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.”
Another McCain adviser, who asked for anonymity discussing internal campaign strategy, bluntly warned: “It’s going to be Swift Boat times five on both sides — The candidates will both do their best publicly to mute it. But in a close race, I don’t see how to shut that down.”
For all of our sakes, let’s hope that some kind of rationality survives. No doubt much of the smearing will happen online, in websites, videos and the kind of behind-the-scenes emails that have already dogged “Manchurian Muslim” Obama. Bloggers will both help AND hurt, helping by researching and puncturing lies, hurting by spreading them. Ultimately, though, the onus is on mainstream journalists to try to separate truth from fiction. Print and online reporters have a far better record on this front so far this year; cable news has been a hellhole of unrepentant rumormongering and idle speculation. Don’t we deserve better?
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:
Kudos to satirical(?) website Stuff White People Like: judging from the number and distribution of people who’ve forwarded it or mentioned it in conversation over the past month or two, the site has built up a level of general viral spread. Searching email, it’s been forwarded by my friend Brad from college and later Austin, my friend Gina from high school, and longtime friend-of-e.politics Burt Edwards. Plus, I swear at least one or two people have brought it up in conversation lately, though I can’t document it.
I mention the site today because Gina just emailed it, giving me three examples, which as any journalistic observer will tell you is one more than you need for a trend story. Plus, the site’s funny as hell, though more in a wry-smile way than a laugh-out-loud way. Editorial strategy note — pitching the stories as survival guides allows us observations like this one, from #91 San Francisco:
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.”
As the Democratic primary process grinds on, the candidates’ supporters are using just about every electronic tool available to swing the race their way. Two cases in point from the Obama side: super.del.egates.us is a wiki-based contact list for voters to use to reach the precious unpledged delegates to the Democratic Convention, while Yrmomma4obama aims to help young voters (and those too young to vote themselves) to use text messages to persuade their friends and family to jump on the Obama bandwagon.
This just in from Bergen County, New Jersey: online politics has hit town and the locals are taking to it with gusto, like a guido to gold chains. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and blogs all make an appearance as North Jersey Record reporter Matthew Van Dusen interviews area politicos attempting to use the internet to influence policy or elect a candidate. It’s up to e.politics to put it all in context:
Some viral campaigns have proved effective at the national level, said Colin Delaney [sic], the founder of e.politics, a Washington, D.C.-based Web site about online political advocacy. For instance, Republican Sen. George Allen of Virginia lost his seat in 2006 after a video surfaced of him calling a man “macaca.”
Delaney believes that candidates at the local level, however, will still be able to win races through traditional campaigning for years to come.
“I don’t think it’s going to be something that every local candidate will do,” Delaney said of the viral techniques.
Some may disagree, but I have truly found the best YouTube video ever — it’s funny, it’s clever, it’s cute, it has a good song, it’s well edited, it’s short, and it anesthetizes or distracts small children (specifically, my two sets of toddler nieces when they’re on the verge of exploding). Finally, a real use for YouTube! If you have not seen it before, and even if you have, allow me to ask you to consider the artistic validity of the following, the legendary Kitty Cat Dance:
Seriously, it’s been seen millions of times now, CONTINUES to pick up views and notice more than two years after its release, and it has to be among the most successful YouTube clips so far. Listen to the song: it’s tight, develops well, is a little twisted in parts, and the punkish chorus is genius, since it helps keep the whole piece from becoming too repetitive or too cutesy. And the use of stills works great, since it lets you edit super-tightly to the music while also creating that immediate sense of unreality. You can learn a lot about what works on the web from watching this one. Again and again and again and…
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.
Wired’s picked up on a clever use of machinima (the “filming” of video in computer games or virtual worlds) by the folks at Bill Maher’s HBO show to nail Hillary Clinton over her exaggeration of the danger involved in her trip to Bosnia in the 90s. Meet “Hillary Clinton’s 3 AM Call of Duty: Mission Bosnia” (warning for the faint at heart: Sinbad doesn’t make it)…
Best line: “Because it takes a village…to take a village.” Bonus inclusion: John McCain’s virtual fireplace. Nice work, and Wired reports that some Obama supporters are trying hard to make it go viral on the web.
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.”
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.
Crowd Enabling, the Obama way. A mighty bold claim: “Even if Obama fails to achieve his goal of becoming President of the United States, I predict he will have a deeper and more powerful understanding of the American people than anyone in the history of politics.”
Quote of the week: “‘It’s a love tap compared to the Wu-Tang fist of fury that’s coming at this guy in the fall,’ said Rick Wilson, a Republican media consultant.”
Facebook Launches Band Pages. “MySpace also might start to get worried — I’m sure I’m not the only one who uses that site solely for auditioning bands.”
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.”
Like its Will.i.am music video counterpart, Lissig’s video reflects its creator’s medium of choice: it’s essentially the YouTube version of a Lessig stage presentation, a quick-cutting PowerPoint with a voiceover. And though it’s been viewed many fewer times than Yes We Can, in this case it was particularly well targeted, since the voter in question is my sister-in-law, a Linux expert at IBM in Austin. Why did it work? First, she respects Lessig and has read his columns and articles and seen him speak. Second, in the video, he lays out what he sees as clear, logical grounds to support Obama over Hillary Clinton, and I suspect that Emily responded to such a reasoned approach. Since Lessig was speaking, copyright of course came up, but the vast majority of the video covered other issues, and soon after she watched it, Emily told my brother that she’d not only switched support to Obama but donated to him online.
To put this in context, let’s go all the way back to April of ‘07 and something Michael Connery said:
“…viral video, which will rise from within and appeal to certain online and offline niche communities…So when the next smash viral hit of the cycle emerges, don’t forget that there were a few hundred others that didn’t get noticed, but may have just as much — if not more — of an impact on our democracy and our politics.”
Absolutely, for every Will.i.am, there are dozens and hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands more trying to persuade their viewers, readers, listeners and pets how to vote in the days ahead. Different people will respond to different appeals, but the genius of a technology that turns the passionate and creative among us loose is that each of those different niches is likely to have a message aimed right at it. Just as Lessig’s was aimed right at my sister-in-law.
We did this in Australia last week. Our parliament apologised on behalf of previous governments to Australia’s Indigenous Stolen Generations. We suggested to both our Facebook and MySpace friends that they change their status to “is sorry” on the day of the apology. Lots of people did, and as an added extra, hundreds of people joined our cause that day.
Excellent way to get an issue out in the public eye, and obviously in this case it benefited the folks encouraging people to do it. On the same article, also check out Briton Mark Pack’s comment on Facebook’s use in UK elections:
Using status in this way is a pretty common campaigning technique in the UK, though what’s become more popular here (at least in the Liberal Democrats) is changing your profile picture to a graphic that says you are backing / have voted for a particular candidate.
Also clever — clearly, this is a promising tool to help activists spread political messages. Facebook users are bombarded by tons of messages and group invitations, but even when they tune those out, they’ll still see their friends’ status and picture.
