Political Gastronomica : eCampaigning

Millennial Makeover: Is there a Lincoln or FDR in the 2008 race?

This evening, as I finished my work at Cooper, I took a walk over to the Great Hall to listen to Dr. Fred Shapiro introduce Morley Winograd and Michael Hais discuss their new book, "Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics" with a talk asking the question, "Is there a Lincoln or FDR in the 2008 Presidential Race?" Interestingly, the talk seems to have been a combination of the premise of the book creation, as well as an attempt to answer the question posed at the start of the talk. [Suffice it to say, I think they would say Obama is the next Lincoln/FDR - more on this later] But what was most interesting to me was the discussion of the impact of technology and generational demographics and their impact on American history - which goes to the heart of two of my posts ([1], [2]), "Would social networks impact the 2008 election?".

At the time, I answered in the negative.

After last night (and this book), I might have a different point of view...

Impact of Technology and Generational Swings
Note: I have only started to read the book as of yet, but I was entranced with the discussion by both speakers and their premises. I must say that I agree with much of what they said and suggest, though I do not completely agree (yet) with some of the mechanisms.

From the start of the talk, Morley drew the obvious parallels with Lincoln and Obama, Steward (Lincoln's "primary Republican" adversary) and Clinton and the issue of race during the election cycle. [Note: I promise to go into the parallels that exist]. But, what perked my ears and interest was the discussion of generational impact and the advent of technology and the impact it had on campaigns and their hypothesis on how it has, on 40 year cycles (give or take some years) cause a civic realignment in terms of political parties and fundamental populational relationship with government and civic duty.

Winograd and Hais's basic premise is that civic realignment - where they characterize it by the "enhanced party identification and straight-ticket voting, rising voter turnout or stable turnout at high levels, positive attitudes towards politics and political institutions, and a focus on broader societal and economic concerns rather than social issues involving personal morality". [p. 27] They argue that this civic realignment is a predictable phenomena that occurs every forty years in America due primarily to:

• political coming-of-age of a large dynamic generation, and
• emergence of a new communication technology

which results in clear changes in:

• electoral results: major parties change power
• voting behavior: South going Democratic, after being Republican and back, and
• public policy: from a laissez faire foreign policy to a force-projection policy in 1932

With this premise, Winograd and Hais posit that this generation - the Millennials - will cause another major civic shift and cause a new outcome in our government that focuses on the societal and economic issues of the day, rather than the divisive issues of our time.

I could short-circuit the discussion with the final statements that:

• likely winner of the Presidential election: Barack Obama
• movement of civic involvement in a more responsible fashion: college for public service (as in AmeriCore and Kerry's National Service program)
• redistribution of wealth from the top 1% to a more even spread
• acceptance of programs that require group sacrifice, rather than blind ignorance of the hidden cost of inaction

I must say that I am pleased this is being painted, and hope that it does come about - which we will see what happens in the coming months. I believed it as the time with Kerry and Dean (as Winograd and Hais said that the Millennials and the Boomers did vote overwhelmingly for), but the weight of the Millennials were not felt until this year - and this cycle. And for that, I look forward to seeing the outcome.

After the fold, I give a short summary of their premise.

Start with Generational Analysis
Based on generational analysis (which I knew very little about except that I was a GenX-er that acts like a Millennial), there are essentially four generational types that break down into ten year groupings. They are:

• The Hero/Civic Generation - the last one was the one in 1932 (the "Greatest Generation") who brought about the change that we saw in the election of FDR and WWII - a very dynamic group that tends to be quite large
• The Nomad/Reactive Generation - this generation spends time trying to respond to the impact of the Civic Generation's efforts
• The Prophet/Idealistic Generation - this is essentially the Baby Boomers, where trusting government and involvement in civic responsibilities are throw aside for their self-needs, and then the focus on maintaining that independence - another lare and dynamic grouping of people
• The Artist/Adaptive Generation - currently, GenX is representative of this generation - latch-key kids who had to fend for themselves and provide support for themselves and their families

What is interesting is that the generational breakdowns map interestingly to technological advances in communications, communities and collaboration. For instance:

• 1820 - the growth within America of improved transportation (canals and steamboats) and then railroads which gave rise to the first political convention in 1828
• 1860 - the invention of the telegraph which allowed for the spread of news from one geographic location to another in the form of regional newspapers
• 1896 - the expansion of the telephone allowed for greater collaboration and coordination of the Republican party
• 1932 - the invention and expansion of the radio - and in particular the treatment and growth of its use (which is quite similar to the growth of iPods in this generation)
• 1968 - the invention and expansion of television and its ability to "shrink" the world
• 2008 - social networks and the peer-to-peer communications that exist with mobile telecommunications

What surprised me is how the generations breakdown into these groups quite consistently (based on the past 200 years of research and history - which Wikipedia and the Strauss and Howe book (Generations: The History of America's Future) support. Based on this - and the incredible similarities that history and our time show - I am quite certain they are right, but not sure I completely agree with all of the mechanisms they discuss.

Social Networks Impacting the 2008 Election?
I have written two posts on this topic - and specifically the fact that the campaign that makes use of the social networks will find their success assured, but my skepticism that the campaigns have yet to utilize them. Winograd and Hais speak of the "Facebook platform" that the myBO is built upon, but it is my understanding that this is a tool from Blue State Digital and not an extension of the Facebook platform. Additionally, I am (normally) not a supporter of the YASN (yet another social network) mentality, since I think that the hyper-segmentation of networks will continue to be met, with increasingly lower costs and new communities will be built up.

But, in the course of writing this post, I realize that I have discussed the needs for in-person connections and "tabling" is quite important. I also school my clients (both political and commercial) that the keys of success are found in using the networks to spread the message via word-of-mouth, or "word-of-network". And, the myBO is actually what I have been asking for IF the campaign is seriously using it to rally the supporters and the "influentials" as discussed in the 2004 campaigns.

Process Behavior and Social Capital
Since people have self-selected and become members of myBO, and a large enough community has formed on the space - and IF the campaign has been communicating AND allowing others to communicate across the network, then the natural word-of-network flows happen into these other social networks since the nodal people ("influencers") have allowed for the crossing of physical (and URL) boundaries. Interestingly enough, the viral nature of the message (as in Dean AND Obama was "vision and empowerment"), coupled with the stateless nature and ease of "travel" from one social network to another (via your browser), which allows for the rapid distribution and aggregation of people into events and communities.

Since these nodal people are about building social capital in informing and educating others on the issues and situations, it is a natural effect. And with a large community (such as the Millennials) who have been raised on Napster (sharing copyrighted music) and MySpace (personal expression/exposure at young age), YouTube (peer-to-peer visual connection) and Facebook (who are already conditioned to tracking the state of their personal social network), I think that social networks as a transport medium have impacted the 2008 election - which goes into my BarCamp discussion on the speed of memes in various communities.

Hmmmmm....18 months since my first post on this topic, could it be I could be mistaken? More than happy to entertain the concept.

Millennial Makeover site: www.millennialmakeover.com
Millennial Makeover blog: millennialmakeover.blogspot.com
Buy the book: Millennial Makeover

Tags: Social Networks in Politics, Millennial Makeover, Millennial Generation Impact, Impact of Social Networks, Speed of Memes

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 3:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Rolling Stone: Inside Obama's People-Powered Revolution

As I went for my snack of cashews this evening, I took a glance at the newest Rolling Stone and saw the cover that graces this post. Underneath the "A New Hope" title, I saw the subtitle that I had been waiting for, "The Machinery of Hope", covering the process story that I wondered if it would ever see the light of day.

I got a little guff from some other posters out there about my article on whether or not would social networks impact the 2008 election, and I think that the premise of my argument might have got lost in the translation. Simply, the idea that social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, hi5, MyYearbook and the other 100+ social networks that currently line the Internet landscape would not seriously impact the election if the campaigns did not apply resources to the problem of virtual canvassing.

What pleased me in reading this article from Rolling Stone was the fact that the campaign married online engagement with offline activities and vice versa. Never a campaign event went off without capturing people's email addresses, zip codes and names as they came to the event. Never a chance was forgotten to drive engagement both online and off - using the MyBO site to drive involvement and community. I just pulled out of one of my (many) proposals to campaigns from prior to the 2006 elections where I request the candidate and their campaign to:

The goal of any campaign is to convert uninterested persons into avid supporters – developing a relationship with these supporters over the course of the campaign. Migrating supporters along this path is an art, rather than a science – since the details of conversion are often considered nebulous at best (e.g. like his looks, his stance on taxes, his wife’s cookie recipe), but the steps are almost always the same – and evidenced in any involvement effort.

