Archive for October, 2011
Hi y’all, your editor was a bit under the weather a week or two back and almost let three good stories slip through the cracks. Never fear — they’re brought back from the dead below, appropriately enough on the night before Halloween.
Traditional lobbyists are leery of Twitter, Politico finds, with few using social channels in their outreach work and most of the big government relations firms having little or no social media presence at all. Friend-of-e.politics and Beekeeper Group partner Shana Glickfield notes the missed opportunity when she points out that many Hill staffers are relatively young and tech-savvy, and she also lets our friends in the lobby know that a social media program can coexist nicely with old-school in-person office visits. Where have we heard about the idea of integrating online and offline communications before?
His technique? Infiltrating an OWS listserv and downloading messages to send to the cops and (worse) to Andrew Breitbart, who posted them online. Judging from the fact that the story died pretty quickly, I’m assuming that nothing too scandalous showed up, but it’s yet another illustration of the old idea that nothing stays secret long on the internet. E.politics follows a classic rule on listservs on social media, and even in a lot of personal emails — don’t write anything down that you wouldn’t want published on the front page of the New York Times.
This article is in the Post Business section, so it’s less about politics than about NationalField’s attempt to connect with corporate customers, but it’s a good introduction to the company and what it brings to political field organizing: NationalField will help Democratic campaigns use volunteers and staff more efficiently in 2012. Not as sexy as Facebook and Twitter, or as startling as a Herman Cain video, but it’s the kind of behind-the-scenes digital politics that should actually make a difference on election day.
– cpd
October 30th, 2011
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Here’s a little something to check out: a few days back, the Obama campaign published a very clever infographic that lays out information they’d like you to know about the 1,000,000 people who’ve donated to the President’s 2012 reelection effort so far. The fun part is that it’s interactive — i.e., you can play with it to find things out (technical note: it uses javascript/dhtml rather than Flash, which no doubt helps with accessibility).
For instance, you can move a slider to find out what percentage of donations fell into certain ranges (for instance, 95% were $150 or less). Or, you can click days of the week to find out what hours saw the most donations (handy for other online communicators looking for benchmarks), see which professions dominate the donor base, how many new donors were recruited by friends and family, or check out how many people gave money from a given state or state-like entity (DC!).
Of course, the numbers reflect a narrative that the Obama campaign would like to portray: that its donors are part of a broad-based movement representative of the country as a whole, not some kind of coastal phenomenon dominated by the “liberal elite” or a handful of moneyed political bigwigs. One thing that’s clear? Just as in 2008, Obama will be able to go back to his small donors again and again throughout the primary and general election process, while his chief opponents (in this case, Romney and Perry) are relying (overwhelmingly so far) on a relatively small group of geographically or professionally restricted donors who’ll hit their legal maximum on campaign giving quickly.
– cpd
October 28th, 2011
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The earlier announcement of our Digital Capital Week panel reminded me that the CampaignTech conference is coming up fast — it starts Thursday, November 10th, which is now less than two weeks away. Get yer tickets now! Here are the details on the panel I’ll be participating in.
Building a Blogger Network
Friday, November 11, 10:15 – 11:15am
Sometimes, size can be a powerful thing. This is particularly true when it comes to building communities of activism online. Today many political operatives create blogger networks to help build conversation and debate around a political party, issue area, or ideology. What do you need to know to join or build a blogging network of your own? How can you use existing blogger networks to join the conversation?
Should be an excellent conversation — I’ll be chatting with Charlie Harper of Peach Pundit and Rebecca Wales of Smart Girl Politics, with Adam Bink moderating. Looking ahead, that’s going to be a hell of a few-day stretch, with the DC Week panel on Tuesday and CampaignTech Thursday and Friday. In between? Guess who’s coming to dinner at my day job….
– cpd
October 28th, 2011
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Fascinating article over at Google’s Politics & Elections blog: their analytics team looked at search trends for Occupy Wall Street and compared them with those for the Tea Party, and the results are most interesting.
- Search interest in OWS spiked ahead of the Tea Party in late September and continues to outpace it — by a lot.
- Peak interest in OWS (so far, in mid-October) topped that in the Tea Party (at least slightly) at a similar stage in its development.
- Relative mainstream media interest in the two is stuck in the past, with OWS getting barely more media hits than the Tea Party — a result whose implications track with what we saw earlier on Epolitics.com when we looked at how how much more attention OWS received on social media channels than traditional media channels. Guess what, journalists: people care about OWS…a lot.
Check out the article for more, and note when Tea Party searches typically peak — at tax time.
– cpd
October 27th, 2011
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Howdy folks, here’s a bit of news — I’m on a panel that Roshani Kothari has organized for the upcoming Digital Capital Week. Other panelists include my former New Media Strategies comrade Nisha Chittal (now at the Travel Channel) along with Bob Fine of The Social Media Monthly magazine, Jon Camfield of Ashoka Changemakers and Bonnie Shaw from iStrategyLabs. Our topic? “Hot Tech Trends: Looking Back at 2011 and Ahead at 2012.”
Cool stuff, and you can help out by weighing in on the question in advance via Quora. Look for us at Affinity Lab (920 U Street NW, DC) on Tuesday November 8, 2011 from 7:00pm to 9:00pm, and you can learn more or RSVP here. And of course, a full list of Digital Capital Week events is available at DigitalCapitalWeek.org. See you in a couple of weeks!
