It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Well, of the summer. Well, of the summer fundraising season. Okay fine — maybe it’s not that wonderful a time at all, but it’s certainly interesting, at least if you’re into raising money online. Why? Because June 30th is the end of the quarter, meaning that candidates are rushing to collect as much as they can before the end of the reporting period. The more cash raised, the better — both because money equals advertising and because money equals credibility in the eyes of reporters and political professionals.
And finally: “Democrats tend to have more problems with harassment, staffers and underage girls while Republicans tend to have more problems with prostitutes, hypocrisy and underage boys.”
New guest author! A fresh voice around here, at least. But Shana Glickfield‘s hardly new to the internet politics space, since she’s an experienced online communicator, one of the founding partners of The Beekeeper Group (“a new public affairs firm in Washington, DC, leading the industry towards toward a community-based, hive-driven approach”) and an all-around cool chick. Check out her thoughts on FourSquare for advocacy below:
Get in the Game With Foursquare!
Shana Glickfield
As a self-confessed Foursquare addict, I’ll admit I am a bit biased in writing this post. I can’t wait to see all of my favorite businesses, organizations and candidates get in on the craze. And I’m far from alone.
So just why is there so much excitement about this new tech tool? Unscientifically, I believe it’s because Foursquare cuts out a lot of the clutter on Twitter, driving us back to Twitter’s original question of “What are you doing?” But the Small Business Labs blog captured the real reason Foursquare has everyone talking:
“Foursquare is getting a lot of hype for several reasons. First, it sits at the intersection of a number of interesting technology trends: location-awareness, mobile computing, social media, social commerce, the real-time web and social games. This is an exciting mix for the geeks that hype these things. Foursquare is also easy to understand, is fun to use and has the potential to add value to both consumers and businesses.”
Contest time! For the 11th year running, Phil Noble’s PoliticsOnline.com (teamed with the World eDemocracy Forum) is seeking out ten folks who are changing the world of online politics, and you can help. To participate, just go to the entry submission page and contribute suggestions by July 9th — send your favorite person or organization to the awards ceremony at this year’s 11th World eDemocracy Forum, being held October 13-15 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, Paris. And just remember, when you’re submitting e.politics, the last name is spelled D-E-L-A-N-Y…Boxless and I could use a trip to France, yes indeed.
Integrate or die: words seen on Epolitics.com before and for good reason, since standalone online campaigns rarely work as well as ones combined with concrete action in the physical world. For a good example of how the virtual can combine with the real to yield results, see Food and Water Watch‘s campaign last year to get federal approval for schools to buy hormone-free milk through the National School Lunch Program. As described by Sarah Alexander at a June 17th Digital Capital Week presentation, Food and Water Watch followed a strategy that wound online and offline action tightly together to get the best out of both, in part through leveraging the results of a van trip through the states and districts of crucial legislators. Note: the cow costumes didn’t hurt.
If Rep. Joe Barton’s apology to BP CEO Tony Hayward was “a political gift” to Democrats, as Rahm Emmanuel put it, the Dems are working to make sure that it’s a financial gift — and one that keeps on giving. After Barton’s most impolitic statement at last week’s Capitol Hill hearing on the Gulf oil spill, the party was quick to jump online with a plea to fund TV ads against Republicans “sympathetic” to the petroleum giant. Key point: that Republican victories this Fall could put Barton in charge of the House Energy and Environment Committee, making him the legislative gatekeeper on environmental regulation. Besides the inevitable online petition, Gibbs tweet and DNC fundraising email, the DCCC has also run Facebook Ads to the tune of 20 million impressions per day, no doubt hoping for a secondary branding effect in addition to any direct click-throughs to the petition/fundraising page. Thanks, Joe! Hope that case of foot-in-mouth disease clears up soon…but not before November.
The oil spill may be an ongoing tragedy in the Gulf, but Louisiana’s coast was in danger of disappearing for a long time before the Deepwater Horizon well was a gleam in BP’s eye. For years, a combination of levees on the Mississippi, land subsidence, the extension of a vast network of canals through the coastal wetlands, invasion by non-native species and sea level rise have conspired to sink the state at a rate of a football field’s worth of land lost PER HOUR. How?
Glad you asked, since the staff at the legendary New Orleans Times-Picayune has put together a clear and concise visual explanation of how the Mississippi River created the place we call Louisiana, and how our changes to the river system are destroying it. Check it out, or read more from Epolitics.com about social media and the BP oil spill.
Time for the first official 2010 Epolitics.com summer reading recommendations! Both books featured today are written by friends-of-epolitics, which though not a prerequisite for recommended status sure doesn’t hurt. First up:
Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking by Deanna Zandt, blurb below.
The times are not just a-changin’, they’re a-revolutionizin’! As social media becomes increasingly present in our everyday lives, a major democratic cultural shift is underway. Through the power of relationships, sharing of experiences, and organizing online, previously marginalized voices are pouring into and shaping public conversations like never before. But serious change will not happen on its own. Despite the increasing presence of a diversity of voices and faces, the Internet isn’t fulfilling its disruptive potential; more often than not, it’s simply replicating and amplifying inequality and segregation.