Physical Events – fundraisers, rallies, field events
At these events – the two most important actions are the acquisition of email addresses by the staff at the event, the branding of all candidate merchandise with the campaign URL and finally, the candidate mentioning the website URL in his speech and other opportunities.

The conversion ratio (number of emails that become active supporters) is always highest through this method – they have self-selected by coming to the event, and they have expressed an interest by signing the form/giving a business card.

Driving the point home that getting involved with the campaign is all at the website will drive interested activists to the site and signup.

Follow up is key – as with any effort – a thank you note with information regarding the candidate allows the supporter to see the campaign values their time and offers the supporter a chance to “get involved” in other ways. The conversion rate of confirmed supporters goes up with just this simple gesture.

This concept was brought home to me over the years whenever I would see how the people we met at events would be more enthusiastic that the people who just gave their email or money over the Internet. The simple lesson is: if they care enough to spend some of their time to come out to an event, they more than likely will do more for you beyond just listening and cheering.

A chance to build up some "social capital"
Additionally, the article in Rolling Stone discusses the marriage of old-school shoe leather campaigning with "new-era" technology - which can be simply read as opening up the supporter database. To credit David Weinberger with his request from the 2004 Politics Online Conference, he asked why didn't the Dean Campaign let the grassroots run with the campaign? Because, unlike this cycle, training and organizing of the grassroots was not supported by the campaign.

Empowering the Grassroots
One of my favorite slogans is "If you can't beat them, join them." I would say that David Axelrod took that statement to heart when he combined the organizing talents of Temo Figueroa and the technology of the MyBO platform to create their own campaign communications channel. By training their supporters and leveraging technology, the Obama campaign was able to amplify their efforts and amass a group of supporters and volunteers that were equipped to do the work that paid staffers might.

It has always been my contention that training people to do something on your behalf is imparting wisdom and knowledge that they do not have. And, since they are part of your program - and Democrats to boot - you are building your team, and the future teams to help create a better, stronger effort in the future.

People become loyal, not just because you are a winner, but because you gave to them and they give to you. In the blogosphere parlance, we call that social capital. And that is something hard to "purchase" no matter how much money you have.

Are social networks impacting the election? I STILL say no, but...
It is the techniques of open networks, finding ways of connecting people through means that they have become more familiar with (e.g. Facebook, MySpace and the multitude of social-network, community sites) in searching down people's profiles and their friends, using search tools to find like-minded individuals AND the cooperation of the campaigns organization team that truly makes the tools and technology of social networks empower the campaign to convert simple supporters to enthusiastic volunteers.

I remember Governor Dean and Joe Trippi saying something to the effect of, "the campaign is not here, it is out there." Funny thing is, the feedback loop and the respect paid to the supporters and volunteers will pay of in spades. That is social capital that I hope the Democratic Party learns to work with (and not simply take advantage of) in the future.

I truly look forward to see what happens next.

Public/private callout: hey JoeR - great work!

Tags: Barack Obama, eCampaigning, social networks in politics, eField Organizing, Distributed Campaigns, social capital, David Weinberger

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 1:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blast from the Past - Kerry's 2004 Online Fundraising Performance

I have been reading all sorts of posts on the performance of the different campaigns, including Colin Delany's post on TechPresident about John Edward's $1M funding surprise in five days and the insurgence of online fundraising after a successful win in Iowa and/or in New Hampshire. Well, I have always had the online stats from those first two weeks after Kerry won Iowa and New Hampshire and thought maybe I could share them with you.

(click to see larger image)

Performance-based Metrics
One of the things we were doing from November until January was trying to unlock the secrets of fundraising and online performance. I spent untold hours pouring over data and online donations to determine the potential success formula. We learned that more pages on a contribution page is bad (went from a 20% conversion rate to an 80% conversion rate), one page minimum on the forms, fewer elements are better (you do not need them to check off each line on the FEC disclaimer) and watched how the conversion rate (contributions/unique visitors and finished contributing/started contributing) improved. But nothing could prepare us for the avalanche that happened on the day after Iowa.

The very next day, as the graph shows, we were having incredible performance on the donations. At the time, I got besieged by one of the communication staffers who asked me for metrics on performance. After a bit, we rushed out numbers and found our press going through the roof. Everyone wanted to know how we were doing. I remember a staff meeting a couple days later where someone from the senior staff commented on the ATM machine finally was working with the Internet. Within a week, we had hit $1M on online donations - web and email.

New Hampshire and Super Tuesday
We were seriously worried about the software doing on contributions since it was relatively cheap and had not been tested under serious load conditions, but when New Hampshire went to JK, I was there all night long watching the server load, making sure we were okay. And, we made it quite nicely. It wasn't until SuperTuesday that we discovered the fallacy of low-cost solutions in an enterprise world.

The evening that SuperTuesday was announced for JK, we were in a large auditorium and were watching the celebration of JK becoming the presumptive nominee. It was astonishing, and I had someone watching the server to make sure all went well. The very next day, MeetUp.org decided to point their 2M members to our server. According to our software provider, we were assured everything would be okay. It could handle the load. Uh huh.

Within 15 minutes, the server suddenly froze and gave up the ghost. We restarted the server and tried again. Less than 5 minutes and it stopped. Interesting, at the same time, Nicco Mele of the Dean Campaign called wondering how we were doing. We discussed performance - and even commented on the sudden uptime challenges - and he said that their (the Dean Campaign's info) had always said there was a pent-up energy for donating once the nominee was chosen. I had to dash off, and fortunately for us, we had a backup plan in place to handle the donations - making them a more "batch" process rather than a "real-time" (authorization right at the time of request). Once that system was in place, we easily took in another $1M within 24 hours.

It was an amazing time, and I wonder how Joe is doing over at the Obama campaign right now...

And for the political/data junkies, I offer the following PDF with the graphs for each of the online efforts during those weeks. Click here for the PDF.

Tags: Online Fundraising, eCampaigning, John Kerry, Campaign 2004, Online Fundraising Performance

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 3:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Will Social Networks Impact the 2008 Election? I think NOT.

On the 12th of September, it will be was the fourth anniversary of my involvement in US politics - from the presidential to the state level - and I have worked on campaigns from as lofty as JK's 2004 Presidential effort to a local run (Jennifer Gottlieb's run for an At-Large seat on the Broward County School Board). In this cycle, I find myself on the sidelines - due to forces beyond my control (thanks to the "speed and rapidity" of the NY Supreme Court System).

In 2003, I came into politics with the enthusiasm as any American school kid does - fed the stories of civic action, civic duty and the thinking that with good intention and hard work, you could make change happen in the political process. And, from my experiences, I think for the most part, you can - especially in the primaries or on the edges where the elephants (and donkeys) will not risk to play. But when risk is mitigated, the older, wiser "A-team" comes calling, and the younger, less-experienced are layered, transferred or simply pushed to the edges. The process teaches you valuable lessons for both politics and life in general - if properly seen in context.

But being on the outside of the campaign cycle this year has given me a chance to see if the hub-bub about this being the Year of the Internet is all that it is cracked up to be. From my vantage point, I think the hype is not going to make up for the lack of connectivity that people think the Internet (and social networks) are supposed to bring.

Will Social Networks Impact The Election?
I was asked this question last year by my friend from Wired, after I finished with another campaign, and I can STILL heartily say - even with techpresident's MySpace, Facebook and YouTube counters - I believe that social networks will still NOT impact the coming 2008 election.

"Wha?", I hear my poli-tech friends gasp. "Didn't you read the study that shows Facebook numbers are an indicator of relative success of drawing voters?" "Weren't you at the Facebook Political Summit?" "Aren't you impressed by / using the new Facebook tools?" "Aren't you impressed by the incredible reach of all of the candidates and their supporters through MySpace, facebook, flickr, YouTube?".

No.

And why not? I think they are missing an essential ingredient: simple, human contact.

