Really?
• McDonnell Online Strategy: People Matter.
• Lewis 4 Labour: Reviewing a Welsh politico’s web presence.
• Examples of Bias in Conservapedia’s Examples of Bias in Wikipedia.
• Ten Reasons Why Using Twitter Will Boost Your Happiness.
• Points-Based Rewards Drive Donor Engagement.
• Five Social Media Fundraising Trends for 2009. C.f. The Right Way to use Social Media for Fundraising: Wildlife Direct.
• Video: non-profits turning to social media during recession.
• Is This New YouTube Tool an Advocacy Dream?
• The Problem with Retweets.
• How Important are Bloggers to Online Campaigns?
• Weekends and Afternoons Show the Highest Twitter CTRs.
• Twitter is 80% “Meformers” and 20% Informers.
• Multi-Channel Fundraising: Strategies and Tools to Engage Donors through Integrated Campaigns.
• (A) Winning (Campaign) Widget.
• YouTube’s role in citizen journalism.
• Look familiar? Old campaign tool, new advocacy purpose. Repurposing an Obama peer-to-peer application.
• 10 Geeky Laws That Should Exist, But Don’t.
• The 9 Most Racist Disney Characters.
• Best Music Video Ever: The Muppets Do “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
• And finally: Man tied lizards to chest at airport (thanks Burt!).

Still trapped with the kinfolk and need an escape? Past Quick Hits are only a click away.

– cpd

1 comment November 25th, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Drinking from the Firehose: Why Obama Should Stay the Hell Off Twitter

Last week, a brief tempest in a teapot brewed up when Barack Obama mentioned in a townhall on his China trip that he’d never used Twitter himself. The whole thing blew by pretty quickly, largely since I doubt that too many people were genuinely surprised that The Leader of the Free World hasn’t played around with “his” microblogging feed. For one thing, Twitter barely existed when he started running for President, and he’s apparently been a bit busy in the intervening couple of years.

But I’d also argue that Twitter is fundamentally a bad match for a Chief Executive, for exactly the same reasons that so many other people are drawn to it. Like the rest of the social media universe, Twitter is effectively unfiltered, with a low wheat-to-chaff ratio even if you’re careful whom you follow. In many ways this is a strength, since part of the fun of the service is that you get access to so much information and opinion coming in from so many directions.

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2 comments November 24th, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Update on the Winning in 2010 Series/Guide

Hi y’all, remember that little series on How Candidates Can Use the Internet to Win in 2010? It’s been on hold for the past few weeks for various reasons; more on at least one of them soon. But with the first three chapters in the can and the final two in progress, I’m hoping to get the whole thing out the door and bundled up as a PDF/e-book by early next week. If not, you guys have free rein to whup up on me as appropriate — there are few things worse for a writer than to stall out three-quarters done, and I’ll welcome the “encouragement.” Keep your eyes on this space…

– cpd

1 comment November 24th, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Sarah Palin, Facebook and Insurgent Jujitsu

Check out Jose Antonio Vargas’s HuffPo piece on Sarah Palin from last week when you get a chance — he’s got some great numbers on the kind of online attention she’s generating, currently more than Obama.

Of course it makes sense that she’s creating buzz on the ‘net; not only does she has a book out that plenty of people are talking about, but she also manages to create conflict or controversy just about every time she opens her mouth or writes a paragraph. If it bleeds, it leads, and neither bloggers nor journalists are going to start ignoring her any time soon. The result? Lots and lots of searches for information about her and her book, plus plenty of new followers for her social media channels.

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6 comments November 23rd, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Political and Issue Advertising on Hulu

Interesting email in from Campus Progress the other day — as part of a student loan reform campaign, they’re running ads both on cable and on the TV/video-viewing website Hulu. The email itself focuses on encouraging recipients to watch the ad and spread the YouTube version virally via Facebook and Twitter, though it also includes a carefully couched fundraising ask as well (obviously not as much of a priority when you’re sending to college students). The landing page fits the email perfectly, with prominent post-to-Facebook-and-Twitter links plus an email-Congress (and presumably list-building) angle as well.

