Hmmm, somebody better check on Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency appointees: they must be frothing at the mouth — or unconscious from shock. Yes, an email just arrived from John McCain’s campaign touting the candidate’s enviro-friendly promo gear:
In our new store section, we’re proud to offer eco-friendly t-shirts and polo shirts made from biodegradable fabric, as well as organic cotton hats and shopping bags. You can also buy travel mugs and notebooks made from recycled materials.
Wonder what Rush will have to say about this one…Operation Chaos is over, Operation Cognitive Dissonance has begun. (Note: the online store address didn’t end up in the PDF, but here it is.) BTW, dig the shampoo-bottle logo:
John McCain, from Hanoi Hilton to New Age fashion mogul…$50 for a polo shirt? THAT’S change we can believe in.
OMG! WARNING: Over the top, offensive humor! Note comment: “Godwin’s Law: As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
Media criticism in context: “Yes, it would be nice if the press spent less time on inanities and more time on how candidates planned to actually run the country. But this view of the media is just too simplistic.” Via Salon.
I hate to risk alienating my new BFF Mark Zuckerberg, but has Facebook’s moment in the sun as a hot political tool passed? And if so, what does that tell us about the future of social networking sites for online political organizing, and even about the future of Facebook itself?
We’ve now seen more than a year of intense use of social networking sites by the U.S. presidential campaigns (and even longer use by issue-advocacy groups), which gives us a solid base of information and experience to judge just how effective Facebook is as a political tool — both for organized political campaigns and advocacy groups and for individual political activists. The verdict? Facebook has not lived up to a lot of its initial political hype, and for reasons that are perfectly natural considering what kind of a site it is. The crux:
My old friend Dean Karlan wants YOU to help improve online advocacy — he’s one of the folks behind a site called stickK.com that that aims to get people to follow through on their commitments by entering into a binding contract, and he’d like to look at how this model will affect online advocacy. Become a guinea pig and you’ll help advance the art and science of motivating supporters — and you might just reach some of your own immediate goals along the way. Details below:
Henry Copeland of Blogads: “As the social media winter looms, the winners will be the folks with strong relationships, low overheads, a strong commitment on innovation rather than coat-tail riding, and, most of all, a indelible passion for the business. We’re looking forward to seeing you after the bust.”
In her presentation this morning, Morra Aarons-Mele made an excellent observation: internet staffers for political campaigns are expected to do everything and to know everything. The same is true in the advocacy world: when I was at the former National Environmental Trust, at various times I was a graphic designer, an HTML coder, an online communications strategist, an email advocacy guy, a database manager, a blog outreacher, a site statistics analyst, a social networking pro, an online advertiser and a trainer of interns — sometimes all in the same day. About the only things I didn’t do were to blog for the organization and to raise money online, and that was only because NET didn’t do those things.
Web staffers are expected to have a broader range of skills than any other part of a campaign or organization (example: do you expect your press relations folks to be fundraising experts?), and yet they’re still often underpaid and kept out of critical communications decisions until late in the process. Bizarre. Oh, and BTW, I can’t fix your computer — it amazed me how often people confused my job with that of our actual (and excellent) IT guy.
I can only assume that this situation exists because the ‘net seems like voodoo to traditional political staff, who often seem to have little idea what actually goes into online communications. As the ‘net insinuates itself more and more into politics at all levels, a change had better come — as Zack Exley put it, you won’t hire an internet person and put him or her in a box, you’ll hire communications staff who actually understand how to use the internet.
This just in from a Drudge Report Siren Alert email: “Controlled excitement is building inside of Clinton’s inner circle… Developing… CLINTON INTERNALS SHOW 11-POINT LEAD IN PA.”
Ah, sweet spin…you gotta love phrases like “controlled excitement,” particularly the day BEFORE the primary election, when there’s still time for a campaign to hope to get late-deciding voters to jump on the bandwagon. The online tie-in, of course, is both the Drudge Report’s involvement itself (remember those mutterings earlier in the election season about a Drudge/Hillary connection?) and the more general vast explosion of channels for distributing a message (see pro wrestling, below). Obviously we have no way of judging the validity of an internal poll whose methodology is opaque, and the Clintonistas have every incentive to get out a positive message at this critical point in their candidate’s political life (Update:they’re denying it). So, who knows how valid this story is. Still, think about the 1988 presidential campaign: it was only 20 years ago, but in media terms, it now seems like an ancient, remote and alien era.
It’s always fun when dueling campaign emails arrive in the e.politics inbox only minutes apart, particularly when they’re so gently massaging the same issues-of-the-moment. Today’s edition: Obama vs. McCain. The weapons: “bitter” vs. “out of touch.” The immediate stakes: the contents of thousands of wallets. The long-term stakes: the public perception of each man, and ultimately his electoral fate. Today, Barack hit first, fast and jujitsu-style, seeking to define his San Francisco comments as a hymn of love to the great America heartland and his rivals as shady opportunists for trying to take advantage of them:
But our opponents have been spinning the media and peddling fake outrage around the clock. John McCain’s campaign, which will continue the George Bush economic policies that have devastated the middle class, called Barack out of touch and elitist. And Hillary Clinton, who is the candidate who said lobbyists represent real people, didn’t just echo the Republican candidate’s talking points: she actually used the very same words to pile on with more attacks.
Bonus points for the McCain-Clinton combo strike! Four head-spinning minutes later, John McCain went to DefCon One and dropped the E-bomb — the dreaded charge of Democratic Elitism:
If Barack Obama is the Democrat nominee in the general election, the American people will have a clear choice between two different visions - Senator Obama’s liberal, elitist philosophy and John McCain’s faith in the small town values that continue to make America great. John McCain will not forget them or write them off. Neither should Barack Obama.
