I told a friend last night - via Facebook private message - that email is still the best way to get a hold of me.* I gave him my work email address, which is the one account out of seven I currently monitor to which I will usually give an immediate response. It's also one of two accounts pushing to my smart phone, so I can receive/respond on the go.
The ways in which we send, receive, and store information have been constantly revolutionizing politics for nearly 600 years, since Gutenberg first invented the printing press. Customer relations management (CRM) systems have become increasingly important (indeed useful and necessary) in the political sphere, as candidate and issue campaigns build vast, scalable email lists for purposes of campaign communication. Somewhat curiously, I have all issue and candidate campaign email delivered to my American University address - which also pushes to my smart phone, but which I rarely actually read.
But let's assume just for a second that I consolidate my email accounts into just one, and I take time to read more than I do now - and a political campaign was able to reach me (in theory) 24 hours a day. Why is it, in this world of nearly instantaneous, targeted, scalable communications, that we still rely on direct mail fundraising? When does the 140-character tweet, the Facebook status update, or even the 30-second YouTube video replace a clunky, 5-page typed fundraising ask - double-spaced in 12 pt. Courier New font - and on pink stationary, no less? Does it ever? What about when we move all of our CRM solutions to the cloud, and we're realizing huge cost savings in our campaign budgets because of it (this is speculative, I'll admit)?
I remember from my Leadership Institute training days back in college that conservatives tend to make quite a bit of money on direct mail fundraising campaigns - my own experience tells me that you're doing well to just break even, particularly if you're using consulting services. Maybe my metrics are a little bit off, and I'm not considering how a mail piece to an identified voter/supporter may energize them, arm them with talking points, and ask them to tell 5 of their neighbors about my candidate or issue. Maybe I need better mail pieces.
Not only in my experience are dollar-for-dollar returns on direct mail doing well to break even, but isn't this social tree 1.0? Isn't this what social media was supposed to solve, in terms of reach, velocity, and scale? I posited in my undergraduate thesis - flying in the face of practical, conventional wisdom - that there's some kind of interpersonal transaction that takes place when one voter connects with another that technology can't replace, and I don't mean to waffle on that conclusion - but I do wonder, as our technology evolves and more milennials and digital natives reach voting age, whether or not direct mail is a worthwhile long-term investment. For the meantime, it's probably okay to assume that the average voter views the on-paper direct mail piece as more authentic or genuine an instrument than something that flies across their computer screen or smart phone, and for that reason, direct mail is still useful.
Candidates and causes also have a swath of social media and social networking tools at their disposal, tools that reach millions of end users (if leveraged properly) and which are also dirt cheap to a campaign, if not altogether free. Rob Willington of RebuildTheParty.com demonstrated as much in Scott Brown's bid for Sen. Edward Kennedy's U.S. Senate seat in a special election following Teddy's death (wait a minute, that wasn't Teddy's seat - it's the people's seat). Rob's use of text-messaging, geolocation applications, YouTube, Ning, and Facebook makes a really interesting case study in the use of these tools on the Right in the MyBO era.
Another important long-term consideration for campaigns on the Right is cost. I asked Willington during a Personal Democracy Forum conference call back in March, and I'm paraphrasing here, "Given the availability of free online tools, why should campaigns invest in proprietary enterprise architectures (e.g. www.CandidateName.com)? Will they be useful in the long-term for anything other than an online depository for campaigns?" His answer - and it's a good one, and again, I'm paraphrasing - was that a proprietary enterprise architecture anchors the spectrum of social media tools the campaign uses (each having its own brand recognition) with the candidate's brand, and acts as a vote getter. You can download and listen to the podcast here.
But given this, it shouldn't be long, in theory, before we totally scuttle on-paper direct mail pieces for fundraising purposes (messaging and relationship-building purposes notwithstanding). Additionally, in order to be really successful in the long-run, these tools need to build relationships: voter-to-voter and voter-to-candidate/voter-to-campaign. Melissa Clouthier has an interesting political spin on Mashable's "21 Rules for Social Media Engagement." Clouthier's conclusions assume a high-level of social media adoption across campaign space, and while candidates on the Right are dominating some social media channels, they don't own the Internet anymore:
In the long-run, the best "technology candidates" on the Right - as is the case with all other technological paradigm shifts - will be the early adopters, like Scott Brown. The candidates who do a great job of building relationships through social media on the campaign trail will have the highest chance of success in using tools while in office, both to foster transparency and to protect incumbency. In the meantime, the Right needs to continue developing an accurate, meaningful set of metrics to measure the success of social media strategies against traditional strategic results to make sure that candidates and causes get the highest ROI and the largest reach per dollar spent.