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Add comment November 22nd, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

An Internet Politics Index to David Plouffe’s The Audacity to Win

Here at e.politics, we’re happy to read things so you don’t have to — though in this case you should, because David Plouffe’s The Audacity to Win is well written and one hell of a glimpse into the strategy, tactics and execution of a remarkably successful political operation.

Suspecting the book’s value as a resource in the future, I took extensive notes as I read through it — essentially creating an index of every substantive mention of online politics in the book, which I’ve reprinted below as a resource for y’all, along with a few links to relevant e.politics articles (the current edition of the book doesn’t include its own actual index, unfortunately).

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6 comments November 20th, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

David Plouffe: Negative Viral Emails As Bad As Negative TV Ads

Also published on techPresident

Just off a conference call to promote Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s new (and so-far excellent) book about the 2008 race, which I’m currently about 3/4 of the way through — more about that soon. On the call, though, I got to ask a question about the behind-the-scenes smear emails that circulated regularly throughout the campaign — what did the campaign do to respond that was most effective, and how should future political operations reply to similar tactics?

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Add comment November 18th, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Enlisting the Web in the Redistricting Wars

Redistricting isn’t sexy: it involves numbers and maps, it’s wonky, and just thinking about it makes voters go to sleep. Which is immensely helpful to the politicians redrawing the lines every few years, because they know that almost no one outside of hardcore politicos is actually paying attention.

But redistricting is where the rubber meets the road in politics, since setting district boundaries is all about power: who has it, who keeps it, and who has a chance to get it in the future. And as the state-level victors of 2010 redraw legislative and congressional districts across the country, they’ll also be establishing the boundaries of power in Congress and 50 different statehouses.

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2 comments November 17th, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Help My Dad Light Up Africa (Voting Ends Today! is Over for Now)

In his latest bid to Save The World, my father’s come up with a way that folks in the developing world can build their own local electrical generating systems. His invention is human-powered (using a treadle, like an old sewing machine) and can charge old car batteries that then provide electricity for night-time LED lighting (so kids can read!) and cell-phone chargers.

Like its parent project, the MultiMachine, Project Genny (for “Generator,” get it?) relies on scrap material that’s available all over the world, in this case an old car alternator to convert motion into electricity. This sucker could transform lives in so many ways it’s not even funny: besides charging economy-altering cellphones and giving children the ability to study after dark, it can help in areas ranging from health (the kerosene lamps currently typically used for night-time lighting are terrible on the lungs) to economics (kerosene can suck up 25-30% of a family budget) to global warming (kerosene = carbon emissions).

You can help spread the word, but time’s tight! Dad just found out about a Peace Corps Foundation competition for development projects last week and got his entry in under the wire. Voting ends today (Sunday), so please swing by the site and cast yours now! Be prepared — you’ll need to give ‘em an email address and click on a confirmation message first. Regardless of the outcome, this contest isn’t the end for Project Genny (or the MultiMachine), so keep an eye on this space for more to come.

– cpd

Add comment November 15th, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Quick Hits — November 9, 2009

A few stories lingering on the list.

