MIT will host a grassroots technology conference in 2 weeks. It certainly tilts left, but online organizing ideas ultimately ignore the political spectrum. The workshop is described as follows:
Workshop proposals that were accepted fit into one of these themes: a) Making technology relevant to communities b) Online politics post-2004 c) Uniting movements for social justice - Building coalitions, progressive infrastructure
The Tennessean covers the story of a state rep who has taken to blogging -- and offending many of his colleagues in the process.
Rep. Stacey Campfield has been taking a beating over his blog.
The Knoxville Republican's Internet postings about goings-on at the state Capitol have been called less than ''outhouse worthy'' by one lawmaker. And Democrats, displeased over some of Campfield's writings last week, all but killed his proposal to make it illegal to point a laser device at a police officer or firefighter.
The blog in question can be found here.
Townhall.com is spinning off from The Heritage Foundation to become a separate entity and is shedding its 501(c)3 tax status in the process. This represents a major development as it will no longer be constrained by IRS rules to avoid political activism. It has the potential to become a powerful conservative grassroots activation tool. (As I've said before, I used to run Townhall.com years ago.)
Mayor/Governor Moonbeam (Jerry Brown) has started a blog. The Christian Science Monitor examines what this means.
(Thanks to Jim Horton for pointing out this story.)
Matt Cronin, a partner at online marketing firm WebLiquid, emailed an intriguing analysis of the recent Gallup survey on blog audience:
Blogs are indeed quickly becoming mainstream but only to the extent that they’ll complement the news picture for those who are interested, simply due to the natural topic/opinion/agenda fragmentation of the blogoshere. While these statistics reflect the demographics of blog readers, it’s an ill conceived attempt to define the audience using a traditional media valuation model. Blog readers can’t be defined by their demographics because it’s their curiosity, interests and behaviors that binds them as a group, not age and income.
The Federal Election Commission revealed yesterday that it plans to take what one of its commissioners termed a "relatively nonintrusive" approach to regulating political campaigns on the Internet.
The John Edwards podcast attempts to strike a folksy, casual tone. The former VP candidate talks about the NCAA tournament being on in the background while he records with wife Elizabeth.
But what really struck me in listening was that Mrs. Edwards plays a much more significant role in the podcast than one might imagine. She fields almost as many policy questions as the former Senator does. She adds her two cents to everything from Social Security to regulating blogs.
It will be interesting to see if future podcasts feature the duo or if John Edwards becomes the focus himself. At the end, he repeatedly says "we" want to talk and "visit us." Is it the Royal We or will the podcast morph into the John and Elizabeth show?
Interesting commentary over at Personal Democracy Forum over the merits of advertising on blogs vs. WashingtonPost.com. Henry Copeland of BlogAds suggested in a debate at the Online Politics conference earlier this month that you'd hit more eyeballs with a buy on political blogs than on the Post web site.
Kate Kaye astutely points out that the raw numbers can be misleading because the comparison Mr. Copeland used dealt with page views, not unique visitors.
It really goes beyond that, though. It's not a raw numbers question. Whether you're advertising online or in traditional media, you have to account for the type of audience you're trying to reach as well as the numbers involved.
Too often new media evangelists want to portray everything as a David vs. Goliath or blogs vs. MSM (mainstream media) battle. It's like saying that the WSJ editorial page ought to exist, but the rest of the paper shouldn't. The fact is there's a night and day difference but they both play an important role.
A well-rounded advocacy buy will probably include blogs and the Washington Post. The notion that it should be a pure eyeballs question harks back to the Bubble Days when advertisers threw good money after bad.
MeetUp.com came to fame because of the Howard Dean campaign. Despite inroads by conservative groups like Townhall.com which has registered 24,000+ activists through the site, most of the top 15 political groups listed on the site are left-leaning. In fact, only 3 right of center groups appear on that list.
MeetUp suffers from the public impression that it is a liberals only site -- it isn't -- and it needs to find a way to overcome that if it wants to tap the full potential of the political audience.
Disclosure: I used to head Townhall.com -- many, many years ago.
