Archive for June, 2012
Update: Naturally, CNN’s headline mishaps have led to Twitter hijinks.
So the Affordable Care Act is upheld! That’s great, but who won the internets? My nominee: SCOTUSblog, which at one point had 866,000 people simultaneously reading its live coverage and analysis of the decision. The site administrators apparently lined up six mirrored servers via two separate hosting providers to handle the surge (redundancy is a virtue!), and it handled both the traffic influx and the unveiling of the decision itself with great aplomb.
Unlike some other news websites we can think of. Let’s check CNN.com’s initial online announcement:
Are you guys sure about that? Meanwhile, over at SCOTUSblog:
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June 28th, 2012
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Screwing up a web project isn’t hard — I’ve done it a time or two myself in 15-odd years in the field. Screwing up a web project in truly epic style? THAT can take some effort. Fortunately, Elana Levin and Aaron Welch have our back, with a little Netroots Nation presentation they called “How to Ensure Your Web Development Project is a Complete Failure.” It’s embedded below, so get some popcorn and a drink and be ready to take some notes. Afterwards, if you don’t fail, you have only yourself to blame.
– cpd
June 27th, 2012
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Quick update: while we were lounging around the e.politics bunker on our recent publishing break, media calls just kept on a-comin’ in. The highlights:
Very cool! Combined with that recent WSJ story, it’s been a great few weeks for press down here. And, these articles are good examples of the kind of interest in digital politics we see in a presidential election year.
– cpd
June 25th, 2012
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One reason Epolitics.com has been so quiet lately? The sweet lassitude of summer has sung its siren song for sure, but I haven’t yet succumbed — too many projects have demanded a delayed start to the season’s easy livin’. A major one went live late last week, and my NWLC colleagues and I have been busy promoting it since: check out the new Faces of Title IX, which tells nine stories of women and girls whose lives have been changed because of the law that guarantees equal access to educational opportunities.
This site was a true joy to work on, since we focused almost entirely on storytelling and design. The result is a gem of an online presentation, and I’ve been told to warn you to have tissues handy when you read the stories (my soul is too cold and jaded to notice, of course).
Note that behind the site’s surface simplicity lie literally HUNDREDS of hours of work: among many other contributions, my NWLC colleague Melanie Ross-Levin came up with the idea, comms guru Maria Patrick spent weeks gathering and editing the stories, Maria and our in-house designer Beth Stover created a layout that I think is drop-dead gorgeous, Rad Campaign built the Drupal template and the technology, our Education/Employment issue team pulled together the background resources, and our whole staff helped spread the word. My part? To help translate Maria and Beth’s vision to the web, which involved everything from strategic thinking to technical specs to a lot of detailed CSS work.
Political communicators rarely get to build a project like this one, more focused on creating a mood and telling a story than on sparking immediate action on a pressing problem. It was a true joy.
– cpd
June 22nd, 2012
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Another great guest article from our old friend Beth Becker! Bonus: look for Part Two in the next couple of days.
Rethinking Social, Part One: Social Media is Social Sharing
By Beth Becker
For the last two years I’ve begun every social media presentation/training I’ve done with the following statement:
“It’s called social media. You have to have the conversation. The internet isn’t just about pushing information out broadcast style, it’s about growing and connecting community. If you’re just going to broadcast, go build a better website.”
While that’s never been more true, a new truth is also emerging within the social networking landscape that we ignore at our own peril. Social media is about Social Sharing. It’s not just about having the conversation, it’s about growing the conversation by inviting those with whom you’re conversing to share the it with their friends.
In recent months we’ve seen an explosion of social sharing from the rise of Pinterest (which I first wrote about here on Epolitics.com a few months back) to MoveOn’s “The Daily Share” email to the newest creation from some big names in dot-com, Upworthy. It’s about moving information from its point of origin to others via social networks.
Thinking about social media in this way allows us to reshape some of our big-think strategy in the space:
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June 21st, 2012
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New guest article! Ben Donahower is an experienced campaign operative who runs Campaign Trail Yard Signs. No stranger to our esteemed pages, Ben wrote about QR codes in politics last August. Below, he heads to The Dark Side to examine some online tools for opposition research.
Online Tools for Opposition Research
By Ben Donahower
Perhaps you think about opposition as a dark art where ruthless operatives find skeletons in a candidate’s closet. Or, maybe you picture a hapless intern poring over mountains of papers at the county courthouse. While there is some truth in both of these stereotypes, these days a lot of opposition research happens online. Many of the best tools are household names, but opposition researchers leverage them to reveal information that can change the course of a campaign. Buckle up!
Google Search
Using advanced search operators, researchers get the most relevant search results unlocking a treasure trove of political intelligence. You can also get to many of the advanced search options by clicking on the options drop down on the top right of the search results page and choosing “advanced search.”
If you’re interested in a walkthrough of some of the ways that you can use Google search and docs to research a candidate’s background and pull voting records, check out the opposition research guide (self-aggrandizement alert, I wrote it) below:
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June 20th, 2012
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Howdy folks, yes we are still alive down here in the e.politics bunker, despite all indications to the contrary — what with conferences, a day job and Campaigns & Elections demanding time, the site has had to take a back seat for too long! That stops today — let’s start crankin’ some content.
First up: slides from yesterday’s presentation by Julie Germany, Kurt Luidhart and me at C&E’s “Art of Political Campaiging” training seminar. We had a great back-and-forth discussion that looked at how campaigns can find, target, recruit and activate voters, volunteers, donors and activists using online tools, and we hit the crowd with so much juicy information that we left ‘em reeling. Check it out…if you dare.
– cpd
June 19th, 2012
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