Posts filed under 'Marketing/Promotion'
- Update: The Obama Camp Dials It Forward. Post-primary conference call plays it subtle, while all is well in ClintonLand.
- McCain Launches Spanish-Language Website. Wonder how the Minutemen (no, not THE Minutemen) will feel about THAT one?
- Bury bad news with online press releases. Somebody forward this to Hillary Clinton. C.f. Craigslist Ad Of The Day.
- The critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. From gin to sitcoms to lolcats, via Henry Copeland.
- Bunches o’ Studies and Stats on Nonprofit Marketing.
- How-To: 10 Tips for Launching a Solid Podcast.
- Two new guides to presidential online advertising from Clickz, Online Presidential Display Ads Leading to the 2008 Primaries and All Primaries Are Local: 2008 Presidential Campaigns Buy Local Online.
- The Tale of the E-mail. Hillary and Barack’s constrasting post-Indiana/NC notes. C.f. She’s Still In, And She’s Still In To Win.
- Pew Study Confirms Cell Phones Rule.
- Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth.
- Right now, I’m watching the President of the Utah State Senate on my desktop. Julie, you had me at “desktop.”
- Google Reader is becoming more of a social networking application.
- Twitter Post Rescues Jailed Journalist, but Egyptians ignore Facebook call.
- How the White House lost 5 million e-mails.
- Jailed Chinese Journalist Shi Tao’s Poem Follows Olympic Torch’s Route Online.
- Matt Stoller on how liberals rule the web, and The Baltimore Sun on how Matt and friends raised 400K for Donna Edwards. Via tPrez.
- Phantom Obama Vote Appears on NJ Voting Machine.
- Web Ads from Left and Right Advocacy Groups Signal More to Come.
- 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.
- North Carolina Radio Host Reports Anti-Obama Chain E-Mail Distortion As Fact. C.f. Pennebaker: Clip Doctored, about the Mickey Kantor video distortion. (also via tPrez).
- Union-organizing emails get employees of a social networking site fired! Sent around by Michael Whitney.
- Clinton’s and McCain’s Gasoline Tax Holiday Reimagined as a Phishing Scam.
- National Intelligence Agency Breaks Out RSS Feed.
- 6% are Natural Born Clickers.
- Twitter frenzy! Using Twitter for Your Organization, Use TwitterFone For Easy Voice-To-Text On Twitter, and Political Junkies Congregate and Comment on Election Results Through Twitter. Plus, 5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence and The Bivings Group Does Twitter.
- Yes, a Montana cattle ranch is using banner ads combined with search ads to sell their premium beef via the internet.
- 10 Valuable Tips for Shooting Web Video. Via Frogloop.
- Google, YouTube and the city of New Orleans try to host their own presidential forum. Via Mike Allen.
- Video: how primary-season attacks have been amplified in the general election.
- FBI Targets Internet Archive With Secret ‘National Security Letter,’ Loses.
- Harold vs. Markos. Not everyone wants a unified Dem ticket.
- META Keywords are Legally Dead.
- Be very afraid: Engineers find ‘missing link’ of electronics. Robots take next step toward world domination.
- A minute and a half with Shana Glickfield…is enough to spark any man’s dreams.
- Clone-tool war on nipples continues. Complete with tragic casualty figures.
– cpd
May 7th, 2008
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Cross-posted on techPresident
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:
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May 4th, 2008
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- Adding Video to Turn Dead-End ‘Thank You’ Pages Into Viral Marketing Campaigns. The Obama campaign finds yet another sweet spot for online recruiting.
- The Post Is Having A Rough Day. Spam attack!
- Reluctantly, a Daily Stops Its Presses, Living Online.
- Rev. Wright Baits the Soundbiters.
- The Internet Goes Green. The growth of the envirosphere, via Micropersuasion.
- Space war would leave destructive legacy.
- McCain: It’s “clear who Hamas wants to be the next president.” Fruits of a blogger conference call.
- Google Earth Outreach Aides U.N. Track Refugees and Save Lives.
- Beyond Bittergate, Barack Yields Success to His Supporters.
- Obama’s Database Will Make Him the Power Broker. Another persistent political following! “Like Mussolini/ And Kennedy…”
- The chummy relationship of campaign professionals and journalists in Washington. Or, getting scolded for making fun of McCain on Facebook.
- Schism Grows Between Obama and Liberal Bloggers.
- Were Mesopotamians the first brand addicts?
- Subject Line, ‘From’ Address Crucial to Email Marketing.
