Internet Now Major Source of Campaign News

Too Bad Gary Jones,
Oklahoma GOP
still do NOT get this...

In Prec 59 in Cleveland County ,
I have 88% of the Republican and
even a few demo on my
Prec E-Mail list.
I use it to help get the word out !

Internet Now Major Source of
Campaign News

Continuing Partisan Divide in
Cable TV News Audiences

Many more Americans are turning to the internet for campaign news this year as the web becomes a key source of election news. Television remains the dominant source, but the percent who say they get most of their campaign news from the internet has tripled since October 2004 (from 10% then to 33% now).
While use of the web has seen considerable growth, the percentage of Americans relying on TV and newspapers for campaign news has remained relatively flat since 2004. The internet now rivals newspapers as a main source for campaign news. And with so much interest in the election next week, the public's use of the internet as a campaign news source is up even since the primaries earlier this year. In March, 26% cited the internet as a main source for election news, while the percentages citing television and newspapers remain largely unchanged.Not surprisingly, the internet is a considerably more popular source for campaign news among younger Americans than among older ones. Nearly three times as many people ages 18 to 29 mention the internet as mention newspapers as a main source of election news (49% vs. 17%). Nearly the opposite is true among those over age 50: some 22% rely on the internet for election news while 39% look to newspapers. Compared with 2004, use of the internet for election news has increased across all age groups. Among the youngest cohort (age 18-29), TV has lost significant ground to the internet.

On television, the cable news outlets clearly dominate the big three networks as main sources of campaign news. Nearly half of the public (46%) turns to the cable news channels, with 25% naming CNN as a main source of campaign news, 21% naming Fox News Channel and 10% naming MSNBC. Only 24% rely on the network news outlets ABC, CBS and NBC. Another 13% look to local TV news. This reflects broader changes in news consumption patterns. In recent years, cable news outlets have overtaken the networks as the general news sources that the public watches most regularly.1

Cable News Audiences Highly Partisan

The audiences for the major cable news networks are highly partisan, while the audiences for network TV and the internet are more in line with the general public.

Among those who name the Fox News Channel as their main source for campaign news, 52% are Republicans and only 17% are Democrats. By contrast, among those who rely on MSNBC for their campaign news, 50% are Democrats and only 11% are Republicans. Similarly, CNN's campaign news audience is largely Democratic -- 45% are Democrats and 13% are Republicans.

Notably, there are substantial differences in awareness of recent campaign events among the different cable news audiences. Majorities in each audience said they heard a lot about reports that the Republican National Committee spent about $150,000 on clothing for Sarah Palin and her family. But far more of those who get most campaign news from MSNBC than those who rely on Fox News heard a lot about the controversy (71% vs. 51%, respectively). Among those who turn to CNN for election news, 62% reported hearing a lot about Palin's wardrobe.

Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama registered more widely among the MSNBC news audience than among those who rely on Fox News for presidential campaign coverage. Seven-in-ten MSNBC viewers heard a lot about the Powell endorsement, compared with 54% of the Fox News audience. Close to six-in-ten (59%) of those who turn to CNN heard a lot about the endorsement.

About two-thirds of those who rely mainly on Fox News for campaign coverage (66%) said they had heard a lot about links between Obama and ACORN, the community organizing group that has been accused of voter registration fraud. A comparable proportion (62%) of those who rely mainly on MSNBC heard a lot about this story. A majority of those who get most of their campaign news from CNN (52%) heard a lot about the ACORN allegations.

Notes

1 See "Key News Audiences Now Blend Online and Traditional Sources," released August 17, 2008.

McCain Throws Aide Under the Bus for Twittering YouTube Link

Soren Dayton was a Twitter friend (Soren has deleted his Twitter account) and STILL is a Facebook friend ! And I am a member on the "Support Soren Dayton!" facebook group !

McCain Throws Aide Under the Bus for Twittering YouTube Link

Posted by: Matt Lewis

Today, John McCain suspended an aide -- Soren Dayton -- for distributing this controversial YouTube video about Barack Obama and Rev. Wright. As campaigns spokesperson Jill Hazelbaker told Jonathan Martin, Dayton was "reprimanded by campaign leadership."