All social networks are not the same
Funny thing, these social networks; there are over 100+ of them - addressing various issues, spaces and sundry interests. MySpace - the behemoth that is (IMHO) on the wane is not a place to connect, it is rapidly becoming the place to be a surrogate website for candidates - not for people to connect. Consider the actions you can take on MySpace:

• Email Your Friends
• Invite to an Event
• Post on the Bulletin Board
• Comment on their Page
Blog

....and? Well - you can add widgets, videos, and other visual attractors - but, between you and me, how often does Jack and Jane Voter plan on watching the same video over and over again? Read the same blog post which more than likely came from the candidate's main site? And, for anyone who truly believes that they are speaking to the national candidate or the candidate is actually listening on that comment site, please know that Suzy Intern really appreciates your involvement.

I could go on about Ryze, LinkedIn, hi5, tribe.net, Friendster (that is soooo 2003), Orkut, myyearbook, eons, mygrito, think MTV, flickr....oy! I could go on, but what are the campaigns actually doing?

Social networks (in version 1.0) have been about exposing data and allowing for a simple search query to allow you to discover other like people in your interest sphere. Web 2.0 suggests that social networks are about a fundamentally different, albeit enabled premise - being social - not simply by having a profile presence, but seeing what is happening in your network and becoming part of the life within that network. Living the pulse of the network and either being part of it - or wanting to be part of it. Do candidates offer a glimpse of that life within the network that is something supporters want to be part of? Does the campaign truly offer a chance to engage in simple, human contact?

When I go to the local mall, county fair, outdoor market - I can often see the ardent supporters of candidates "tabling" in the flow of traffic - holding their campaign literature, sign at the edge of the table, looking for eyes that are ready to learn more about the person running for State Senate, Congress or even President. You and your friends are there, giving each other moral support as the throngs of people walk by - nary paying attention to you, until a person walks up and says, "So....tell me about Senator X."

Where does this happen on social networks? Can I put up a "table" and engage in a conversation? Where is the flow of people that are milling about that can be "chatted up"? Certainly not on MySpace or many of the other social networks.

While I may have sounded dismissive earlier, Facebook does something that others do not - provides a news feed on my friends. Coined as "exhaust data" by my friends at Yi-Tan, the news feed - if updated regularly, gives me a sense of who is "walking around the mall" of Facebook - 'specially ones that are part of my social graph. This is where the campaigns would benefit.

Where are the Virtual Tablers?
This is where the campaigns can use their volunteers and give them the power to reach across their own networks and chat up people when they are interested in learning more about the candidate. But, it is not easy to go and "speak" to someone in Facebook since all of the communications are not interrupt-driven (as a face-to-face might be), they are addressed whenever the receiver wants to. How do you get people to accept the interrupts? Usually, that is the sense of presence - of human contact. Once that magic ingredient is "captured" and enabled, then I could see social networks truly engaging people.

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 3:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Keeping Personal Democracy personal

This morning, I got an email from an old friend of mine, Aldon Hynes, who made two interesting posts at Greater Democracy:

• Keeping Personal Democracy Personal
  where he talks about the migration of politics from the personal to the professional, where the operations of politics is about optimizing certain performance metrics, and
• Interaction and Interactivity
  where Aldon discusses the difference between "interaction" (where you respond to a stimulus given) and "interactivity" (where a conversation or dialog ensues between a grouping).

In reading his posts, I see a lament of the migration from a civic, personal contact to a business mentality of running a campaign. Considering the masses under nebulous demographic and psychographic metrics may seem cold and calculating, but the challenge of achieving the goals of campaigns is to win. And to win, the campaigns have little else to do but place bets on particular expenditures, rather than trying to be all things to all people.

In every campaign I have been a part of, there is always a major constraint that they have: money. While the assumption that volunteers for the candidate is "just around the corner", that is almost as funny as hearing that "there's gold in them thar hills", convincing the old '49ers that they should keep digging into the hills for that chance of finding the motherload.

In an archived post, which I never made public due to last cycle's issues, I wrote about being a campaign manager and the business of running a small campaign - especially one where resources are scarce and the opponent is entrenched. I promise to finally publish this post which should be instructive on how campaigns have to have a startup mentality in order to succeed - since the goal is to raise awareness with the individuals that can best bring about your success and find a way to fund your efforts, especially when you are a candidate who needs to rely on the support of others.

The challenge is to maintain a close relational contact with your supporters while keeping in mind that there is only 24 hours in a day, and you can only occupy one physical space at one time. Technology is meant to help enhance the ability of a person to communicate with a group of people, and allowing for some personalization of the communication to the supporters in the best way possible. Note, I did not suggest "converse" with all of the supporters, since people are limited with one mouth and two ears (or you could include two hands). But, by using technology to enhance the chance of communicating (e.g. John Edwards on twitter, every candidate on email and/or blogs, Chris Dodd and Tom Vilsack on video sites), the candidate (and/or his staff/surrogates) tries to keep the connection with the supporters to ensure the energy continues to flow.

I, too, will be attending the PDF - this year, for the first time, as a participant. This cycle has been difficult for various reasons (as some people know), but my affection for the art and business of politics still exists. No matter how difficult it can be, I believe that we will be able to create relationships through these technologies - in ways we have yet to understand. In the business world, I spend more time confirming with clients on how to work together online with their customers, considering the long-term value of a customer given the power that technology can give them. If it was not for Microsoft Outlook, Plaxo and/or google Calendar, I would loathe to remember every one of my friends birthdays. If not for the ability to blind cc my friends, I could not keep them up-to-date with my goings-ons. And if not for the ability of blogging and the easy publishing and syndication tools (thanks Dave!), I would not keep in touch with my friends in the blogosphere. Personal Democracy is about maintaining a connection with others - whether one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many. In a later post, I will explain where I think we are heading in our technological evolution such that Personal Democracy can remain personal.

Tags: Personal Democracy, Personal Democracy Forum, Greater Democracy, Aldon Hynes, PDF2007

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 9:56 PM

How to improve SEO/SEM without paying a dime!

Yes, after all of these posts about websites and opinions on political matters, a "how to" post. The inspiration comes from a conversation with my friend Howard Greenstein, CEO of Social Media Club who just came from a lecture where he was a panelist on SEO/SEM. Funnily enough, what he told me has been second nature to so many sites that most people forget, and do not think to improve once they have it. So, to help in the discussion, let me give you my quick-and-dirty list of "to-dos" for improving SEO/SEM.

Site Specific Improvements
These are a few of the design rules my teams use when we code candidate sites. We try to make sure that they try their best to follow them so that the page is highly search-engine friendly.

• Separate out content from style
  This sounds funny, but the techies out there hear this as "no tables unless needed" and "use CSS". HTML stands for "hyper-text markup language" - which meant that the original purpose of HTML was to markup content/documents and identify what is what. For example, there is a TITLE, HEADING 1, HEADING 2, a form of quotation in BLOCKQUOTE and paragraphs (P).
  
  The goal is to make the webpage machine readable rather than just pretty. Pretty goes into the CSS (if you look at Microsoft Word - there is something called Normal.dot, which is the source of what HEADING 1 and so on mean in your instance of Microsoft Word) not into the content. Make sure that this happens. The better you are at separating style from content, the more machine readable it is for google, Yahoo and so on.
  
  
• Make sure your tags have meaning
  Huh? This means that if the page is your candiate's bio page - make sure the TITLE tag says "Candidate Name - About Candidate", not just a standard template that says "Candidate Name". Additionally, your H1 and H2 tags should be appropriate (e.g. make the H1 tag be the major header "Candidate Biography" and the H2 tag be the subsections like "Candidate's Early Years" or "Candidate in the State House"). Think like a person who goes to google and wants to search your candidate's name and a particular aspect of the candidate. What would help stand out?
  
  There are other tags to consider - but be sure to have your content in paragraph tags <p> rather than in tables with <br> tags.
  
  
• Use tables for tabular data
  This one is a little simpler - whenever you have table data, use a table! Think of the idea - if you are writing a document, you use Microsoft Word. If you are doing something that requires consistent table format for the data to make it easier to read, use Microsoft Excel. Same concept in web sites.
  
  
• Use different metatags for each page
  Again, something a little technical, but in each page, there are tags which look like <META> which are the description and keywords. Both of these meta tags are important and should be related to the content of the page they are in, rather than being the standard metatag for the entire site.
  
  
• Make the words that are being linked from mean something
  This is a simple one, but is so often forgotten. Case in point: how many sites have the inevitable click here link? If it said biography or "candidate X's position on global warming, the search engines would understand the relevant issue that comes after linking through. And with images that are linked onto, be sure that the alt value has relevant meaning to what will happen.
  