– cpd
October 26th, 2011
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Screenshot of post-occupation Epolitics.com, transformed by OccupyTheURL.com
Occupy Wall Street and its spin-offs haven’t just taken over public squares across the world, they’re also getting really creative online. Here are a couple of examples for your consideration, one of which is brand new:
Occupy the Boardroom
OccupyTheBoardroom.org’s premise is based on stripping away the anonymity behind which our corporate overlords hide, by targeting executives and board members directly for advocacy actions. So what if corporations are faceless, deathless entities to whose puppeteer’s strings we all dance — they’re still run by human beings. And as humans, corporate managers can feel embarrassment, shame, horror and all the other emotions that beset puny mortals like us (at least, we hope they still can).
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October 25th, 2011
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New guest author! Jon Wheeler is an old friend who’s recently relocated below the equator and sends this update on how online tools are playing out in a very different political environment than we’re used to in the States.
The Internet and the Argentine Elections: The View From (Way) Down South
By Jon Wheeler
Six months ago my wife and I left our home and jobs in Washington, DC and headed off for a extended sojourn in the land of meat, malbec, mate (and her birth) — Argentina. Turned out to be fascinating timing for a political junkie like myself, as 2011 is a major election year in Argentina, culminating this Sunday with the national presidential election.
Perhaps not as exciting as it could have been, though. By all accounts, the incumbent, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (or just Cristina, as she is either affectionately or dismissively called by her supporters or foes) is expected to win either outright on Sunday or a few weeks later in an unlikely run-off election. Still though, there have been some intriguing characteristics of this election — especially the use of the Web and social media in the campaign — that I thought Epolitics.com readers would find interesting.
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October 21st, 2011
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Howdy folks, my first section for Campaigns & Elections magazine is out! The print version is in the mail and the online version is live. Check it out, in two parts:
The next column’s due in a few weeks, and I’m always looking for new ideas. So pitch away if you see anything interesting out there! What doesn’t go into C&E might just find its way onto Epolitics.com, so everyone’s a potential winnah. Rock and roll.
– cpd
October 20th, 2011
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Here’s a cool resource and the product of a collaboration between the folks at Rad Campaign and Craig Newmark (as in, Craigslist Craig) — it’s an infographic illustrating data about how leading nonprofit organizations use social media.
The information is pretty basic but includes numbers on how often top charities post online, how many feature social media buttons on their website front pages, which ones have the most followers, etc. In an email, Rad Campaign’s Allyson Kapin points out something in the data, that “the organization with the highest net income, the YMCA, only posted 19 times to Facebook in two months, but has over 24,000 fans” (note that “net income” refers to the nonprofit’s overall fundraising, not to online-specific fundraising).
Interesting, but I’d suggest that this disparity actually makes sense, since the YMCA has chapters all over the country and hence a natural base of fans. This means that plenty of people are active members and thus primed to associate themselves with the organization online, but the YMCA itself is already raising plenty of money and may not see much need to engage heavily on Facebook. We’ll see if that changes over time, and I’d be curious to see how individual YMCA chapters use Facebook and Twitter versus how the overarching national organization approaches them.
One other note: to see the full graphic, you have to “follow” Craig on Facebook…clever audience-building strategy, my friend!
– cpd
October 17th, 2011
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Everybody step back: the programmers are entering the building. Without the need for formal leadership, folks are self-organizing hackathons to help build digital tools for the Occupy Wall Street movement this weekend. So far, events are planned in three cities:
Stock up on the Mountain Dew and Cheetos, kids! These events are a great example of how multi-faceted a modern grassroots political movement can be. Sure, plenty of people are camping out on Wall Street and in cities across the country, but that’s not the only way we can be involved. Here’s a great opportunity for the ones-and-zeroes crowd to contribute their skillz and experience to what’s shaping up to be a pivotal development in our contemporary political culture. Even if the mainstream media didn’t notice it until people started getting arrested.
– cpd
October 14th, 2011
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Also published on HuffingtonPost
Nate Silver had a great piece in the Times over the weekend, looking at how clashes with police seem to have driven mainstream media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests (a classic example of the principle of “if it bleeds, it leads”). The centerpiece of his article is the chart below, showing the pattern of relevant media hits:
Nate’s article made me wonder about the comparable pattern of discussion on social media channels, a far more democratic (with a small “d”) set of media. Our new friend Steve Kleine was able to produce the social media numbers for “Occupy Wall Street” and “OWS,” hot on the heels of his first article for the site, and the results are striking:
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October 13th, 2011
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New guest author! Steve Kleine is the Principal at Ensomo, a social media monitoring and analysis firm, and in the piece below he introduces us to the basic concepts campaigns need to know about this ever-more-important aspect of online communications.
Four Steps for Effective Social Media Monitoring in Politics
By Steve Kleine, Ensomo
Social media monitoring (SMM) is rapidly becoming a hot topic as campaigns and elected officials realize just how much unbiased data is being churned out about their candidates every day across the social web. The social media universe truly has become the world’s largest focus group. Many campaigns are taking advantage of this huge mass of data to not only communicate with their current and potential supporters, but also to gain significant intelligence on potential voters.
For example, social media data can provide insight on how a particular speech or debate was received. Did it increase the number of positive mentions? Are people understanding the messages behind it? Other examples of the benefits of a solid SMM plan include measuring how a candidate is perceived on current issues, finding new issues before they get covered in traditional media and seeing if a new ad campaign is making an impact.
SMM is a daunting task, but a well thought out strategy can help your campaign find the best program for your unique needs. Here are a few steps to help you get started.
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October 13th, 2011
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