I defended John McCain when he distanced himself from that radio show host in Ohio who repeatedly invoked Obama's middle name. To me, the radio host was making a tawdry attack, meant to imply Obama was Muslim. And McCain was doing the right thing by not engaging in that sort of campaign.

But this situation is a bit different.

In reading his Twitter message (shown above), Dayton merely wrote: "Good video on Obama and Wright," and included the link. That's it. And for that, he was suspended.

Here's why I think this move might have been politically unwise. Suspending Dayton for passing this video on implies by extension that the message of this video was in some way incorrect, or, at least, not respectable. But, as I've written in the past, it is entirely legitimate to question Obama's affiliation with Rev. Wright -- as well as to highlight Obama's evolving positions.

From Geraldine Ferraro to Samantha Power, this has been the year for apologies and terminations. My question is whether John McCain is willing to throw everyone under the bus the minute they do something that might be embarrassing to him.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I've been told that campaigns actually attack their opponents from time to time. It is unclear precisely what Dayton's job for McCain was (a source tells Jonathan Martin that Dayton was doing "low-level political work for [deputy political director] John Yob."

Dayton was a fairly prominent blogger, and one would suppose he was doing more than simply "low-level" work. Perhaps he wasn't -- or perhaps this is an example of a McCain aide taking another shot at a guy who is already down.

Still, reprimanding him may cause future McCain operatives to think twice before doing their job. Is McCain recommending a sort of "limited war" in which the enemy can shoot at us, but we can't shoot back?

Standing on principle is a good value, but so is supporting your subordinates and so is loyalty. It takes political courage to stand up for your team -- even if it may cost you politically. Is McCain too concerned about wanting to come across as a nice guy?

Hazelbaker emailed me the following statement (which is the same thing she sent Martin):

We have been very clear on the type of campaign we intend to run and this staffer acted in violation of our policy. He has been reprimanded by campaign leadership and suspended from the campaign.

Though they have been clear on the type of campaign they want to run, it is still unclear if, or when, Dayton will be reinstated.

Of course, it is not unheard of for campaigns to engage in a bit of deception involving the leaking of negative information. For example, it is entirely possible that Dayton distributed it under the direction of a campaign superior. It is possible Dayton believed the campaign would have wanted this out there -- but that not telling them would give them plausible deniably.

It is also entirely possible that he has agreed to be the "fall guy" in an effort to save Senator McCain face. In fact, it is likely this little controversy will result in more people viewing this video -- which would obviously be a net-plus for McCain (who gets to remain above the fray).

But -- because this particular video added little to the narrative -- it is more likely that Dayton merely passed this link on, not knowing it would be a big deal -- and that the McCain campaign has chosen to punish him for this. What Dayton is really guilty of is failing to follow the maxim that you should never interfere when the enemy is in the process of committing suicide.

If McCain has any cause to be angry, it's not that Dayton made an ethical lapse -- it's that he made a political one.

Dayton distributed the video via Twitter. The default setting on Twitter allows anyone to "follow" a Twitterer. In other words, it would have been easy for anybody who wanted to catch Dayton (or any other operative, for that matter) in a gaffe, to sign up to receive his messages.

Most folks who use Twitter, do so in a very casual and personal manner. One source who follows Dayton told me that Dayton most likely didn't think he was Twittering in an "official" capacity. Still, anything you write can and will be used against you.

Dayton has since deleted his Twitter account.

Did the 'So call Power's' in the McCain camp goof up ?

Soren Dayton was a Twitter friend (Soren has deleted his Twitter account) and STILL is a Facebook friend ! And I am a member on the "Support Soren Dayton!" facebook group !

Defending Soren Dayton
Posted by: Patrick Ruffini

Earlier today, Soren Dayton, a friend and frequent collaborator in the blogosphere, was suspended from the McCain campaign for making a note of this video in his Twitter account.

To see Video, click here

A few notes here. I use Twitter a lot. And I'm "looser" on Twitter than I would be on my blog. My Twitter account has been updated 2,863 times since last June, while I've only penned no more than a couple hundred mostly long-form blog entries. My Twitter posts contain a lot of rough thoughts that are then refined into blog posts. So, there's a greater volume of chatter, and the sense that the tool operates more like a secure backchannel than a public blog.