* The double irony of this isn't lost on me. Not only is Facebook not very well known for its privacy at the moment, but I sent a Facebook message to relay an enterprise email address.
Before the new year, Micah Sifry came out with a provocative, much-discussed piece on the failures of the Obama organizing model in government. At once, the piece is a surprising indictment of the Administration's modus operandi from one of its supporters, but the reasons the indictment came about are not surprising at all. Like 43 similar outfits before it, the Obama White House is essentially a top-down operation.
Indeed, it's easy to dismiss Sifry's ideal of autonomous, almost leaderless political movements as essentially incompatible with the work of government. The contrast between the populism of the Obama campaign and the unmet promises of the Obama Administration is an easy one to make, but I suspect there's a tad of inflated expectations at work, borne of a misunderstanding of the fundamental motives of Obama for America and the community organizing spirit that seem to lay behind it. Sifry is disappointed that the fervor and "bottom up" organizing of the campaign hasn't translated to the White House, but when has the excitement and lofty goals of a campaign ever translated fully into the drudgery of running the federal government? Is such a transference even possible?
Probably not. The job of a campaign is not to transform the ethos of governance. The job of the campaign is to win the campaign. The job of the Administration is to transform the ethos of governance. Whether one leads to the other is entirely extrinsic to the campaign since the White House involves a totally different set of actors, more likely to be experienced government hands like Rahm Emanuel than Alinskyite field organizers. We can discuss what is and is not personally important to Obama as a community organizer all we want. But the imperatives of governance are completely different than those of a campaign, as Obama learned taking office in an economic crisis and George Bush learned after 9/11.
Rather than buck the tide of conventional "top-down" politics, the campaign's "bottom up" grassroots emphasis was actually top-down perfected for the Internet era -- a logical and sensible response by the campaign to Obama's celebrity.
In the end, the campaign did not have to make any hard decisions that allowed supporters to organize in new ways. Rather, I would argue, the supporters made the decision on their own, as expressed in the tremendous and early self-organized action for Obama early on, and the campaign would have been brain dead not to play along. (Many campaigns are still blind to this, even today, but the default baseline position for a campaign at the national level is to play along when supporters start doing massive amounts of stuff on their own.)
The campaign's decision to default to open is expressed in Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's book, The Audacity to Win. At the outset, it wasn't clear that Obama's campaign would be anything other than a traditional exercise. As Plouffe writes early on,
We raised $4 million online, a significant amount but far less than our fund-raisers wanted. Our new media team were very careful about how often we asked people for money by e-mail. We wanted our online contributors to have a balanced experience with us, thinking that if they felt part of and connected to the whole campaign, they might be more generous over time. The fund-raisers, who felt the pressure I was putting on them to post a big number, wanted to ask for as much as possible, as often as possible, starting right away. These were some of the tensest disputes I had to navigate throughout the whole campaign, and they left a lingering sore spot that did not heal for over a year. The finance team really believed that the new media team was underperforming financially, and the new media team thought the finance team viewed them and our supporters as an ATM.
Though it's ultimately clear where the campaign came down at the end of the day, Plouffe doesn't really evince bold conviction that the new media guys were right from day one. Here we see the traditional top-down playbook lingering on within the Obama campaign. Now, if Obama the community organizer started out running a fairly traditional campaign catering to the donor class, and in fact, ran a fairly textbook Senate campaign in 2004, what changed in the heat of the campaign? Plouffe doesn't seem to indicate that there was any altruistic, philosophical instinct to buck the finance team's approach, beyond a general sense that what the online people were doing seemed to be working. If there was a sudden epiphany by Axelrod or Plouffe to buy into bottom up, community organizing methods, it was probably a transactional, reflex response to the 20,000 person crowds, the e-mail signups, and the online fundraising. When you have a candidate like Obama, "letting go" and being bottom up is not simply a noble, unconventional, damn-the-consequences move. It's pretty darn profitable, generating more signups, more activity, and more money to feed the top-down parts of the campaign.