Blogs may be going mainstream -- CNN has officially added a daily 4 minute blog segment to its "Inside Politics" show, according to USA Today highlighted by Steve Rubel. At some point blogs may no longer be the mavericks that they once were. How will this affect their impact? Bloggers today proud themselves on being outside the MSM (mainstream media) but the more that they get picked up, the more mainstream they become. Will they resist the pressures that go with it? Or will blogs shake out as a useful tool, but not the Wild West that many traditionalists perceive them to be today?
Henry Copeland of BlogAds, an advertising network for blogs, spoke to the current state of the market for ad spending in the blogosphere:
After dropping 40-50% for the first couple of months after the election, it looks like we'll be at new highs in March and April. I won't call it a tipping point, because you can only see those in retrospect, but we're definitely at a tottering point.
In the same interview, he also addresses the future of advertising on blogs.
Brookings will be offering a talk on "The Impact of the New Media" tomorrow, which will be available via webcast. Old and new media will be on hand to discuss the meaning of blogs and the like.
The Washington Post reports that new rules on internet campaigning are likely.
"We are almost certainly going to move from an environment in which the Internet was per se not regulated to where it is going to be regulated in some part," said FEC Commissioner David M. Mason, a Republican. "That shift has huge significance because it means that people who are conducting political activity on the Internet are suddenly going to have to worry about or at least be conscious of certain legal distinctions and lines they didn't used to have to worry about."
Before anyone panics, though, it is is important to point out that like most government agencies the FEC is generally risk averse and won't get too far ahead of its skis here. Four of the commissioners have already said they don't want to restrict independent bloggers (those paid by campaigns would likely be a different story).
At the end of the day, there will likely be restrictions that mirror those in other media and will deal mostly with significant activities and not mere links provided by supporters online.
Former VP candidate John Edwards will launch a podcast next week, likely being the first national politician to do so. For the technically challenged readers of InterAdvocacy, check out this definition of podcasting. (Thanks to the BuzzWebster blog for bringing this to my attention.)
The good news: 36 million Americans use text messaging. The understandable caveat: most are 18-27.
Shel Holtz discusses implications for the PR industry broadly, but does text messaging have a future in politics? Could it be a way to engage younger voters with issue alerts? Or is it an Inside-the-Beltway pro tool that might work for lobbyists to be updated on key news tidbits? Or is it a technology ill-suited to politics and advocacy needs?
Perhaps text messages could be employed by an advocacy group to flood congressional phone lines on a moment's notice. But the 18-27 year old set isn't the one most often associated with such activism. Are there enough older users to make it worthwhile? Or can some group take advantage of the younger constituency?
Lots of questions at this point, but nobody has yet solved the riddle.
Steve Rubel points to a Pew statistic that shows 5 percent of users take advantage of RSS feeds. That's obviously a number that shows the technology is in its very early stages.
The interesting thing to consider here is how RSS might impact politics in a few years. For example, it could be used as a more efficient way to push action alerts or similar things to members rather than email.
This all depends on wider adoption of RSS readers by users, of course. And today it still sounds too scary for many average readers. The most likely way that technophobes will adopt it in greater numbers is if products like Newsgator that can show RSS within Microsoft Outlook (a product most such users are already comfortable with) become more prevalent.
The key is to remove perceived barriers to use -- right now too many people are deterred by installing separate RSS readers or having to visit RSS aggregation web sites. Early adopters tolerate the upfront investment of time to find and setup new products; typical users will not.
One of the things I plan to do with InterAdvocacy is to show different techniques being employed by groups in their online advocacy efforts. Needless to say, I won't agree with all of the groups or even techniques I feature, but these are ideas that seem worth sharing.
Today, MoveOn.org's contribution page drew my attention. It tries to put the current plea for money in context for the visitor by showing an ad they are trying to fund, along with still shots from that ad, and even a link to watch the full ad online.
The page also includes a specific financial goal ($500,000) and uses a very compact contribution form to avoid shopping cart attrition.
By providing a tangible reason to contribute, the group should be able to achieve a higher conversion rate -- assuming the message hits home with the site's visitors.
The technique is similar to the TV ads that tell you that for pennies a day you can support a child whose picture you will receive in the mail. That makes the donation real. So does the clear linkage with a TV ad buy for political advocacy.
Politics can be a dirty business, that's certain. In the trenches, many will do the unthinkable. Now some are speculating about PR firms creating fake blogs for the Bush Administration ... or even Democrats creating fake fake blogs in an attempt to implicate the President's team.