Of course, this is really an illusion. Everything you say on Twitter is publicly accessible, unless you choose to protect your updates for friends only. If you can screencap it, folks in Peoria on the other side of the Fox News filter won't care if it was Twittered or blogged. This is a stark reminder that anything that you write on a social media site, now matter how "protected" is ultimately just as accessible as anything you put out in any other medium. (It didn't take long for people to sniff out "Kristen's" Facebook profile.)

I'm not going to argue that Soren was right in posting the link. But I do agree with Matt Lewis that there was some overreaction here. If they go further with this civility routine, they risk alienating conservatives in talk radio and the blogosphere who are doing the necessary work of defining Obama and rendering him just as radioactive with the base as Hillary.

A month ago, McCain-Obama looked like a bad matchup for us: a Republican nominee who didn't do much to galvanize the base against a Democrat who didn't either.

The New York Times kerfuffle and now the Wright story is slowly changing that. With an assist from Hillary Clinton's overtures to the right-wing of the Democratic Party, Obama is now a more polarizing figure in key swing states than she is. It is now clear that conservative media will do to Obama what they did to Kerry, Gore, and Clinton. This can be an unalloyed boon to the McCain campaign, as it pretty much takes care of his conservative problem and frees him to go after swing voters.

This is not about "Barack Hussein Obama" or Muslim smear emails, which need to be repudiated. It is about a Presidential candidate's literary muse going all Susan Sontag on us on the Sunday after 9/11. It is connecting the dots on the post-patriotic milieu that surrounds Obama seemingly everywhere he goes. These are legitimate issues for public discussion, if not by McCain himself, then certainly by talk radio and the blogs. If McCain doesn't want to be part of that, that's understandable. But he should get out of the way and let talk radio do its thing.

In many ways, the Bush campaign had the right approach with the Swift Boat Veterans. Any functionary or board member who had been connected in any way with the Swift Vets resigned from the campaign. The campaign told them -- and, crucially, any 527 -- to take down their ads. They repeated that they respected Kerry's service -- without turning into a mouthpiece for the Kerry Vietnam narrative.

But nothing was done to single out or disrespect John O'Neill and the other veterans who had earned their right to speak. The tone was firm but respectful.

With this campaign, there has been a tendency to do the necessary distancing, but with sharper words and a sense that freelancers are thrown willfully under the bus. First, Bill Cunningham, who was an important part of Ohio GOTV in the '04 election. Now this.

It is pretty well understood by most serious people that the Rev. Wright is not a racial/foreigner/Muslim issue, nor was it an unprovoked attack on Obama on these grounds, not in the way Ferraro was, or the Somali email that Clinton's staff circulated without reprimand (which was 10x worse than this, btw), or Bill Clinton's South Carolina comments.

I'm not suggesting the McCain campaign traffic in it directly. Politically, they probably had to do what they did today. Most people in this business understand that moves like are a game -- a show -- that the campaigns put on for the media, that won't swing a single vote at the end of the day -- but that if handled poorly, could cascade into a larger issue. See: Clinton, Bill -- South Carolina.

But what I am suggesting is that McCain in the future calibrate his response to different situations, and recognize the value in drawing certain personal contrasts with Obama. Voters are motivated less and less by issues, and more by personalities and narratives. So, a key McCain strategic goal is to turn the Obama persona in against itself, so that the rock star/Messiah/hopeandchange routine turns into a liability in dead-serious times when people are worried about losing their jobs and/or getting killed.

The challenge in modern Presidential campaign is not simply to paint your opponent as wrong on the issues, and to prevail in a civil debate. It is to render the opponent unacceptable to 48% of the electorate, and merely less preferable to 3%. Despite McCain's troubles with the base, conservative media (and Hillary) are doing the heavy lifting on the unacceptable part. McCain should get out of the way, and jump in ONLY when someone crosses a racial and/or religious line.

New Media Continues to Grow in Influence

New Media Continues to Grow

in Influence; Further Fragments
Influence of Traditional Media
by Admin
March 10, 2008

Advertisers trying to increase their ROI would be well advised to pay more attention to what their customers say influence their purchases and, in particular, the new media options which are growing the fastest, according to BIGresearch’s (http://www.bigresearch.com) Simultaneous Media Survey (SIMM 11, Dec. 07).