Enough technology for one beach trip? Next up is The Upper House, a look inside the U.S. Senate through the eyes of several senators elected in 2006 and 2008, written by Terry Samuels, an epolitics drinking buddy who’s formerly an editor at TheRoot.com and who also covered Congress for US News and World Report. You can read a Bob Kerrey review from the Post plus plenty of others, or just jump straight in and order it at Amazon. Terry’s also hosting an event at Kramerbooks on Monday for the DC set; I’ll see you there. Congrats, y’all! Great work on the dead-tree-media front — perhaps one day we’ll join you there.
Here we go again — yet another pronouncement of the death of email, this time by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (see video below). Allyson Kapin has an excellent response on Frogloop, and I’ll just note that way back in 2006 one of the first posts on Epolitics.com dealt with predictions of email’s demise, a subject we’ve revisited time and again since (once with Chuck Norris!). Honestly I’ve run out of things to say on the subject, other than that email was the killer app in politics in 2006 and again in 2008, and I don’t see a whole lot of reasons it’s going to change fundamentally in 2010.
Besides noting that predicting the death of email is a sure-fire way to get media attention (particularly if you’re a company that might stand to benefit from such a development), I’ll just close with a cautionary tale for would-be futurists — if I remember correctly, online guru Seth Godin predicted the death of email advocacy within five years at the GetActive user conference…in 2005. Looking around from the vantage point of 2010, I don’t see a whole lot nonprofits and political campaigns ditching their email lists — in fact, I see plenty of people trying to grow them as fast as possible. Of course email will continue to see a gradual and RELATIVE decline, since so many other online channels now compete for our attention, but I find it hard to believe that we’re going to ditch such a near-ubiquitous and immensely practical tool any time soon. And you can quote me on that.
In the Nevada case, they’re trying to help Harry Reid break up Republican Angle’s support among the fringe Right, in part by pointing out the fact that this “political newcomer” has been in the Nevada Legislature since the late ’90s and (I assume) has taken campaign donations from financial services firms. Will it work? The Tea Partiers are a purist and fractious bunch, liable to split along ideological and personal fault lines at the drop of a hat, so perhaps there’s some chance that it might. But conservatives were quick to catch on, and the advertising could backfire in the end.
Regardless, it’s a great example of how the internet can deliver targeted messages to people deemed likely to respond to them; whether they do or not is a different question. And the Patriot Majority’s overall outreach campaign (over 3000 fans on Facebook) once again reminds us that we should ALWAYS ask who’s behind an online campaign — the internet can lift high the small and silent, but it can also provide a grassroots facade for someone else’s money.
Fun thought question from Michael Clements, moderator of yesterday’s Digital Capital Week/Future of Media panel: if the world was once flat, then round, then flat again (at least according to Thomas Friedman), what shape will it be in five years? The audience fired back several good answers, but the idea that popped into my head and stuck there was “lumpy.”
What do I mean by that? Imagine the media world as a physical object resembling a 20-sided D&D die, but with many more points, each of them a publishing outlet. Some points will poke out more (the New York Times), others much less (some random dude’s Twitter feed), but each of them projects some distance above the surface and demands our attention. As you get closer to the surface, you’d see more and more outlets, but they’ll follow the same pattern over and over: you’ll always see a handful of prominent voices accompanied by many smaller ones, which in turn are surrounded by smaller ones, which in turn are surrounded by…(you guessed it) smaller ones.
In this model, in other words, the arrangement of points would be fractal (a term also tossed out as an answer to the shape-of-the-world question), meaning that the distribution is the same whether you’re talking about the macro level (the top online publishers) or the micro level (the handful of blogs and Twitter feeds about some obscure film genre). Dude, whoa.
Another description from the audience was “ethereal,” which captures the cloud-like (and constantly shifting) web of connections among online voices, something that my model could incorporate if the points could move around relative to one another (imagine Brownian motion-style vibration, but with more vigor). Fun stuff! And if this model is accurate, let’s hope that our own points keep rising — like mountains driven up by clashing tectonic plates, only more quickly.
“Dear citizen, you have been tricked by the foreign media and you are working on their behalf,” the message read. “If you do this again, you will be dealt with according to Islamic law.”
Pretty damn intimidating, particularly when it’s sent by the government and it arrives on a cell phone that’s probably in your pocket. Whether the messages were sent to known anti-government activists or just blasted out to phone numbers at random, this kind of direct and personal threat would dampen just about anyone’s revolutionary fire. And coming soon after a Foreign Policy piece that demolishes the idea of an Iranian “Twitter Revolution” last summer, it clearly demonstrates the ability of electronic tools to work FOR an authoritarian government as well as against one. Also note that the Times article that quotes the text message above mentions that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has now set up more of an infrastructure for monitoring electronic communications.