- Who Stole the Plans for iRobot’s Battle Bots?
- YouTube vid inspires Obamacrombie t-shirts.
- Facebook as Weekly Evil.
- McCain on FriendFeed: “Considering the McCain campaign’s sometimes uneven online strategy, this is a step in the right direction.”
- Social Applications Dominate the Web.
- Gays, Lesbians More Receptive to Blog Ads than Heterosexuals.
- An overview of web mining in societal benefit areas.
- Top 10 Wireless Marketing Mistakes.
- 3 Top Tips to Improve Your Online Writing.
- 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.”
- Sorry Disney, But You’re Kind of a Skank Factory.
- DNC’s national cable ad buy. The RNC’s not so hot about it.
- Web Site Blames Sen. McConnell for Quorum-less FEC.
- The Twitter Disconnect. An introduction and how-to. Also, glimpse a hardcore Twitter-using life.
- Things Really Were Different Before Clinton-Obama. Time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin…into the future.
- Which Government Agency Should Be Your Computer’s Firewall? HAL 9000 or black squirrels?
– cpd
April 28th, 2008
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- Espionage Against Pro-Tibet Groups, Others, Spurred Microsoft Patches.
- New Freedom, and Peril, in Online Criticism of China.
- In every measure, Obama clobbers Clinton online. Also, Barack Obama Takes Lion’s Share of Online Video Viewerships.
- Obama Uses YouTube To Lobby The Public After Losing Pennsylvania.
- Notes from the eCampaigning Forum 2008.
- Cuddle Parties: When Touchy Feely Goes Goofy.
- Why Democrats Rule the Web.
- Smug Alert in SF. Thanks, Slate
- Lost in the Smoke-Filled Room: Unexpected Talent. On the benefits of a primary process. C.f. The Primary ‘Bounce’.
- Government to Seek Terrorists in World of Warcraft: The Full Proposal.
- Welcome to the high-tech age of consumer jihadists. Suggested by Burt Edwards.
- Look Ma, I’m on CIA.gov.
- Anti-war site lets you spend $3 trillion your way.
- Obama’s GOP Shadow.
- Laughing Baby vs. the YouTube Commenters. C.f. The vile state of Internet discourse knows no borders.
- Colbert Snags Clinton, EdWORDS and Obama in One Cast.
- Fight, prefrosh, for social justice — via e-mail.
- Newspaper Ads Drive Online Research, In-Store Purchases.
- Online Advocacy — Using Petitions for List Building.
- Obama Talks About (Internet) Rumors.
- MTV News Still on the Edge of Political News. Kurt Loder rides to the rescue one last time.
- Twitter Away Your Life With Social Networking. And, Is Twittering Sustainable?
- The Twittering Class and the Primaries.
- Tips for success in a Web 2.0 world.
- Do Progressive Techies Have a Google Blind Spot?
- Drive additional web traffic with email.
- Facebook Chat — distraction or benefit?.
- Sick Profits Video Contest. User-generated content goes to the doctor.
- Despite Negative Press, Facebook Is a Powerful Agent for Social Change. But wait: 51% of Donors ‘Not At All Interested’ in Social Networks.
- The New Guards: The Players. A look at potential Republican MoveOn equivalents. C.f. MoveOn.org Asks McCain To Drop Pastor Who Blamed Victims For Katrina.
- EEN’s Avatars Campaign Brings Online Marketing to Life. Online/offline connection.
- Huckabee to follow in Robertson’s footsteps? Yet another independent audience?
- Radiohead Launches Social Network.
- Nerd alert or sublime beauty? Full Earthrise and Earthset in Hi-Def, from the Japanese Kaguya lunar orbiter. I can see my house from here! Via Space.com.
– cpd
April 24th, 2008
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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.
– cpd
April 24th, 2008
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While you’re waiting for the verdict of the good people of Pennsylvania today, why not check out the beneficial effects of a Googlebomb for a candidate? Go ahead, type “Barack Obama Muslim” or “Obama religion Muslim” into your favorite search engine and see what you get. As former Edwards staffer Tracy Russo mentioned at last week’s Internet Advocacy Roundtable, the first sites you’ll see in the search results debunk the claim that Obama is a secret Muslim Manchurian Candidate. A couple of links claiming the opposite do show up, but they’re well down from skeptical articles from the likes of Snopes, CNN and the Obama campaign itself.