While traditional media still rank on top, many are declining in influence and some are showing double digit losses over the previous year; whereas, many new media options are showing double digit growth. For example, when compared to SIMM 9 (Dec. 06), Instant Messaging and Blogging experienced double digit growth for purchase influence of electronics at 22% and 21.5%, respectively. Conversely, Broadcast TV and Cable showed a decline of 13.9% and 14.4%.

“It’s no longer enough for marketers to advertise only a slogan or warm fuzzy feeling. Top line sales growth and bottom line increases are where it’s at in today’s highly competitive no growth market,” said Gary Drenik, President of BIGresearch. “Marketers need to better understand the changing dynamics of the consumer media market and develop new marketing plans that integrate new media to replace the erosion of traditional media for influence to purchase. Marketers who can’t tap new media options for their influence to purchase will suffer a decline in advertising ROI,” said Drenik.

Not only is influence of new media growing, it is much more influential among minority groups. Influence of new media is higher for Hispanics and African Americans across all new media forms compared to all adults. Alternatively, influence of new media for Caucasians is lower than the general market for all types.Further analysis comparing new media influence to purchase with traditional is available by clicking: http://info.bigresearch.com/

Web politics go beyond YouTube

Web politics go beyond YouTube
By Jennifer Harper
March 5, 2008

Technology-challenged politicians beware: George Allen's infamous "macaca moment" was a little disaster compared to what's to come, according to the Politics Online Conference, which got under way yesterday.

"YouTube moments will be nothing compared to the impact of emerging, disruptive technologies in political space," said Julie Germany, director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, which organized the event at the Renaissance Washington hotel.

For the uninitiated, "disruptive technology" is a term for daring innovations — digital photography and e-commerce, for example — which jolt us out of the status quo toward new behaviors.

Such technology is reshaping the presidential election. The conference will showcase political applications of MoSoSo (mobile social software), microtargeting, widgets, UGC (user-generated content), mashups, radical transparency, open source government, wireless engagement, actionable public data and search marketing, among other things.

"It's a matter of pervasive politics. We're looking at a combination of satellite technology, incredibly detailed databases of consumer and voter habits, social networking, online activities. Advertisers can track everything — where you go, what you do. As technology evolves, anonymity slips away," Ms. Germany said.

So does decorum, perhaps. At times, the forum was almost drowned out by the giddy din of attendees as they gleaned free coffee mugs, Gummi candies, trail mix and T-shirts from Yahoo, Google, Politico, ValueClick Media, RealClearPolitics and other sponsors in the back of the room. Meanwhile, much of the multitasking audience was chatting on cell phones, fiddling with laptops or tapping frantically on a BlackBerry.

The experts du jour — slouched onstage with wireless microphones — bickered over marketing phrases such as "dual transparency" and "integrating the chaos factor." They also pondered the burgeoning big picture.

"Should we always be online, always connected? I'm not so sure that's a positive thing. We have to start making decisions about whether we want to be on the grid, 24/7," noted Jon Taplin, a communications professor at the University of Southern California.

"Whatever media I consume, I try to remember what ideological agendas I am exposed to, and correct for it," said Adam Greenfield, a panelist and author of "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing."

Bob Boorstin, a spokesman for Google, was not worried that Web-based political groups would threaten the nation's traditional two-party system. "I'm excited that the orthodoxy is challenged. If the Internet enables MoveOn.com and other organizations, I'm all for that," he said.

The political mainstream already may be hip to technology, disruptive and otherwise.

Maria Cino, president and chief executive officer of the 2008 Republican National Convention, announced yesterday that the Sept. 1-4 event would be the most "tech-savvy in history" via new partnerships with Google, YouTube, Qwest and bloggers "both emerging and traditional."

"This isn't your father's GOP — but Dad is still a proud Republican," noted convention spokesman Ryan James.


The GOP eCampaign guru's for the 21st Century ..