  
• Refresh the content - frequently
  This one sounds like a lot of work, but it simply means make sure your home page and your blog is refreshed with relevant content. google and Yahoo are hungry for new content - which is why blogs and newspapers are very "tasty" for google in terms of search. But in changing your content, you must focus on staying on message to ensure that your entire site is drawing people for the candidate AND the issues that matter.
  
  And, with a blog, all of the above rules apply as well - and since blog software is essentially guaranteed formatting, you should have these rules hard-coded in so non-technical people have not a worry in the world. But, for these pages, you need tags (see Wikipedia:tags for more) for your content to help increase machine understanding of the content that is associated with the post.
  
  
• Make a sitemap
  This is a holdout from the past, where people used to manually build HTML pages with links to every page in the site. For the most part, few people go to the sitemap anymore - they still rely on the main navigation. But search engines are hungry for sitemaps - and go to where they are for better understanding.
  
  For a better understanding of what they are and how to get one automatically generated for you, go to the Wikipedia:sitemap article.

Sounds funny to say, but these few steps will save you hundreds of dollars on your car insurance....oops, I mean to say on your SEO spend, and improve your ranking in the search engines immensely. Later on, I will discuss how to improve your site's relevance with external actions (getting links back to the site).

Tags: SEO, SEM, search engine optimization, search engine marketing

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 8:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Social Media Club NY - How Will Social Media Impact Politics?

Interested in a conversation about Social Media in this coming season? Join us today at the New York Social Media Club where we will be discussing the use of social media in political campaigns and how they have and will (potentially) impact this cycle's elections.

Joining us will be:

• Noel Hidalgo - part of BarCamp and the "unconference" scene
• Joshua Levy - associate editor of Personal Democracy and TechPresident
• Adam Mordicai - founder of Advomatic, proving Drupal-based solutions and former Dean campaign member

Please join our host, Howard Greenstein and Nate Westheimer of VentBox for a very interesting evening.

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 2:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Congressional email delivery - abmissmal

Happen to be discussing with Colin over at e.politics about blogrolls, and he points out an excellent blog called Dr. Digipol, of which I have not seen before. I begin reading it, and alight upon this post about CapWiz's testing of email advocacy tools in communicating with members of Congress. In reading his post, I came upon the following passage:

... But the important issue here is not which software vendor is better at jumping through Congress’s hoops. It is that Congress is creating hoops in the first place.

If Congress is flooded with more constituent email than it can handle, it should increase its resources to handle it, not figure out ways to block constituent email. Efforts to block email will only give advantage to the larger, better resourced advocacy software vendors over the smaller ones. In essence, Congress is perpetrating anti-trust behavior by creating uneven market advantages for some vendors.

Worse, the barriers erected by Congress are obstructing real constituents from petitioning Congress via email. Consider that one office implementing the Logic Puzzle saw an 80% drop in email coming in through their servers. There is absolutely no way that all 80% of those emails were SPAM. Even the most generous estimates are that about 10% of emails flowing into Congressional offices are SPAM. The rest of the blocked email represent citizens denied their First Amendment rights.

The problems that need fixing are clear, and they are not the responsibility of the software vendors or the advocacy community. They are Congress’s responsibility. First, Congress must provide itself with the necessary resources to handle constituent email. In the last 5 years, constituent communication to Congress has increased 4-fold. In the past 25 years, Congress has not increased its staff or administrative budget. Further, instead of having a Congress-wide standard for email, each office is flying solo, free to choose its own system, its own subject headings for incoming email, etc.

If Congress is committed to constituent services, then it would create an environment that welcomes constituent communications and effectively processes them when they arrive. When that happens, there will no longer be any issue about which grassroots advocacy system is better at delivering email to Congress.

Here, here.

And what was even more surprising was the backlash it begat at Democracy in Action (where the testing methodology was not effective in handling DiA's processes, and getActive's request for the effectiveness numbers that Colin posted from the study to be taken down.

Interesting to see something like this performed, and amusing to see CapWiz be the leader of the bunch. Personal amusement was Convio and Kintera's numbers, if only for the fact that they did not make a stink about the test themselves.

tags: Email Advocacy Tools, Email Campaign Tools, CapWiz, Democracy in Action, getActive

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 1:56 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Will Social Networks Change Politics?

As the 2006 campaign is coming into the primaries, I recently lunch with a friend from Conde Nast who asked my opinion on whether social networks would have a significant impact on the upcoming 2008 Presidential Election. After our lunch, I glanced at my email inbox and found a newsletter from the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet which quoted an article (from researcher Riki Parikh) entitled "Will the MySpace Phenomenon Change Politics?". Just this week, the KerryPAC sent out a job description on looking for an Online Communications Director who would be "responsible for online community outreach and organizing, including strategy development, working with external/internal blogs and social networking sites, online organizing, e-mail campaign creation, and Internet-related project management." In my start-up consulting business, I recently met with a company that was trying to offer something that resembled Essembly-lite. And just yesterday, the IPDI announced a conference on the issue of social networks entitled "Person-toPerson-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Online Social Networks and User-Generated Content in Politics" on September 15th in Washington, DC. What was amusing about the synergy these threads is that social networks is becoming the topic de-jour in the political realm.

Will MySpace and YouTube change the way the Beltway does politics? IMHO - Nah.
Every day, in the past two years, I have heard about MySpace and YouTube - this week, Fortune had an article on the "MySpace Boys". YouTube founders were getting fawned over on Good Morning America and other magazines. And the impact of videos on the YouTube site are sited as contributory reasons for Lieberman's downfall to the Lamont Internet-friendly campaign. But I would bet that when you ask any seasoned campaign professional - what will the real impact of social networks be in the political process, I believe you will hear in 2008 social networks will be a nice hype story, but the networks will not be as effective as they can be in terms of what is needed for political campaigns. And, because the campaign cycle is already upon us, campaigns will not work to use these networks effectively due to their high human cost and low return.

But I make one caveat - the only way social networks will have some REAL impact will be if campaigns dedicate the energy/resources to make them effective OR to let their supporters within these networks have REAL control over the messages in a fashion as described as virtual precinct captains.

History of Candidates in Social Networks - Is this new?
Interestingly, there were a slew of articles on the topic of the 2004 primary candidates using social networks. In particular, BusinessWeek discussed the Kerry/Edwards profiles on Friendster and how George W was no where to be found, Many2Many discussed Jonathan Abrames thoughts on Kerry's profile, and Salon discussed how Friendster changed their process for the Kerry campaign (see the article at Portfolio at NYU) - and that is just for Kerry as he was on the rise.

If you looked during the primary, you can find other examples of the other candidates and their efforts:

• General Clark was the first to have a profile in orkut, google's social network play, having a staffer manning the profile and communicating with people within the orkut network (before it became the virtual United States of Brasil). Then, with the creation of the Clark Community Network by Cameron Barrett and team, the Clark campaign could centralize their communications directly from a home-grown platform.
• Not only did the Dean campaign also establish a presence in orkut, Friendster and other social network spaces, but Zack Rosen and Zephir Teachout created the concept of DeanSpace (rumored to be inspired by an inadvertent purchase of networking books). DeanSpace became Dean's own social networking solution that would connect the campaign to the distributed campaign - much the same way MeetUp was doing already. Zack continued with his dream as civicspacelabs.org, which now is one of the best Drupal installations and seems to have dropped the social networking angle altogether.
• At Kerry, I have discussed our efforts which were managed by Erin Hofteig across a number of social networks such as orkut (where he also exceeded his maximum allowed friends at the time), Friendster, Ryze, tribe.net and others. But what was lost in the priority shuffle that is a primary campaign was the concept of KerryNet - a DeanSpace project designed to help our supporters become the virtual precinct captains. While the development on the transparent networking got shelved, the general concepts of the reward and centralized management structure was reflected in the Kerry Action Center.

Interestingly enough, the Kerry social network experiences provided some insights into how the relationship aspects could work - and the Leiberman/Lamont race demonstrated the next level of social networks - or how concepts/assets can be used within social networks to the advantage of a campaign.

Evolution of Social Networks
Back in 1995, companies trying to secure venture capital always had to include in their pitches some description of their "viral marketing efforts" - how they would keep the cost of marketing down and increase the growth by some form of "word-of-email" functionality. A slew of stories were written and a number of companies were relatively successful (eGroups, a company I helped with, grew faster than any known service at that time, due to the inherent viral nature of mailing lists). The first phase of social networks was supposedly about providing a new level of transparency to other people's networks - allowing members of your network to connect with others within to connect beyond your node. And the growth of this first wave? Email invites.