Tracy didn’t go into too much detail about it, but she definitely implied that this distribution of search results was the result of a Googlebomb, which was at least partially encouraged by the Obama campaign behind the scenes. Googlebombing is the deliberate attempt to influence search results through encouraging people across the web to link to certain sites to make them appear authoritative, and it’s been used commercially as well as in the 2006 elections. Lo and behold, here’s a Daily Kos diary piece from March encouraging that very tactic, and note that it mentions that several “yes-he-is-a-Muslim” pieces then appeared much higher in the rankings than they seem to now (not bad results for a month’s work). Andrew Sullivan also reports on various right-wing attempts to bomb Obama over communism and the flag lapel pin, but those seem pretty lame by comparison.
Whether the Obama campaign encouraged or influenced this apparent effort in any way is unclear from the public record, but I would be shocked if their blogger relations people hadn’t been involved in it at some level. It’s another measure of the subtlety of the ways campaigns can interact with the public via the ‘net.
– cpd
April 22nd, 2008
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Quick news from the world of pro wrestling: my near-namesake Colin Delaney has weighed in on the Democratic primary, and the results may be a surprise. On the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, Clinton, Obama and McCain will ALL appear on World Wrestling Entertainment’s RAW to make their cases before an audience of five million sports/entertainment fans. Alas, they’ll be on tape, so we won’t see a tag-team deathmatch (which would no doubt be less painful than much of the campaign so far), but that didn’t stop young Mr. Delaney from giving his estimate of the winner: “I don’t even want to venture a guess who would come out on top, probably Hillary. She seems like a scrapper. Yeah, definitely Hillary. She’d probably kick my ass, that’s not saying much, but I’m sure she could.” Watch out, my friend — Obama’s got reach (as long as he doesn’t roll a gutter ball) and I guarantee that John McCain can take a hit and keep on going.
All jokes aside, it’s fascinating to see politics get nichier and nichier. Though as the WWE article points out, RAW is the “number one weekly year round show on cable.” Media fragmentation, anyone?
Update: The Times has the candidates’ wresting videos and other details.
– cpd
April 21st, 2008
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These tips are for an Advocates for Youth/Choice USA online organizing training session on April 16, 2008, and you kids can look at them in greater depth in the relevant Online Politics 101 articles, particularly the ones covering marketing and promotion, websites, blogger relations and search engine optimization. They’re aimed at organizations and campaigns that are on the resource-poor side, since those won’t be able to do much paid promotion, but the basic ideas apply to most sites regardless of scale. See also that enduring classic from November of 2006, How to Build Traffic to a Blog: Ten Tips.
10 Ways to Build Traffic to a Website
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April 15th, 2008
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First fruits of RootsCampDC: time to experiment with a couple of site promotional tools. Look to the right, below the search box, and you’ll see a new content widget which you can use to put e.politics headlines on your site, blog, Facebook page or computer desktop. It takes this site’s RSS feed and packages it into widget form for use across the web; run by SpringWidgets, it’s one of the standard promotional tools provided by Feedburner. Just below that, I’ve also added a Feedburner-provided email signup form. E.politics has had an email subscription option since the beginning, but it was only on the Feedburner subscription page and not obvious at all (only two people have signed up for email, vs 600-odd RSS subscribers). The usual expectation is that having a signup form visible directly on your pages encourages signups; time for a little test.
Thanks to Michael Whitney for the suggestions — he ran a great RootsCamp session on getting the most out of RSS.
– cpd
April 14th, 2008
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Hi y’all, I gave a social media marketing training in New York on Monday, and I developed something for it that you might be able to use. The training was for the web staff of the local chapters of a large national nonprofit, and we covered the basics of using tools like blogs, online video, social networking sites and email lists and discussion groups to promote their activities and help with membership and fundraising. As a takeaway (a trick I learned from Michael Bassik — if you can, leave a little something behind for the crowd), I created a cheap sheet that looks at the basic social media marketing tools, their pros and cons, and the essential considerations involved in a social media campaign. Here’s a link to the PDF; details are below.
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April 4th, 2008
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- Trust in Peers Trumps the “A-List,” Study Finds. Definite implications for political marketing.
- Act Blue’s Record Take. They’re raking it in for candidates.
- Online Call Tools and the 2008 Campaign.
- Detroit Mayor Is Charged With Eight Felonies. Much to his surprise, text messages are stored somewhere. C.f., TXTmob Subpoena Shows the Hazards of Using Technology to Protest.
- French President Caught Monitoring Blogs: Mon Dieu!
- Voter Relationship Management: The Constituent Is the Customer. A look at the available tools, from the point of view of business CRM.