• Radical Imam Blogs His Support of Ft. Hood Shooter.
• Gay bloggers organizing boycott of DNC. C.f. Bloggers Furious At White House For Anonymous Ridicule.
• More Sarah Palin Facebook fun.
• Low Turnout Didn’t Cause Democratic Losses.
• New Advocacy Site Maps and Tracks Journalists in Peril.
• Kansas lawmaker’s anti-Obama ‘RedNeck Rap’ off Web.
• Why running the White House Web site on Drupal is a political disaster waiting to happen. C.f. Inside (and Outside) the White House Drupal Switch, Tim O’Reilly’s Three Insights into the Drupaling of the White House, and Before Drupal, There Was “The Tool”.
• Bloggers v Climate Change.
• Defending Clunkers with a Data Dump.
• Candidates Use Behavioral Targeting to Reach Voters.
• The Calculus of Mayor Mike’s Online Ad Blitz, plus “Facebook Guy’s” Thoughts on Campaigning.
• Using Twitter Lists to Judge Influence.
• Online Left Bundles Dollars for Grayson.
• Whither Obama & Co.’s Organizing Might? Plus, Twitter + Ads + Daily Kos = SEIU’s New Health Care Campaign.
• Ralph Lauren owns up to Photoshop disaster.
• E-Mail Mocking Obama Is ‘Exhibit A’ in Wrongful-Firing Suit.
• Did Meghan McCain get called a slut? Twitterfight!
• Wiesel slams tea partiers over Holocaust signs (on Twitter, natch).
• In Today’s Viral World, Who Keeps a Civil Tongue?
• MySpace for Millionaires not doing so well.
• Michele Bachman’s daily choice of reading material.
• How The Huffington Post uses real-time testing to write better headlines, via Burt Edwards.
• Membership Data Becomes Newest Weapon Against Britain’s Far-Right BNP.
• An Architect for the Machine Age.
• Edward Burtynsky’s Oil.
• The online ad market: “We’re not dead yet.”
• Criminalizing Twitter.
• Twitter: Disrupting Politics from Coast to Coast.
• NBC Taps SocNets to Generate Olympic Buzz.
• Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2010: Flash, Crowdsourcing, Info-Art.
• The psychology of Google Wave.
• Recessipedia, via Brett Schenker.
• Refugees set to tap demand for virtual workforce .
• Best advice for building nonprofit e-mail lists.
• Report Card: Which Groups Use Social Media? The response: One Year After Obama, Most Big DC Orgs Aren’t Embracing Social Media Tools, DC Social Media Survey Touches Nerve, and Participation in Social Media Does Not Equal Success.
• Wen Jiabao apologizes for geology error.
• The future of political journalism? Salon v Politico, again.
• 50 Serious Games for Social Change.
• Best Practices in Online Advocacy for Associations, Nonprofits, and Corporations.
• Googling Virginia’s Vote.
• The Fine Art of Timing a Money Bomb.
• Asteroid blast reveals holes in Earth’s defences.
• W.Va. House to stream sessions online.
• Can Public Data Be Too Public? Inside WA’s Domestic Partnership Debate.
• Shot at RNC “Hosting” Bill Draws Return Fire.
• “Designing Obama,” a Few Dollars at a Time.
• Report on Online Townhalls Finds Enemies on the Right.
• Why Obama Is Taking His Time on Afghanistan.
• How one company of Marines is helping to bring Afghan insurgents home. A glimpse at what it takes to do modern counterinsurgency.
• Now THIS is comprehensive battle damage analysis.
• Our lovely neighbor, plus an impressive shot of part of the extended family.
• Six diseases you never knew you could catch (see first comment for a perfect example of the genius of the internet).
• And finally: Cat Congress Mired In Sunbeam, via Alicia LaPorte.

C.f. Past Quick Hits.

– cpd

Add comment November 9th, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Don’t Copy this Al Gore Email

The message below came in recently from an alert reader, who received it from Al Gore/Repower America and passed it along because she thought it was a great example of how to really lay it on too thick in a mass email. The online tool itself that Al’s promoting? Neat all around — it collects video clips from people across the country and displays them through a cool Flash interface that lets you scan around remarkably easily. A little slow to load, but an impressive visual experience with a great social media angle.

Unfortunately, the email is so over-the-top (and reeeally long) that it dilutes the tech-cool aspect of the whole idea. This one should serve as a lesson on how to aim for sincere but hit a little closer to ridiculous, and to use a whole lot of words in the process.

Dear Repower America Member,

When a clean energy economy finally becomes a reality in America, people will look back to the day that together, you and I launched The Repower America Wall.

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4 comments November 5th, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us