As networks have more transparent (seeing more degrees of freedom/friends-of-friends), a confluence of experiences have made the jump into more attractive networks than ever before. Services made it easier to express their personal interests in a machine-friendly fashion (read: tags), dating sites and search engine tools in all forms of web applications has made searching through structured (and unstructured) data easier, and the ease of developing community tools (e.g. Drupal, Joomla, RoR) has increased the speed to market immeasurably. Couple that with blogging, RSS, faster Internet connections, etcera - and you have turbo-charged connectivity.

If you want to find like-minded people who enjoy surfing on the East River, look in MeetUp for "East River Surfers". If you want to find people who want to help victims of the latest natural disaster, you can search the web via google or any other engine for the relevant keywords, or look on your social network for people who are involved in the effort. More than likely, if you are already connected to the networks, you have an email in your inbox calling upon you to get involved with an effort. And, if you want to help a local politician get support in the Netmosphere, create a diary on DailyKos and get a bunch of your friends to astroturf it - thus attracting others to get involved in the discussion.

But, waitaminute - this is about personal interests. People, given a passion for a topic/interest/action, and a "space" to form within - naturally self-organize, given an objective. In political campaigns, this seems like a natural fit - get the candidate elected and dedicate your time and resources to this goal. Uh ho, it is not that easy.

Preaching to the Converted - Friction-Free Communication
Now, mapping this to political campaigns, the benefit of networks would tend to be the ability to leverage supporter's connections to spread the word and/or to convince to participate - whether by signing a petition, sending a letter to an editor, or donating in a group fashion. But what is the problem with this? I think a hint comes from the quote that Riki brings from Clay Shirky's Many2Many blog post:

[W]e talked ourselves, but not the voters, into believing. And I think the way the campaign was organized helped inflate and sustain that bubble of belief, right up to the moment that the voters arrived...

So, social networks make it easy to find people of like-minds to work together, but does not afford the ability to converse or convince people on the "other side" to the merits of your points. And recalling the many "trolls" that scrambled on the Kerry or Dean blogs, discourse was not the order of the day - flaming and negativity was the order of the day. Even on forums, where people would sign up to join in the discourse, contrarian opinions were often shouted down, or shouted aloud without consideration. "You are WRONG, I am RIGHT" often seems how the discussion is engaged. So - why should we care about his issue of "social networks"?

Tipping Point Alert: Online Networks are hitting critical mass
A report I recently read has MySpace at over 100M registered users. hi5, another social networking site, has 25M. Tagworld, launched just over a year ago has 2M users and growing rapidly. The population of these networks are becoming the equivalent of medium-sized states which, if geographically bound, would garner a large number of Electoral College votes. But, in the eye of the seasoned professional, they are (often) not considered valuable because communicating with members of the community does not generate the benefits that you find in the real world.

Let me offer a couple of intriguing scenarios:

• Imagine if you would, former Governor Mark Warner having a MySpace page and a list of friends where he sends a fundraising email to all of his "friends". Think about the social impact that will have on the MySpace community. MySpace is about sharing content, swapping notes and building friends and recognition. Money making is made outside the community. I believe a case can be made for both sides.
• Now think about Senator Clinton, building a virtual campaign office in SecondLife, the 200K member community that allows for intellectual property ownership and currency exchanges. In this case, the campaign has a virtual store within the office where you can purchase "Hillary '08" paraphenalia with your Linden dollars (L$). To pay the "rent" in SecondLife, the campaign converts those Linden dollars used to buy the campaign gear into US currency through various online exchange sites. (Ooch - those pesky-little rules from McCain-Feingold could potentially problem for compliance issues - but it does help in those data collection needs).
• Or how about Mit Romney decided to try the Lamont tactic on McCain, using the content from Matt Stoler's many anti-McCain posts on myDD. He captures a lot of good video content, and now posts it on YouTube. But, in the forest that is the content within YouTube, very little gets found that does not have other support behind it. Maybe he decides to have his "Internet guy" navigate the over 300 video hosting sites, and post them there. Does he get the same bang-for-the-buck as Lamont did?

What does this point out? Applying the standard model or rehashed models does not always work - and campaigns are not designed to play long-term to benefit from the mistakes they make along the way (with maybe the exception of Hillary and Frist).

Thinking of these social networks as databases or platforms is a BAD IDEA - much like the way campaigns consider email lists and voter files as one large blast mechanism with a percentage of response that has a projected average take, social networks could be perceived as another form of communication that can be broadcast to in an "effective" (read: cost- and time-saving) manner. But, as many people have discovered when marketing in MySpace or on YouTube, the "social" aspect of social networks is key. If success in blogs is dependent upon two-way interaction, success in social netowkrs is even moreso. Consider that by entering into a social network, you are leveraging the trust of your connection, to reach out to another. If the relationship is not formed in the social structure that exists within the space, ham-handed actions will quickly alienate the candidate from within.

Campaigns will try, make hay in the press, but little else
Consider the goals of a campaign: raise money, raise awareness, raise lots of money, and then get the voter to the polls (and potentially convince the other side's supporters not to go). So, put yourself in the shoes of the campaign management - the challenge is: with these priorities, does a social network provide the return that the other tried and true methods do? Does conventional wisdom agree that this is possible? is the concept ahead of the curve?

Hillary has already begun with her recent hiring of Peter Daou as "blog advisor", Warner has Jerome Armstrong and now Kerry is seeking an Online Communications Director, will this be simply a channel for the Communications team to use for broadcasting or shaping the response - or will it become the conduit for coordination between the pieces of the fragmented world of the Internet - building the "virtual precinct captains" we once discussed for KerryNet? To be successful, this will require staff resources and management of large virtual teams. Will a campaign allow this to happen? Unfortunately, I think not - in this cycle.

One last minor anecdote - I always wanted to recruit a field person into the role of Internet Volunteer Coordinator, simply because they understood the need for coordinating large groups of people for a particular activity, and the Internet would just be a different "space" and channel for communicating with the supporters. At the Deutsch Campaign, I almost recruited one - but at the last minute, he decided to take a "real" field role in a northern state. But my experience in both Deutsch and Kerry field operations were incredibly instructive. Erin Hofteig played that role at one point, and I look forward to learning about others.

Tags: Social Networks, Election 2008, MySpace and Politics, YouTube and Politics

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 6:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Are you using the Internet as effectively as Hillary?

After going through my candiate emails (and trust me, there are a lot of them), I began to evaluate the rationale of the content (similar to what I did for the English eCampaigning in 2005). In going through the emails, I began to notice a trend that should be noted such that the other candidates are better equipped for the upcoming online battle ahead. To this end, take a look at this quick and dirty assessment of emails I have been keeping track of:

HillaryClinton.com
One of the interesting things about the frequency of the emails coming out, is that their specficity of action has become more targeted. In the last three months, Hillary (and her staff have) discussed:

• Sign a petition to fire Don Rumsfeld - which is code for "Iraq"
• Sign a petition for Plan B Emergency Contraception - which is code for "abortion"
• Sign a petition for Stem Cell Research - which is, well actually, about stem cell research (and "abortion") and sent twice to confirm
• Sign a petition to support Minimum Wage
• Contribute to NY Dem Mike Arcuri - which connects back to her Contrinution server and helps identify NY voters and others that would support candidates other than herself
• Sign a petition to support Net Neutrality
• Sign a petition in support Homeland Security - which is code for "defense"
• Have a House Party for Hillary - which is code for "super supporter"/influencer
• Sign a petition supporting Family Planning

All in the past three months. And note, almost no request for money for her - only for Mike Arcuri.

JohnKerry.com? In comparison, in the past three months, Kerry has sent:

• Requests to contribute to races he supports - which goes back to his contribution server
• Sign a petition for the Kerry-Feingold amendment
• Cheerleading emails ending with "Make a Contribution"
• Call your Senator on Iraq - with a "report back feature" on the page
• Support Enviromental Candidates fundraiser - back to his contribution server

And what about the other candidates? Well, Joe Biden's "Unite Our States" has:

• Asked for contributions
• Wished the list a Happy July 4th
• Talked about his recent trip to Iraq
• Told me when he would be on "Meet the Press"
• and asked me to read his speech, download a plan and then sign his petition on Energy Security

Why do you act?
Why the analysis? Consider the trends above - note that for every issue discussed, if you were to "sign the petition" or do the action requests, do you think your action results in an action within the campaign? Or are you saving the staff time and energy by keying in your details and signalling the campaign your interest "hot buttons"?