- With the Internet Comes a New Political ‘Clickocracy’. Jose Antonio Vargas’s new gig, writing think pieces (nice work if you can get it).
- In 2008 campaign, the Internet packs a powerful political punch. Frank Davies overview piece.
- Kenya: What a laptop and a video camera can do.
- Calling all women who tech and talk. Regular e.pol reader Jeanette Russell says, “Hey Ladies!”
- Local bandit eludes Indian police AND Google Earth. But he still can’t get his mom elected.
- Broad Concerns About Internet Voting. Guys are worried, too.
- “Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has finally figured out how to raise funds on the Internet”. But still, a lot less than Obama.
- Chinese Authorities Place ‘Wanted’ Posters For Tibetan Rioters On Web Portals. Also, China Destroys Tibet’s Sacred Environment. When wrecking your own just isn’t enough.
- Over 1.3 Million Petition Signatures in 10 Days against Chinese actions in Tibet. China to petition-signers — um, yeah, we’ll get right on that.
- Magic Spy Smart Phone.
- Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig Bets ‘Wikipedia’ Approach Will Transform Congress.
- McCain Girls Are Your New Jalopy. And more than a little hard on the ears.
- Raffle craze strikes innocent presidential candidates.
- Republican videos attack congressional democrats.
- The Press and Political New Media.
- Obama Utilizes Internet for Success.
- Cuba Lifts Restrictions On Personal Cellphones.
- Citizen Huff: How Arianna became the Matt Drudge of the Left.
- Gore Launches Ambitious Advocacy Campaign on Climate.
- Blogger’s Rights, via Burt Edwards.
- Website changes political climate. Reaching the young online.
- The Message Box: the Zone to Stay on Message. Fun with diagrams.
- Color-Coded Threat Level System In New Colors for Spring!
- Clinton’s Wiki-Warrior.
- Air America Host Suspended for Clinton Remarks. YouTube strikes again.
- Clinton Floats Delegate (Online) Petition.
- Obama inspires an online art explosion. “The Web has become a rich canvas for artists and candidates who know how to connect digitally.”
- Micha Sifry gets the Download from Joe Trippi.
- Democratic Lawmaker Vouches for Bush Administration’s Secret Plan to End Cyber War. See also DDoS Packets are Two Percent of Net Traffic, Report Says.
- Ed Markey’s Subcommittee has hearing on Virtual Worlds. He really looks stunning in that WoW Orc outfit.
- Latest sign of the impending Apocalypse: New Kids on the Block are reuniting.
- 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.”
– cpd
April 3rd, 2008
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Check out this brilliant bit of promotion and branding from conservative site NewsMax, which has been around since the first internet/politics boom in the 90s:
This ad appeared in Monday’s Marketing Vox News, which is an email newsletter aimed at advertising and marketing professionals. Regular readers will note that Marketing Vox articles often show up in e.politics Quick Hits link roundups, and for good reason — it’s an excellent source for the latest in the broader world of online marketing communications. And the NewsMax people clearly think that it’s also a way to reach potential advertisers, in this case with an image and message that are both a little tongue-in-cheek and I suspect quite effective. The ad’s landing page is well designed (down to the HTML title) to follow through on the promise, providing a breakdown of the site’s demographics and an example of a past high-end product that sold well on the site.
Nice job all around — good targeting, good messaging and good follow-through. If you’d like to see the ad in context in the Marketing Vox email newsletter, here’s a printout.
– cpd
April 2nd, 2008
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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.
– cpd
March 27th, 2008
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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.
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March 20th, 2008
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Plenty of people have tried to start nonpartisan political discussion sites over the years, but most have dried up and blown away for reasons covered on e.politics before. But this election cycle has seen something new — now that many news organization websites have blogs that allow comments, they’re becoming a true public forum for the exchange of ideas and (often) insults.
The Ron Paul army was particularly active on The Caucus and The Trail before the wind finally went out of their sails, for instance, and these sites have also seen heated discussion among supporters and opponents of Obama, Clinton and McCain. At the Politics Online Conference last week, Patrick Hynes also mentioned some of their less positive uses, for instance as a medium for the distribution of rumors and innuendo. And, tons of folks are also taking advantage of news story discussion boards for blatant self-promotion, dropping links to their own articles into their comments. Yet another example of the internet as a disintermediator: political activists use the comments sections as a way to reach the news organizations’ readers directly, generally bypassing the editorial approval process as long as they don’t use dirty words or otherwise get rude.
– cpd
March 12th, 2008
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