Fred08.com: An Outside Insider’s View

Fred08.com: An Outside Insider’s View

Hat Tip to Michael @ Kung Fu Quip

Fred08.com:
An Outside Insider’s View

January 24th, 2008
by Turk

A lot has been written about the Thompson campaign in the past two days. I have read a bunch of post-mortems all focused on what went wrong, but I thought I would spend a little time telling you what went right. For people interested in online politics and the way candidates use the web, the Thompson campaign is a great case study in what can go well, and go badly in our world.

On May 22nd, I was sitting at Inova Fairfax hospital as my wife was rehydrated. A vicious stomach flu was circulating through the house and had brought my wife and son down. As we sat there that evening, I received an e-mail on my Blackberry from the brother of a friend of the Thompson’s. A few days earlier, they had seen an article in the Washington Post wherein I chastised my party for not using the Internet effectively.

I had been sweating the fallout from that article for two days. I was not exactly loved by the RNC for my critical assessment of their online operation. That article, which was about 180 degrees removed from the series of conversations I had with the reporter, was not going to help.

The Thompson team, however, agreed with my assessment that campaigns could use the Internet differently and wanted me to come out to “The House” to chat about it. We agreed to meet the next day despite what would become a full-blown case of the flu. The Thompson team, it seems, had circulated that same flu about a week earlier and none of them were afraid of catching it again.

On May 23rd, I met with Team Fred and after a three hour discussion of new and innovative ways you could use the Internet to supplement a traditional campaign, I left with an assignment - build a Presidential website in the height of a media storm, that would withstand a huge rush of traffic the moment it launched, and do it all in 10 days.

The Launch

On June 5, 2007, we launched ImWithFred.com. The site was originally envisioned as a simple splash page that would gather low hanging fruit - early donors and supporters looking to sign up. A requirement that all forms be pre-populated so visitors would not have to fill in information more than once threw in a wrinkle and we ended up building personalization into a splash page - not something most people would do. We also ended up building tools that would allow viral recruitment for both donors and volunteers.

Now these tools were hardly new or innovative, but the combination of designing the data architecture, doing the graphic design work, cutting up the site, coding it all, and allowing time to test for bugs in 10 days (over Memorial Day weekend, no less) was about the craziest thing I have ever tried. The data architecture alone had to support huge traffic, and getting the servers provisioned, hardened and tested would eat into our ability to deploy a test environment. Doing all of this over the holiday made me very popular with the development team.

Speaking of the team, I have to give credit to Dan Hopkins, Blaise Hazelwood, Todd Zeigler, Ken Smith, Brian Lyle and the gang that pulled this together. They did an outstanding job getting the site launched under those conditions and rarely complained (to me at least).

On Hannity and Colmes, Fred announced his website url and the flood came in. We took a lot of heat for the thin site, but we didn’t have time for much else. Had we had a month to design, build and test, we could have done more. Given the time we had, and the limitations of working under the “Testing the Waters” rules, I thought we did fine. We attracted over 100,000 unique visitors, raised over a quarter million dollars, and added nearly 30,000 names to our list in the first 24 hours.

On June 12, we rolled out the Fred File, added Fred’s bio, and added tools to spread the word through traditional media by contacting talk radio and newspapers. I was traveling back from a meeting in Colorado that night on a flight that was seriously delayed. I ended up doing the go-live countdown from a seat just inside the arrival gate at Dulles airport on their wi-fi connection. We made the rollout about 30 minutes ahead of Fred’s appearance on Leno that night.

The blog was a hit almost instantly and led me to believe the path we had chosen was right. Fred’s commentaries were getting a lot of comments and I saw the beginning of an online community I’ve never seen around a GOP candidate’s online operation. What’s more, nobody wrote a single word about what supporters were saying online. Nobody accused us of endorsing the random beliefs espoused by the occasional nut, and nobody on the campaign had to answer a single press call (that I am aware of) about the blog or anything said on it.

ImWithFred.com Version 2.0 - The New McKinley

Described inappropriately as ImWithFred.com 2.0 by some creative types, the actual site was finished the week of July 9th. We had been asked to shoot for having the live site ready the first week of July (timed to be released with the announcement). The site was delayed by a week. The announcement was delayed by two months.