One of the greatest challenges we faced during the primaries of Kerry Campaign was how to inspire people to donate via online donations. In a crowded field of ten candidates and a front-runner found in the wintery hills of Vermont, we were frustrated with equal parts of growing our list and successfully burning it out with continued fundraising emails that were not very effective. With our limited budget and dwindling timeframe, we discovered that we had to optimize our email performance with the limited services and tools we had. So what is happening now?

Identifying your interests increases donations
One of the lessons I learned from Kerry Finance Director Pete Maroney and National Treasurer Bob Farmer (as well as others on the Kerry Fundraising Team) were skills about how to entice donations and convincing others to contribute. It was amazing to watch Maroney on the phone making calls to various donors. He was equal slaesman, taskmaster, psychologist and badgering family member - depending on whom he spoke with. He could be sweet, harsh, smooth, short, halting, etcera - whatever he felt would connect with the person on the other end of the phone. What made all the difference was his understanding of the hot buttons for each donor and how to conjole them to donate.

So why do I bring this up? Well, a lesson from Cialdini's book "Influence" talks about the start of the alignment and loyalty being borne upon the small, low-cost actions that bring about longer-term engagement and investment in whatever they are aligning themselves with. It is kind of funny to think that something as inexpensive as submitting your name and email address to a website should have any psychological impact on you, but consider the next step:

• The candidate that you signed their petition now asks you to help them with the same issue by emailing your friends about the issue - complete with a tool to handle composing and delivering the email. It does not cost you anything but five minutes of time, and you can even connect to your Outlook Contact list if you'd like. So, you decide to help and send the message to your friends or to the local paper.
• Now, Congress is now addressing this issue on the floor of the House or Senate. Now, they need you to reach out and tell more of your friends. Or perhaps to support another candidate on the issue since they are in a battle for their seat against the opposition. Give a small donation (with a trailing amount in cents to show your support) around $5, $10, $25.
• And now, the candidate is looking for contributions for some other issue. What do you think you will do?

The greatest value in the web has always been about information that can be pulled from large amounts of data. google started from an effective algorithm, but what makes the ads it serves effective is about knowing your interests and intents. Sales and revenue is the short-term metric of performance, but information and rationale for action is all about long-term "customer" value. Politics seems to focus on short-term returns - because campaigns are about 18 month engagements. Savvy candidates spend most of their time building Rolodexes with high dollar contributors and understand their rationale for donating - which makes raising money for re-election that much easier. But with McCain-Feingold and the ability of small-dollars to be aggregated into large funds, it is more important to understand the trends of the masses and slice and dice with greater precision.

Catching up with the (business) Jones
This is not rocket science. Companies have these tools within their grasp (look at E-piphany) and product driven companies know this in their DNA. Pollsters for years have been using this knowledge for the benefit of the candidate to understand the best message to address - since it has been focus-group tested and evaluated. Ahhh - but there's the rub. It is not about the lowest common denominator any more - it is about "mass customization" and building relationships with supporters while using technology and information to connect more effectively.

So what's a voter to do?
Good question. Interestingly, you have to decide for yourself. Senator Clinton, who seems to have invested the most in her Internet infrastructure and planning (as evidenced by her focus on soft actions, instead of continuous appeals for donations) has been working this for longer then most. While John Kerry might have a larger list (from the 2004 election), it is obvious from the body of emails that his focus is on his issues - not on the members of the list. My bet - with the Mayfield Strategies solution behind her, she will begin to target more specifically over time as described earlier. Down to understanding and mixing in demographic, psychographic and geographic information to better target you durring the primaries and even during the general. And what does this cost her?

Return on Investment
Well, since Senator Clinton (and Cantwell and Nelson) is running for re-election and she is a Senator, it turns out that Senators are exempt from submitting their financials electronically. But political action committees are not exempt - which affords us but a glimpse. John Kerry's Keeping America's Promise is paying Mayfield Strategies a maintenance fee of $5K per month for site and service management and when other features need to be added (like the Call Your Senator page) increases the spend to numbers like $10K. And, my evaluation suggests that they do not use MSG for their email content.

From my own assessment, it could be assumed her Senate committee (focusing on the longer-term goal of the Presidential run) is paying on the order of 10K per month - which includes service, content (especially for their emails and video) and statistics. And, add on the needs for additional services like Flash or other services not included beyond the base offering, and she could easily be paying on the order of $20K per month.

Sounds like a lot? Consider the total cost is on the order of $200K for a year. How much will be made in the long run with such improved information? Thinking long-term has given Hillary the chance to surpass the successes of Dean and Kerry. Dean brought in close to $40M with donations under $100. Kerry, simply by being the presumed Democratic fundraiser and the alternative to Bush, was able to draw in $82M during the primary on the web. Imagine what 2008 will bring.

For the price of two senior fundraisers, Hillary's Internet fundraising operation is position to break Kerry's totals - and provide Hillary with the most effective political marketing engine through emails, text messages, videos, etcera. What will the rest of the field do from this day forward?

Tags: Email Campaigning, eCampaigning, Political Infrastructure, influence, Hillary Clinton, Mayfield Strategies

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 7:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Emails Keep On Comin'

In the last couple of weeks, I have begun to notice a steady increase of emails from the various players in the 2006 and upcoming 2008 election cycle. Ranging from my frequent email missives from Hillary and John, I am seeing:

• Russ Feingold - using GetActive to send out emails to get people to sign his petition for healthcare and announcing his new website
• Evan Bayh - using a Articulated Man-like design to send out emails from his newly revamped website
• Senator Joe Biden - using a Articulated Man design and GetActive to send out media alerts

Additionally, I get email from:

• State Senator Rod Smith - running for Florida governor
• Congressman Jim Davis - Smith's Democratic primary competitor
• AG Charlie Crist - Republician front-runner for Florida governor
• FL Senator Bill Nelson - Senior US Senator for Florida
• Senator Maria Cantwell - running for Senate in Washington state
• Former Governor Howard Dean - for the DNC
• Congressman Rahm Emanuel and Congresswoman Nanci Peloci - for the DCCC
• My "friends" at the GOP and the RNC
• Democracy for America, True Majority and MoveOn on the left
• RightMarch on the right

And so many other players. One thing I noticed is that all (of the Democrats) are beginning to follow the basic premise of emails gained from the Dean campaign. Seen cribbing from the echoDitto site, most are beginning to use this basic format of links in the body and such. But, what seems to be missing from some - and especially from Republicians like AG Crist - is a succinct, engaging narrative that poses a problem that is solved by our involvement. Getting us to engage and invest in the solution makes us stronger supporters in the long run.

I have to give credit to some of the players - like BlueStateDigital (behind the emails from Rod Smith) and Mayfield Strategies (behind the content from Hillary, Cantwell, Casey and others) - they are generating well-written and engaging content. What worries me is that others - like Bayh, Biden and Feingold - who are trying to position themselves for the upcoming fight - are not winning the discourse. They are getting missives out there - but little engagement. Where are the real problems that we could solve with you - the candidates?

Anyone looking at Warner?

Hmmm....here is a candidate that seems to be involved in engagement, rather than announcement. In terms of his actions and interactions, this candidate seems to be building a relationship with his base. And instead of thinking of pure marketing (or broadcasting and blogging for the PR aspects), Warner seems to be involved in the communications - and building what people used to describe as the Dean campaign. Will a movement form? Will Warner's emails get to the level I describe? Not sure - since, for some reason, I have not been getting them. But I will keep on the look out and see how everyone begins to shape up. And - Sen McCain - what's up with your connecting?

UPDATE: Granted, getting a trackback from a fellow bloggerKari Chisholm is not usually cause for note, but when it is the first solid one that is not trying to sell Hoodia solutions, Viagra or other sundry links - all I can say is thanks.

Tags: Email Campaigning, grassroots marketing, Rod Smith, Jim Davis, Hillary Clinton, Mark Warner, EchoDitto, Blue State Digital, Mayfield Strategies

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 4:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Part 3: Master/Slave and Peer-to-Peer

And now, I come full circle with finally answering the original question of Jock's post - are we able to move from Master/Slave to Peer-to-Peer? Interestingly, the posts have gotten into a discussion of what the Kerry Campaign did or did not do, what the Dean Campaign did or did not do - but what is fundamentally missing is the basis of what a campaign truly is: a small organization that is strapped for cash - trying to marshall resources to engage an electorate that the majority gets involved in the last six weeks of the campaign.

