Posts for April 29th, 2005

Funny - after the Presidential election in the US - I was expecting a very spirited online campaign effort in the UK - especially with a six-month build-up to the anticipated May 5th election date. And, as an interested party and a spectator - I have been watching the websites and on the three major party websites for the past month - ever since PM Blair dissolved Parliament. So, have the parties and campaigns leveraged the vantage point from across the pond to communicate to the masses via the Internet?

Basic Principles
Initially, the question is what does the campaign wish to accomplish with the Internet effort? In the Dean Campaign, it was (my assumption) to build the mailing list and then drive actions by the supporters to help the campaign in various forms (volunteer, donate, gather supporters). In the Kerry campaign, we refined this act by building the list, requesting support (first in terms of fundraising and then in terms of house parties and volunteer efforts). MoveOn.org originated a lot of these concepts - derived directly from fundraising tactics - and took what many of the dotcommers said about the Internet: it is a way to get a distributed group of people to act in a unifed fashion. The best analogy I can derive is watching a swarm of bees - each individual one is moving in its own fashion, but the group looks like they are moving in a unified direction. By focusing on the desire of the group, the swarm can be generally lead in a direction that is along the gradient of their desire.

Read the rest of this entry »