Let's not get too carried away here. Professional public relations firms aren't likely to engage in such tactics. What fringe activists might engage in, of course, is another story.
BuzzWebster has links to a recap of the Politics Online Conference held last week at George Washington University.
A study by the Economic and Social Research Council found that Britons are slow to adopt the Internet as a means for communicating with MPs. But politicians and advocacy groups on this side of the Atlantic would be wise to listen to the conclusion of the study's leader, Stephen Ward of the Oxford Internet Institute, as quoted on PublicTechnology.net :
Dr Ward said: "Our survey provides a sobering antidote to the hype that often surrounds the role of the Internet in the political world, but we shouldn't write off new technologies as being of no consequence. The findings show there is potential to attract and deepen engagement, particularly among younger people."
He continued: "Simply adding new electronic means of communication to old structures, or providing information online, will not automatically spark interest."
Marketing guru Seth Godin points to a study about how visitors read news web sites. It's all based on tracking technology designed to show what the eye is looking at on the screen.
I've only had time to skim the report so far, but it is clearly fascinating reading. Just take a look at the chart that shows the most important zones on the home page of a news site ... it runs counter to what the conventional wisdom has been within many circles about where to place the most important content.
Anytime you have access to solid research on how to layout and design web sites, you should take advantage of it. Gut feels work some of the time, especially after you've been in the game a while, but nothing beats some real evidence to back up those gnawing feelings -- or to prove them wrong.
WashingtonPost.com offers a commentary on the ongoing Politics Online Conference at George Washington University. It notes that one of the speakers this year came from JibJab, the outfit that created the widely viewed online parody titled "This Land." (If you haven't seen it, you must not have had an Internet connection last fall.)
The piece examines what this means for traditional campaigns and contains the following important observation:
Matthew Dowd, the Bush-Cheney campaign's chief strategist in 2004, acknowledged that "the bigger campaigns always have to struggle with 'How far do you push the envelope?'"
Robert MacMillan goes on in the piece to conclude:
But even the candidates willing to step over the precipice must realize that the best genius moments, from Archimedes to JibJab, are usually accidents. "This Land" is no exception, Spiridellis said. "All of a sudden this thing spread across the globe. We were at the center of something we never expected."
And maybe this is the lesson for attendees at this year's Politics Online Conference: The Internet is no panacea, and unintended consequences can take your candidate on an incredible online ride.
Well-known PR measurement expert Katie Paine is blogging about the International Public Relations Research Conference going on in Miami. She has an intriguing observation which hopefully she'll elaborate on when she's not running between sessions:
Howard Dean and the DNC would be adviced to carefully study Len Barshak's ongoing Q-Sort study of attititudes about the war. He and Karl Rove may be the only two who accurately identified the subtle differences between Southern attitudes and Western attitudes.
Fair warning: some of this stuff gets pretty deep into the weeds. I think Katie sums it up well in the first line of her bio: "Katie Delahaye Paine has spent most of her life translating Venutian into Martian."
San Francisco Chronicle writes about a city councilor blogging using a government web server. The article addresses some of the concerns over the use of taxpayer resources to maintain a blog. It points out that for members of Congress, there are myriad rules and regulations already in place, but for local officials the guidelines tend to be murky or missing. (Thanks to infOpinions for highlighting this article.)
Who would have thought that the public affairs folks at Cisco would actually lead the way at the high-tech company by launching the networking giant's first official blog? Neville Hobson draws attention to this groundbreaking effort. (Link: NevOn: Cisco breaks new ground with government affairs blog.)
For more than a decade, I have been working with employers, colleagues, and clients to maximize the use of the Internet for political and public affairs advocacy. I’ve tried a lot of things. Many worked well, some didn’t. And I’ve seen a lot from others that worked and some that didn’t.
Hopefully my regular postings will help identify new technologies and tactics in such a way that you, the reader, find them informative. I’ll offer my opinion, and I invite you to share yours in the comments section of this blog.
This is not new to me. Six years ago, before blogs were what they are today, I founded a newsletter called PrimaryScoop that examined the 2000 presidential primary in New Hampshire. Today, it would be called a blog. At the time, I was an early adopter. Today, there are a number of similar blogs that ably serve that niche, so I am left free to move on to different endeavors.
And so the cycle begins anew.
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