The Problem: Creating Scale
Consider the challenges of any campaign:

• Create awareness about the candidate
• Create a team
• Build relationships with validators
• Create and manage buzz
• Answer questions from interested parties
• Build a platform for the issues
• Build, develop and manage volunteers
• Develop field team to get out the vote on election day
• ....and many, many more

Consider all of these tasks, and the energy it takes to even consider running for public office. You take on incredible risks (your reputation, your home, your personal relationships) all for the potential of winning an election that could turn on a dime for some salacious piece of information attacks you and your reputation and strikes at your core.

How can one person do this alone? And constantly for a period of 18 months to three years before the election day? How can you hire a staff (and a qualified one) to handle all of these tasks? How can you expand your personal bandwidth to address the growing needs of your supporters and campaign? How do you build scale?

Risk Capital is like Voters to the Polls
One of my favorite thought exercises/analogies when describing my experiences in the campaigns is the pursuit of capital for a startup. When someone creates a company - they (potentially) have a number of channels to secure financing: personal credit (high priced debt), a bank loan (lower cost debt), venture capital (lower cost, migration of control) to friends-and-family (low priced debt, high emotional price). The investment risk profile of each of these groups varies based on their organizational structure:

• credit cards assume some level of default, which determined their high rates
• banks have to manage the risk of their capital, which is why they ask for assets to have the loan secured
• venture capitalists take on more risk but also are willing to secure their capital against the asset of stock ownership and directorships, and
• friends-and-family secure their investment against the relationship they have with the "investment" - which is usually the individual and their commitment to the task.

Apply this model to the political realm. You are a candidate risking your reputation, career, livelihood and potentially your home and marriage to get elected to a higher office. Are you the bank? The venture capitalist? The financially secure, independently wealthy individual? Or somewhere in between? What is the social proof that the distributed channel is going to get you elected on Election Day? And what is your concern? You want to deliver on your promise to your backers - especially your friends and family.

Next, focus on the political operatives. They make their livelihood on their success of getting their candidates elected. On the quality of their relationships. On making an investment in a candidate in the early days, to potentially benefit from the success in the later part of the campaign (e.g. points on the media buy). Are the social incentives in place to allow for a distributed effort to occur where the operative feels confident in the commitment and results from external supporters?

No Tyranny of the OR - Master/Slave AND Peer-to-Peer
One of my favorite business books is Jerry Porras and Jim Collin's "Built to Last" - which describes how a number of successful companies can be distinguished by looking at processes and cultural attitudes within them. And granted, the difficulty in comparing long-standing businesses to 18 month campaigns is not necessarily on-par.

But, I believe that a combination of the two concepts (and a slight modification of one) can be effectively implemented to bring about success to campaigns - for all parties concerned. But it takes planning, effort and coordination - and an understanding of all parties of the chalenges they face.

Peer to Peer is based on Trust
Peer-to-Peer works most effectively when information is provided, transparency is available - in a trusted network. The incentive for peer-to-peer networks is based on the benefits that one gets. Look at these common peer-to-peer situations:

• Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa
  Napster (and the other solutions) were so successful (when measuring network growth and distribution) because, even with their challenging interface - users could get music for FREE. Students who wanted to share music could easily do so by using their network, ripping their songs, and making the content available for their friends. Once the software was proven not to adversely damage computers - and other "mavens" validated the use, the software grew like wildfire.
  As the network began to grow, connections began to form - people would connect with each other via the chat application because of the music they had on their hard drives, and new relationships were formed. This act of transparency created a beneficial side-effect - self-expression and relationship building - which myspace.com has been so successful in exploiting.
  
• Skype
  One of the success stories of the last two years, Skype got started using the same principle they learned from building Kazaa - and making a service that benefitted people where it mattered - COST. There were a number of VOIP phone services before (Net2Phone is an example), but their interface, quality of call and price structure were deterrants to adoption.
  Skype addressed all of these concerns - and from their, the stories grew about companies, non-profits and families saving incredible amounts of money for distributing Skype to their personal network - reducing the cost of long-distance changes. And, once the process of making calls on the computer became a comfortable process - making calls off the Skype network was as easy as calling cards - and generates the bulk of Skype's revenues. And, with a distributed, peer-to-peer network that has RELIABILITY and REDUNDANCY, Skype can save costs on routing and infrastructure, because the web of Skype clients is dense enough to handle the traffic - even with holes in the network.
  
• SETI @home
  A terrific example of altruism and distributed computing - that allows individuals to help a project by offering their spare cycles for a common good. SETI @home is not necessarily peer-to-peer, but it is the use of distributed energies for a centralized good. And, the cost to the contributor - simply their spare computer cycles and the broadband connection.

It is all about Trust
In these examples, peer-to-peer is a technical implementation of a trust network. We have all sorts of trust networks that we use on a regular basis. My migration to Firefox from Internet Explorer was not because I was looking for a new browser - it was because a friend of mine told me about the browser and how it was successful in blocking pop-up ads and deterred spyware from being installed. Since I knew him (and his reputation), I checked out the software, installed it - and have been a happy Firefox user ever since. Napster had a slowdown in adoption during its growth period because of viruses being distributed in the network, posing as audiofiles or images that people would download and open. But once it released a patch that was endorsed by trusted members of the community, Napster's growth began again.

In the political realm, how does the distributed network offer assurances to the candidate and the operatives that they can bring about the success metrics that both parties need?

One technique I am supportive of is the Democracy Cell Network designed to train individual supporters to create a network of grassroot supporters in the use of technology and communications tools to support Democratic candidates. Dick Bell and his wife created this group with the "troll-patrol" supporters on the Kerry blog - and have been working very hard on developing some success stories. I liken their effort to the old Underground Railroad - where disparate, but passionate individuals banded together to provide an infrastructure for a common cause. Trust is/was formed through actions and shared risk AND there is/was a centralized mechanism that leveraged the peer-to-peer infrastructure to accomplish the overall goal.

The Solution is building Trust and Results
Jock's premise is that campaigns and the system is designed against the concept of peer-to-peer. And within the comments, technology is seen as the potential solution to overcoming the problems (i.e. complaints about not having enough technical resources). IMHO, I believe that targeted development efforts - like AdvoKit which addresses peer-to-peer voter outreach or vivaDemocracy which leverages group dynamics to accomplish volunteer tasks - is the way to build the tools that can leverage our trusted networks.

From my limited knowledge, NOI is working on some solutions for this - leveraging the skills of Josh Lerner and others who are building out tools for political campaigns to manage their online support network. The question that I have to ask: how can we build the trust and relationships between the different parties to ensure that successful experiences are generated AND create an effective engagement of the distributed support without negatively impacting other priorities of the campaign to drive to the success that all parties desire? If you have suggestions, I (and many others) are all ears.

Tags: Participatory Democracy, Kerry Campaign, online organizing, eCampaigning, Greater Democracy, Jock Gill, peer-to-peer, Master/Slave

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 4:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

SXSW - Revenge of the Blogs: Election 2008

Listening in on the SXSW conference with Henry Copeland from blogAds moderating. At the conference, Marcos (from DailyKos), Michael (from redstate.org) and Ruby (from NetCentricCampaigns) are discussing the impact of blogs in the coming elections.

Interesting content - and seems to carry on from the IPDI conference - that the future techs will be: mobile platforms, social networks (my read: detailed databases) and easy publishing will begin to enable others to speak out that are still not part of the conversation as of yet. Michael suggests that politics will still use the techniques they already are comfortable with today - and just use tech to enable it. Essentially - reduce the friction and speed up access and visibility of action through the web and telecoms medium (read: Asterisk and mobile).

Tags: SXSW mobile campaigning

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 11:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

IPDI "Politics Online" Lessons

Spent Tuesday and Wednesday at the IPDI conference catching up with various friends and vendors. Excellent panel on mobile solutions (see Mozes and POLItxt) and a discussion on VoIP and softPBXes (think Apache for the phone services) and how it will revolutionize the political industry. A sunning summary of what I learned:

"The Changing Media Landscape" - with Chris Nolan, David Weinberger, Dan Gilmore and Alex Jones.