Now, what happens when the campaign goes away? What happens when the enthusiasm inevitably ebbs and the hard work of governing begins? The immediate benefits of a bottom-up strategy become less clear. You revert to traditional instincts, where powerful obstacles stand in the way of getting things done -- even amongst your base, and the wielding of massive political machinery cannot be left to amateurs. Either way, the decision to go "bottom up" is a traditional reflex response by smart people who realize they can get more done with bottom-up than with top-down in a campaign. And the reversion to "top-down" is a similarly calculated response to the fact that the financial and organizational benefits of bottom-up do not seem to apply to an Administration. Plouffe admitted this much in his interview with Ari Melber in defending the decision to downgrade New Media in the White House. Now, this may be wrong, short-sighted, or ignoble, but BOTH the bottom-up Obama campaign and the top-down Obama Administration were calculated strategic decisions made in response to specific situations of the moment. Let's not kid ourselves that the community organizing rhetoric was how they actually intended to govern.
The provided link is a story that was in the Politico today. It includes the southern districts the GOP is going to go after for 2010. Although the Dems are digging themselves in the whole, many are still drinking the Obama Kool-Aid.... Let's get to work! http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27715.html
The political blogosphere is buzzing about Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s interview. Soren Dayton argues the lessons of the Obama campaign were “budgeting, technology, field, and media,” while Patrick Ruffini finds that the important lesson is that “Obama ran a better kind of offline campaign.” Although it is quite true that these are some critical lessons, as a business nerd and student at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, I think there’s a massive lesson that pundits are missing: Obama for President wasn’t run like a traditional campaign, but instead like a huge corporation. I don’t believe that any campaign on this level was ever able to accomplish this with nearly the same success as Plouffe and company.
Plouffe makes this unmistakenably clear throughout his interview:
There are business analogies. One is, we’re a startup, we had to go from zero to 60 in a matter of weeks. Our company, if we were successful, would only last two years at the most. … We had over 5,000 employees… And we were an organization about accountability. Down to the entry-level staffer, we measured their job performance based on metrics.
What specific trends that the most successful modern corporations employ were echoed by the Obama campaign?
“Know your customer.” I’ve probably heard this from my entrepreneurship advisor a thousand times now, but only because it is perhaps the single most important phrase in business. Obama’s campaign really knew its customers – just look at the way it outreached to young voters.
A consistent message and high-impact branding. These two go hand in hand. Take Apple, a highly successful company even despite the recession, for example: they have a simple but highly memorable logo, effective messaging (i.e. “Get a Mac” ads), and a well-designed and innovative website. Barack Obama’s branding and messaging was as good as any corporation.
Job performance measurement and personal accountability. Think quarterly or annual reviews at your place of work. As quoted earlier, Plouffe confirms the importance of this in the Obama campaign: “Down to the entry-level staffer, we measured their job performance based on metrics.”
Fiscal accountability. Successful corporations have very specific budgets, and virtually all spending is highly scrutinized. Plouffe notes that, “People on the campaign could not make more than a certain amount—$12,000 a month… If you were a deputy you got paid X, if you were an assistant, you got paid Y… From a fiscal management standpoint, Obama was very clear that he did not want to end up with a debt in the primary or the general, so we just planned accordingly. We didn’t spend beyond our means.” (emphasis added)
A willingness to take significant financial risks and depart with the norm to be on the cutting-edge. This sentiment was echoed by the Obama campaign at many levels. Team Obama got the idea of peer production, which is quickly becoming the premiere business model of leading corporations like IBM, Boeing, BMW, and Goldcorp. In addition, as Patrick and Soren point out, Obama invested the campaign’s resources in a very unique way – remember the advertisements the campaign ran on an Xbox 360 racing game?
In business, constant innovation is crucial. Fall behind and your competitors will likely crush you. Find a decisive edge and you stand to profit immensely. Plouffe’s comments and the results of the election demonstrate that business and politics are actually two very similar animals.