Originally I saw the campaign’s Internet operation as the modern day equivalent of McKinley in 1896. As Fred took his message to the people, they could, at the same moment, come and visit him sitting on the front porch of this virtual house. FDT could simultaneously campaign in Iowa and around the world, by carrying the coffee shop conversations online - posting about questions he was asked at a rally, or continuing to develop regular, and lengthy posts about the issues we face.

While the pundits will discuss and debate exactly where the campaign went wrong, the one thing I believe they misunderstand is the way the Internet could have, and should have, shaped this campaign. That misunderstanding contributed to the “Fred is lazy” storyline early on.

The campaign still had to do the things necessary to win - talking to, registering, IDing, and mobilizing voters. Nobody questioned that. That the campaign strategy was written off as “relying entirely on the Internet” was simply not accurate.

The idea, from my perspective, was to harness the power of the Net to build a robust community that would become an integral part of the ground game. The Bush-Cheney campaign had begun the process of enabling volunteer action online. It pioneered activism tools that allowed voters to create and run phone bank and canvass operations from their home. It allowed people to participate on their own terms, rather than forcing them to attend a Saturday morning walk.

I saw this campaign as the natural evolution of that effort, but it would go further in the one arena where BC04 fell short. The Bush campaign was innovative in allowing people to participate in the mechanics of the campaign, but it never developed the community that could interact, inspire, and spur each other into action. I felt in 2004, and still feel today, that is the missing pieces required to fully realize the benefit of these applications.

The Thompson web operation would be different. With Jon Henke, Howard Mortman and William Beutler constantly opening new channels through local, state and national blogs, and the campaign site providing a vehicle for those attracted to participate in the campaign, we could reach the tipping point where engaged people are empowered to contribute in ways never attempted by the GOP.

Buy In

When I first met with Linda Rozett, Mark Corallo and Ed McFadden, I was distrustful. I unfairly stereotyped them as traditional communications people. It has been my experience in dealing with campaign Communications staff that they have developed a sort of impenetrable cocoon around themselves. Any thought that runs contrary to the way they did things on their first campaign is somehow filtered out as a bad idea. I would describe it as a mild form of mental illness. It’s a cognitive dissonance of the first order and it seems to afflict nearly all of them.

Mark, Ed and Linda didn’t fit that mold. They understood that we needed to be part of the dialog on blogs and online forums like Townhall, but they also understood the need to drive traffic to our own property and to develop a community. The chatter about Fred online, the traffic to the site, and the money coming in led me to believe the theory was right and we could introduce a paradigm shift.

I knew from my RNC days and the Bush days that buy-in for a radically different approach would be critical. I was pleased to see that everyone in the campaign from Fred and Jeri through Linda, Mark and Ed was onboard. It really did make a difference.

The Little Red Truck

Unfortunately, the staff turnover that began in the late summer had an almost immediate effect on the Internet operation.

As the Communications team focused on traditional media tactics, their attention increasingly turned away from the Internet. The commentaries became less frequent, online initiatives were no longer part of the equation.

In October, we began discussions of an end of quarter fundraising drive featuring a real-time disclosure of our success. The concept was shot down over concerns that it would place too much emphasis on money. As we moved through November, we began to hear rumblings of Fredsgiving Day - a third party money bomb effort scheduled the day before Thanksgiving.

It was unclear whether the campaign would support the effort. There were concerns (voiced by many online) that the timing was off - nobody would pay attention the day before the holiday. In the event the campaign decided to jump in, we went ahead and built the little red truck to track contributions that day. It was never deployed.

It was late in December when the little red truck finally saw the sunlight. Over the next three weeks, that little red pickup helped the campaign raise 1.25 million dollars. Had it been unveiled sooner, who knows what might have happened.

Lessons Learned

I share all of this anecdotally in the hopes of illustrating something for GOP campaigns (and more broadly for campaigns in general). I’m afraid that the withdrawal of Fred Thompson will lead people to conclude that the model was wrong. I really don’t feel it was.

As I said, I think the Thompson Internet operation, in the early days, and in the final days, was really second to none. Political campaign professionals should study the Thompson effort not as a case study in what went badly, but as an example of what was going very well, and could have been extraordinary had it not been for the media’s obsessive demand for ‘the tried and true tactics of the 1980s’.