Who will win this contest of wills, this battle of generational champions, this struggle for the Very Soul of Middle America? Don’t touch that dial…
Science Link of the Day: “There you have it: the world’s most sensitive eyes allow them to be simple! And smash things! And it’s worked for 400 million years.”
Here’s a fun new Flash-based toy from Joseph Gordon and some of my other former NET colleagues at the Conserve Our Ocean Legacy Campaign: see if you Have What It Takes to be an Ocean Survivor. Guide your tuna through an ocean full of hooks and nets while you also dig the dramatic soundtrack and exciting 3-D backdrop (with moody clouds and stab-of-sunshine lighting effects). Once you cruise to a brutally high score, you can leave it online for others to read and weep. The game does a good job of integrating the learning component, since you get a brief educational bit about each nasty tool that eventually does in your brave fish, and you’re also encouraged to sign on to an email petition (hello, list-building). Nice work all around, guys.
Greetings from New Orleans and the Nonprofit Technology Conference, where e.politics is bearing up nobly under the strain of going to fantastic cities and hanging out with bright and interesting people. Rough life, I know
As a takeaway for the participants in our online advocacy panel on Friday, below are a ton of articles on various aspects of the question of spreading a message and working to change politics and policy online.
Update from the Politics Online Conference: some quick numbers from Patrick Quinn of PQMedia on how candidates are expected to spend their money online in 2008. First, online spending should total roughly $73 million at all levels in the ‘08 elections. Second, email marketing is still dominates expenditures, taking up 62% of campaigns’ online spending. Web development is next on the list at 27%, with display, search and video ads taking up the remaining 11% of online budgets. For comparison, the 2004 numbers were 74% for email, 19% for web development and 7% for ads.
Marketer Brent Rosengren has embarked on a journey through the wilds of presidential email campaigns, using commercial email marketing standards and practices as a standard, and guess what: ALL of the top-level campaigns fail the test. Each of them makes critical mistakes that limit the effectiveness of their mass emails, their primary means of communicating with steady supporters and converting them into donors and activists.
Email is a behind-the-scenes medium, so political marketers may not be aware of how much effort goes into testing and measuring email marketing techniques in the commercial world. Businesspeople pay attention to email for the simple reason that it works: as Rosengren notes, “When compared to the ROI of mass media advertising, email continues to dominate; for every dollar spent on email marketing, marketers can expect an estimated $48.29 return.” From the signup process to subject lines to message content and landing pages, political email marketers can and should learn from the tools and tactics of our colleagues in the business world.
So what mistakes are Obama, McCain, Clinton, Huckabee and friends making? Some are ludicrous — most campaigns didn’t even include forward-to-a-friend link in their messages, something that comes standard on most email marketing software packages. Other campaigns had cumbersome sign-up processes, weak subject lines and overly long messages that buried the ask, problems that user-testing and statistical analysis should be able to correct (i.e., segment your list, run several different subject lines and see which ones work best, something that nonprofit fundraisers and advocacy experts have been doing for years). What’s sobering about Rosengren’s analysis is how elemental many of the mistakes are, but that also means that they should be relatively easy to correct. If his piece only whets your appetite for good mass mail practices, check out the Online Politics 101 chapter on managing email advocacy.
Update: according to An Experienced Political Mass-mailer I chatted with last night, leaving off the forward-to-a-friend link may have been intentional, since every extra link in an email will pull some people away from the action you really want them to take. So, if you’re solely trying to raise money, that forward-to-a-friend link may be counterproductive.
Update:Primary Season Signals Adoption of Online Ads by Political Campaigns. “Not only are those ads relatively inexpensive; they’ve allowed often cash-strapped campaigns to determine whether their dollars were well spent, before voters went to the polls.” Lots of details in this one.
Politics and tax top US search league. Also note that Huckabee’s site outdrew McCain’s by 50% in January, and that Obama’s site had double the traffic of Hillary’s and four times that of McCain’s.
U.S. Spies Want to Find Terrorists in World of Warcraft. Juan Cole replies:
“The recent alarmism about terrorist activity in virtual worlds seems designed to prey on the fears of the Internet common among the Great Unwired. Most of the concerns are simply unreasonable.”
From the beginning of Campaign 2008, liberal media pundits have fawned over the Democrat presidential candidates while ignoring their lack of substance on the issues. You can be certain that as the campaign heats up they will continue to mislead voters with their anti-Republican agenda.
Joe, Republicans must fight back against the mainstream media’s clear liberal bias — and we need your help to do it.
According to every TV type I heard last night, one of the few things the Far Right seems to hate more than John McCain is the Times, so perhaps this (potential) scandal will provide an effective hook for coaxing some bucks out of the faithful. At the very least, it’s won over Rush Limbaugh for a couple of days. And note how quickly it blew the Obama/Patrick plagiarism affair off the air.
Seeing more dollar signs, the McCain campaign and the RNC decided to jump at the chance to take advantage of the distraction they had created to raise money. They had spent the day firing their supporters up, trying desperately to change the subject, and then they literally cashed in on it. It was textbook sleaze.
My old NET colleague John Anthony (who’s soon off to a new gig at the U.N. Foundation) writes in today to note an online aspect to the current Democratic “scandal” — to back up her claim that Barack Obama plagiarized Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has emailed political reporters a link to a YouTube video that shows speeches by the two side-by-side:
While we’re on the subject of video, John also points out an ABC News collection of citizen-generated viral political pieces, which is a little hyped-up but does include a lot of our old favorites. To see for yourself, scroll down to February 18 and click on the “Political Viral Videos” link.