In a discussion among local party people about "how to bring the Republican party back", one idea crystallized that I would like help to flesh out. We discussed the fact that campaigns - in this particular context local campaigns - need better support in terms of technology, communications, infrastructure and a lot more besides. The challenge is how to implement such great ideas in the context of campaigns that cannot afford huge budgets. Technology is making things cheaper, but there is a yawning gap between what is possible and what people know how to do. So we came up with the concept of "Campaign-in-a-box" - a manifest of all of the elements needed to support a basic political campaign (e.g., local-type campaign, state representative, county commissioner, etc.), that would enable a candidate not to get lost in the 'nuts and bolts' concerns of how to set up all the technology and communications infrastructure to support the campaign. It would be a manifest and implementation that provides all the basics to him or her so they dont have to build from scratch.
Consider it from this perspective. We are telling campaigns "get on facebook; get a YouTube account, post video there; get a way to issue press releases; ID your voters; build a website; etc." Well, giving such advice is useless to a candidate who is neither expert, nor does he even know where to start on these things.
So, let's collate that advice in the umbrella of ALL the advice and specific supporting implementations that a candidate would need. Can a local campaign leverage standard infrastructure for an effective campaign, and would such a concept lower the barrier for them to utilize more effective technology? In other words, what should be the manifest for the "campaign in a box"?
Some specifics:
Campaign website infrastructure and templates, e.g., can a Drupal implementation be templated to create a baseline campaign website to leverage? Many congressional campaigns use Drupal (e.g., Chet Edwards) so it or a CMS like it is a good starting point. What would be the must-have features, and what is a good implementation (low-cost/no-cost), so that a campaign wouldn't have to start from scratch? What Web 2.0/user generated content to have?
YouTube, Facebook, twitter; what is the set of must-have online communications channels? Optional/maybe-do communication channels? Encourage use of videos and posting them
How to interact with bloggers? Websites, forums and online groups to leverage?
Communications / press office: The 'campaign in a box' includes a Press Release Kit - What's in it? How to establish good press relations?
Voter database: Voter data should be a part of the package, so the question would be, what sort of database should be used, how should it be managed and integrated? What voter data is important? Mostly getting the "R" and "D" affiliation is just a first step, can more precise data be gathered? Should the candidate bother trying that? Is an integrated database important? How sophisticated should it be? (Again, think local-type race, where you might have 10,000 - 50,000 voters total).
Campaign basic strategy: Should the campaign-in-a-box have a basic strategy and what would it entail? What methods of outreach have the best ROI, and how should the local candidate be directed: Phone calls, blockwalking, neighborhood forums, finding key influencers, etc. Which to prioritize or should that be left to the candidate to figure out?
The reason this idea is important is that many campaigns with even good candidates flounder for the lack of a 'good campaign', and they rarely fail for lack of hard effort. They fail because the candidate, while they may know the issues, doesn't know how to run a campaign, and doesnt have the money to pay big-buck consultants to figure it out. A "campaign-in-a-box" would be a simple pared-down version of whatever its that Obama spent tens of millions of dollars putting together and which costs a hundred thousand or more for a Congressional candidate to put together.
A simple "How To" and manifest for a local candidate could go a long way towards making many of these campaigns more effective.
So ... Time to think INSIDE the box. What should be in the Campaign-in-a-Box? What technology components are particularly effective/needed in this?
[Promoted - Pete Snyder, a colleague of mine, combines his pollster, campaign and social marketing hats to offer this very good analysis of the 2008 Presidential campaign and election. Jon Henke]
There is no doubt that this year presented the toughest political climate for Republicans since Watergate; indeed, this campaign has been an uphill fight for McCain or any GOP nominee. That said Barack Obama, David Axelrod and their team deserve a huge amount of respect and credit for running a nearly flawless campaign.
They didn’t fight today’s war with yesterday’s weapons and most importantly their campaign was based on a superior strategy. For the purposes of this column, let’s forget about the issues, let’s forget about the climate and let’s ignore message for a moment. The simple fact is that Obama and his campaign chiefs understood two of the most significant (but little talked about) changes of this campaign cycle:
The Election Timetable fundamentally shifted from being just about Election Day or even the last 72 hours (as was the rule of thumb for decades) to being decided as early as six weeks in advance.