Personal technology are forcing a conversation to occur whether through blogs with individuals discussing amoungst themselves or social network spaces forming (e.g. myspace, facebook) that are becoming the new "town halls" or "third spaces" in this medium. And even though 100 years ago, the explosion of publishing that occurred with the advent of an inexpensive printing press eventually lead to a consolidation of media channels as seen today - this explosion will have to be handled in a much different issues because of ease of publishing, ease of distribution and ease of access. (paraphrasing Dan here). Services like Digg and other collaborative news sites (like NewsVine) will begin to create and dominate the community awareness of news content in a collaborative sense, instead of relying on large media brands to select the appropraite content to a wide audience.

One question I still have - will access to capital for marketing or government agreement with carrier restrictions (e.g. net neutrality) be the friction that causes tthe slow-down and consolidation. As with every ecosystem, there tends to be an explosion of growth and then a winnowing down of the growth to the strong few. A recent article spoke on this - tho I do not remember where it was. (Special note: Chris Nolan - exceptional moderator with her focus on the audience level of understanding).

One more thought: as these sites begin to proliferate - I would wonder why Digg or NewsVines do not create versions of their services (like syndication/white labels) for different communities. One lesson from eGroups that I thought was particularly well-suited to eGroups was the creating of ccgroups.com - essentially a Christian Community eGroups that solely supported the Christian Community mailing lists (Disclosure: I was the Director of Marketing for eGroups and built this deal). Interestingly, during the time I tracked it - ccgroups was either the third or fourth most prolific "grouping" on eGroups at the time before acquisition with Yahoo! (below the main site, eGroups Japan and adult content).

"Over the Horizon" - with Valdes Krebs, Micah Sifry, Eli Parser, and Danny Glover

Interesting chat - focused on email campaigns (can we say MoveOn), group managemen software (can we cay eGroups) and "social networks" (can we say InFlow) - but it seemed that the horizon was still quite muddled - innovation is there, but the implementation of these techniques still require campaigns to make the next step.

"Politics to Go" - Jed Alpert, Aaron Clark, Julie Barko Germany, and Dan Weaver

Interesting discussion of mobile communications and using mobile technology to get out the message and/or build relationships. The ubiquiousness fo the mobile platform ("third screen") is already so prevalent that the ease of connecting though various services like POLItxt or Mozes (in beta - but coming soon) is going to be another tool in the campaign toolset. The challenge I forsee is one similar to email campaigns. To date, campaigns are often found to acquire email lists, direct mail list from older campaigns - and people often find themselves on candidate mailing lists they do not want to be on. Now consider the upcoming effort of mobile marketing. While it is promised to not to give away mobile details to other parties - was that not the same promise for email and direct mail? I should als state that the speakers addressed this by saying that the mobile carriers are able to stop mobile spam and could negatively impact (read: cut off) service providers who work with groups that connect with pilfered lists, I would love to see legal rememdies that scare anyone from doing so in the US - and then, I would be happy to give my mobile number to a compaign.

"Making the Next Generation Telephone Calls" - with Justin Oberman, myself, Julia Cohen, and Chris Spence

Interestingly, I filled in at the last minute - and discussed that the goal of this talk was to discuss about how VoIP and another concept (softPBXes) could fundamentally change the political marketspace. In the sense, with softPBXes (like Aserisk) becoming more technologically doable, campaigns can now see the benefit of using more inexpensive phone services across their data network. Concepts like WildFire (personal answering assistant), unified presence (one campaign number automatically routes the call to any person available) to centralized phone banking with distributed staffers with the control at the center (think of home-based customer service with a control scheme at the campaign office). VoIP was identified as a godsend for reducing costs - especially in International non-profits - and for campaigns, we discussed many of the products that are potentially possible for the future of campaigning from your mobile phone. Examples like Speakeasy, created by the founder of txtMob and liveOps (a home based customer service offering) were also discussed.

Annd, as always, the Golden Dots were awared - and, again, I am confused as to who and why they nominees were chosen and the winners selected. I think for the future there should be greater entries (like from Blue State Digital, echoDitto, Mayfield Strategies, etcera) which really are demonstrating the future of campaigning.

Tags: eCampaigning IPDI mobile Politics moPocket Asterisk VoIP Politics Online SMS Spam

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 5:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Function combined with form

One of the questions I get asked freqently is "what do you do for campaigns?" The concept of using the Internet for campaigns has had the same hype that the Internet has back in the late 90's ("it'll change the process of democracy"). But the truth of the matter is - the Internet and the associated technologies will do to politics what it did for commerce - reduce the friction/obstacles from the path to action. Consider what happened in 2004 - and what might happen in 2006 and onward:

In 2004, broadband penetration had reached a tipping point - and the excitement of blogs began to permeate the national consciousness - which meant finding the threads of hot information were simply a search request away found at the new nodes (such as DailyKos, Eschalon, MyDD or LittleGreenFootballs).

The Bush campaign leveraged the medium (as aptly put by Ken Melman at the Politics Online Conference back in Jan 2004) and took advantage of the systems that required adoption. They would launch web ads first - then alert the media - which would increase visibility of the web ad - and have the media do their marketing for them - all without a spend of media dollars (unless you consider Akamai bandwidth charges a "media spend"). Again, the friction was reduced because supporters and detractors alike could simply search or surf their way to the site and consume the media - all without an extraneous effort beyond posting the file onto the web.

Contributions were similarly improved - because now, instead of having to get your postal mail from the mailbox, open the letter from some candidate, decide to write a check, write the check, put it in the envelope, stamp it (if not already included) and then take it out to the mailbox (whew! talk about friction) - a supporter could see a advert online or on the television, decide to donate, go to the computer - go to the candidates website - and donate ONLINE. All from the comfort of his/her home/work computer. Consider how many "impulse donations" occurred when emails on issues hit the email inboxes of supporters, when John Kerry said "johnkerry.com" on national television, or when an advert hit the airways talking about the future of the country. Now, function combines with form to drive to a call-to-action.

For the first time in the history of the world, real-time response is possible - not because we did not have a globel communications network installed (heck, I think Alexander Graham Bell might have an issue with some assertions), but because we have the means to LISTEN to what our supporters/customers are saying - and can implement scalable solutions to accept and respond to them.

BUT - and here is the cautionary tale - it is not technology that is the panacea that makes this work. It is the people and processes that make it work. Taking the words of Alan Greenspan into mind, we increase the productivity of each campaign worker - and give the the ability to improve the reach of the campaign/candidate - if taken seriously. Consider what would happen if the proper training and tools were in place - and could empower the candidates/campaign to reach out effectively.

Here is a plug for The New Organizing Institute - a group that Zack Exley is putting together to help build out the future campaigners for Democrats. If I were you - and looking to get involved - sign up. It is going to be an interesting ride.

Tags: eCampaigning, New Organizing Institute, Zack Exley, Online Organizing

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 3:36 PM | Comments (0)

Participation on the edges

Spending today in Maine at popTech (Thanks to Te Smith for her help) and spent the days listening to how technology and visionaries are working to "make a difference". And one of the conference speakers, Professor Yochai Benkler (see Dina's post and Buzz's post), spent fifteen minutes explaining the "future of open source' - and how the centralized model has been spun on it's head.

Intriguingly, this is what I heard at the start of the Dean phenomenon - that the conversation is occuring on the edge, and not in the center. Trippi was masterful in leveraging this energy ("You Have the Power"), but the challenge is - the process for electing people into public office is a much more complex than most people think. The engagement of the masses is not necessarily easy - but the lesson that I took away is supporting the community can derive benefit, but how do you generate deterministic performance (e.g. the meme you want discussed becomes the dominant one) in the timeframe you need?

The situations Yochai discussed regarding politics were the Diebold Machines and the "Stolen Honor" airing and withdrawl. Intriguingly, the "Stolen Honor" story is quite engaging - how Sinclair Broadcasting was shamed into reacting when the politically interested bloggers and supporters of Kerry got involved. Another story of community action like this would be the Rathergate story - the Killian memos and how the conservative blogosphere was able to shut down this story.

But the question is - how does a political campaign engage this distributed community? Consider that the priorities of a campaign (at the beginning) are to (1) raise money, (2) manage relationships, and (3) build awareness. They work the Democratic Executive Clubs (who is paying attention to a campaign 18-24 months out), Democratic Party leaders within the within the geography they are run in, and the campaign has to generate contributions to fund the campaign - which is shown as the only metric that determines the viability of a campaign before the majority of voters even