As an example of the strength of Thompson’s online effort, look at the Thompson campaign blog and you’ll see something remarkable for GOP candidates - comments. And not just a few comments, but hundreds and even thousands of comments.

Rudy’s blog doesn’t allow comments. Romney’s gets a few per post. Ron Paul just recently launched a blog (despite the fact that blog software is largely free). He currently gets between a handful and a few dozen comments.

I don’t think this indicates a lack of supporter enthusiasm as much as it indicates that the campaigns have created a blog with nothing to say on sites that are so scrubbed of interesting content they’re alsmost sterile. Most of the posts are rehashed press releases, rehashed campaign e-mails, or occasionally a video so overscripted it becomes almost completely unwatchable.

Most campaigns think of comments as a way for people to respond to the post. Almost nobody on the GOP side sees this as a way for their supporters to network, to share ideas, or to brainstorm ways to help the campaign.

Most Republicans fear the rogue comment that will be used to tarnish their campaign. What they fail to realize is in a vibrant community that rogue comment is always surrounded by dozens of voices or more shouting them down. If anything, they typically dispel arguments that your base is crazy.

For the rabidly partisan Democrats reading this, please don’t mischaracterize this post as “Republican Internet guru just discovers blogs and comments.” That is not at all the point. The point is something much larger that I have been shouting at my party for several years now - they need to trust and engage the people. Since the people are online, they need to engage people online. There are just as many Democtrats who need to learn this lesson (cough, cough, Hillary, cough, cough).

They need to build online operations so they invite people to the discussion rather than turning them off of it. Get candidates to write, in their own words, frequent posts. Understand that a ground game is critical, but it must be viewed in terms of ROI. A thoughtful, honest post from a candidate may be discussed and passed around by thousands of people online. It takes little time to write if it’s sincere and not obsessive studied and focus grouped.

If your candidate honestly doesn’t have time to write, have staff carry a video camera and a MacBook to post from the road. Forgo the hair, the makeup, and the lighting. You’re on a bus 50 miles from Waterloo. Nobody is going to believe that your makeup is perfect and so is the lighting. Be real. We don’t expect perfection, but we do expect honesty.

My last piece of advice is this… In your interview process, ask your Communications Director to name his five favorite blogs. If they can’t, ask them for a suggestion on how best to target communications to specific demographic segments using banner ads. If they can’t answer either of those questions, don’t hire them. They don’t get what’s going on in the world around them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Bloggers, Candidates, Elections, Fred Thompson, News Media, Operatives, Politics, Republicans, The Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thompson Failed to
Capitalize On Initial
Media Interest
01-25-2008

NPR's Audie Cornish followed former Tenn. Sen Fred Thompson during this past summer when he was still thinking about starting his run for the Republican presidential nomination - which he dropped this past week. She offers this analysis of why he wasn't able to capitalize on the initial surge of interest in his candidacy.

First, Thompson focused a lot on conservative blogs and radio, and some Fox News shows. It was very difficult to get him or through to that campaign in those first few weeks. After a certain amount of time Thompson's so-called "earned media" diminished - and he pretty much fell off the radar. The campaign sort of squandered the attention they had from the mainstream media at the start.

Second, Thompson did not defy the "lazy" label with his campaign schedule. While he made strong and hard pushes in the final week or two before Iowa and again in South Carolina, I would be very surprised if his schedule matched up to say a Mitt Romney or a John McCain - or any of the Democrats. Just a week before his announcement in September his campaign manager-to-be Bill Lacy told me this in an interview when I asked about the "lazy" thing.

He knows how important it is to prepare and be ready for big events. I think that preparation is important and that is going to involve - maybe I don't ask him to have a grinding schedule every day where he spends 18 or 20 hours out because frankly I'd much rather have him able to be deliver better performances.

By not putting in the trail time and making good use of initial media interest I think Thompson made it less likely he would be able to exploit potentially "big" debate performances that could have elevated him above the pack.
-- Audie Cornish

The GOP eCampaign guru's for the 21st Century ..

The upcoming edition of Campaigns and Elections Magazine will feature Republican eCampaign guru's and my Twitter/Facebook buddys (from left to right), Erick Erickson, David All, Patrick Ruffini, and Robert Bluey.

Hat Tip to Buzz Brockway @ Peach Pundit