Due to the seismic changes in how voters get and process information that we marketers have seen for quite some time, just like consumers, the voter is now in control and, thus, would be open to making their voting decisions earlier than ever.
Combined, these two critical assumptions that turned conventional campaign wisdom on its head, helped provide Obama with a major strategic advantage over McCain. Here’s how:
At this point, I don’t think that any of us can effectively predict what the outcome of tomorrow’s elections will be. Quite frankly, I’m not even sure that we’ll know the who the next President of the United States is going to be for many hours, if not days, after polls close. That said, it seems that there are three possible scenarios that could play out in tomorrow’s Presidential election:
Barack Obama wins in a huge landslide.
Barack Obama wins in a close race.
John McCain pulls off an historical upset in a close race.
Barack Obama Wins in a Huge Landslide
This seems to be the narrative that the Leftosphere would like us to believe. This scenario seems to be the most unlikely due to a number of factors, including the huge percentage of undecided voters (which should break for McCain), McCain’s success in raising doubts in the minds of voters about Barack Obama, and Obama’s struggles with working-class voters in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Nonetheless, if current polling is to be believed, then we should see a such a landslide with an electoral map looking something like this (this is pulled straight from the RCP “No Toss Up States” map):
Barack Obama Wins in a Close Race
Unfortunately, I strongly believe that this scenario is the most likely. Basically, I see Florida and Ohio departing from their current polling numbers and going for McCain. Obama is polling near, but not at, the 50% mark in each of the states, and I think that the vast majority of undecided voters will swing to McCain in these states, allowing him to win each of them, albeit closely. Thus, the final electoral map in this scenario would look like this:
John McCain Pulls of an Historic Upset in a Close Race
I am extremely hopeful that John McCain can pull off an upset tomorrow. Unfortunately, looking at the electoral maps above, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which he can accomplish such a difficult feat. However, if it’s going to happen, I think that in addition to Ohio and Florida bucking the current polling trends, so will Pennsylvania and, out of necessity, another state with a couple of electoral votes. Based on current RCP averages, I’m of the opinion that Nevada is the other state most likely to swing.
First, let’s talk about Pennsylvania. I’m Pittsburgh born and raised, and so I’ve lived in Pennsylvania my entire life. As a former Santorum 2006 staffer, I know that accomplishing a statewide victory in Pennsylvania is an incredible challenge for Republicans. However, I also believe that the dynamics of Pennsylvania’s electorate make it the next most likely state to flip from polling projections after Ohio and Florida. No, this isn’t because we’re racist or a bunch of rednecks (although I believe that Murtha’s comments may drive an increased number of Republicans in his district to the polls tomorrow, which is undoubtedly in McCain’s favor). Rather, I believe that the blue collar voters of Pennsylvania, although reliably Democrat, find it extremely difficult to swallow Barack Obama’s “spread the wealth around” policies – and as a result, they may either decide to not vote at all, or to pull the lever for John McCain. Additionally, there are a number of highly competitive Congressional races in PA in which an outcry of Republican voters could help turn the race in favor of McCain. Specifically, I look to William Russell’s race against John Murtha (which I mentioned above), but also to Lou Barletta’s race against the filthy Paul Kanjorski, in which I think Lou will defeat Kanjorski. With Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida going against polling trends, the electoral college stands at 270 for Obama-Biden to 268 for McCain-Palin, requiring one more state to flip for a McCain-Palin victory.
In my eyes, there are two other states that potentially could end up becoming red despite polling that indicates otherwise: Virginia and Nevada. Winning in either of these states will prove difficult for John McCain. However, he only has to flip one of them from its polling trends in order to win. So a McCain-Palin victory might look something like this:
The roadmap to victory for the McCain-Palin ticket is enormously difficult and quite improbable, although certainly not impossible. Some important questions to ponder over the next day or so: Can Barack Obama close? Will the GOP’s vaunted GOTV machine have the success we’ve seen in previous elections? Will young voters turn out in droves, and if so, will they really disproportionately vote for Obama? And, most importantly, does John McCain’s campaign have the ability to pull off an unprecedented and historic electoral victory?
The 2008 Elections are really the first to be dramatically affected by online and social media. The major media really can't dominate as much as in the past, and many internet users are getting information and even interacting online.
Is your favorite candidate willing and able to interact online? If not, this may be the last election for your favorite guy or gal. I am willing to predict that social media and online interaction, online fundraising, and blog style communication will not go away, and will be the trump card in the future for many elections.
Barack Obama was really the break-out story in all this. I may not want him to be President, but am very willing to allow that he's "changed" the rules of the game in this arena. My hope is that in the final 30 days of this election, when more than half the public is interested, that John McCain's team will step up and join the 21st Century.
One would have thought that after all the stories about how Obama's online presence was key to his triumph in the Democratic primaries would have led McCain's team to focus on this... but apparently not.
Side note: for previous coverage of the role of wikinomics in this race, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. (I'm always willing to let those I source get a bunch of inbound links, I read them, so I hope you will too)
It's time McCain team. Please, from one social media amateur to a professional campaign team, join the rest of us out here.
Now a challenge to McCain, and in state and local races too, supporters ... get online, go social media, say what you think and engage the conversations. If you just watch the liberal elite internet types dominate the new mediums, then you'll just be complaining about the "liberal media" next year again. This media medium is wide open and easy to dominate quickly. Get online for the next 25 days.
Sarah Palin decisively won the VP debate tonight. And no, it wasn't due to Biden's annoying smirk, or his claim that he understands our needs because he's always at Home Depot, or his condescending "Let me say it again!" attitude that persisted throughout. Rather, quite simply, Palin connected with every day, middle-class voters in a way that none of the other candidates could.
Hugh Hewitt points out that, "The Luntz focus group picked up the decisive Palin win, and Luntz is predicting a move towards McCain in the polls as a result." I articulated this same thought right after the debate on Twitter.
In the last debate, Obama seriously solidified his position in the polls on the point of which candidate better "understands their needs and problems." With the economy in the tank, this is going to be a critical factor when people come out to vote – and so McCain cannot afford to have tepid numbers in this area. And unfortunately, I don't think there was much McCain himself could do to improve these numbers.
Enter Sarah Palin, the only one of the four Presidential and VP candidates who currently has actual ties to average middle class Americans. For this debate to have been success for McCain, she needed to connect with these voters and demonstrate that the McCain-Palin ticket understands their needs. She did so in a knock-out fashion. For his part, Biden looked, well, Senatorial, boring, and uninspiring – all the while, Palin came across as a regular, hard-working American, a mother of five – certainly not as a politician.
Her immense success in tonight's debate will re-energize the Right, but more importantly, it will also reassure many Americans in two ways: first, that she is absolutely, unquestionably ready to, if called upon, step up as President; and second, that the McCain-Palin ticket understands and will fight for everday Americans. As a result, I expect to see a modest boost in the polls for McCain over the next few days.
The critical question, however, remains: can McCain maintain this momentum in the last two debates? The answer is yes, but McCain will need to drive home the points raised by Palin in tonight's debate. He needs to continue to demonstrate that he understands the middle class' needs and problems, while at the same time showing that Obama does not. But McCain the Maverick should not have much trouble doing that.
So much for people criticizing Sarah Palin for not being ready for the spotlight. Tonight, she had a chance to talk directly to everyday Americans – and she shined like the star she is.
Aaron Marks is President of Three Group, LLC, a Pittsburgh-based new media firm that focuses on providing technology-based solutions for Republican candidates and organizations, and in particular has built Web 2.0 campaign management software called Mission Control. Aaron also worked in new media and voter outreach on Senator Rick Santorum's 2006 re-election campaign.
We have a couple or three train wrecks facing us; Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and possibly the prescription drug benefit.
So, while we are at it lets add Universal Health Care to the train wreck list.
Does anyone really believe that "we can afford it", "we can make up the cost by getting waste and fraud out of the system"? No, I thought not.
With two train wrecks for sure the candidates have devoted so much to the solutions! Right? Wrong. I don't think I have heard a peep from the candidates on how to fix these disasters!
Nope, just add another!
I have thought about this and have come up with an idea. Instead of establishing the entitlement, we decide "How much money will be spent this year on _______ . When the money runs out the service is suspended. If every legislation had a $ limit I think they would be a little more careful about the service provided.
