Online strategy

Gary Andres makes a very important point about the Left's new infrastructure in a recent Washington Times article.  The whole thing is very worth reading, but I want to focus on the infrastructure.

Democrats regularly benefit from well-organized, well-financed and effective outside liberal advocacy groups who relentlessly investigate, attack and criticize Republicans. The GOP lacks this kind of advocacy infrastructure.

Glenn Reynolds calls this sort of thing "battlespace preparation".  It's an appropriate term.

These outside groups have long existed, but the rise of the new media has accelerated the Left's political machine.  The organic elements, such as Moveon.org, Daily Kos, MyDD, Atrios, Talking Points Memo, etc, arose between 1998-2003, and they have been reinforced since then by very savvy, cultivated elements, such as the Center for American Progress, Media Matters, the Center for Independent Media and many more. 

The Left has taken their existing coalition and grassroots-based infrastructure, and combined it with this new internet-based Progressive Infrastructure to move messaging, mobilization and money into more effective channels.  They have seen three benefits from this.

• Better information and strategy coordination among coalition groups and the broader movement
• New channels for signaling and mobilizing the activist base
• Better targeting and influence of the media

Gary Andres continues...

Liberal activists have grown increasingly restive and well-organized over the past 15 years. Their grievances mounted when Republican political power grew in Washington between 1995 and 2006. Impeachment, the disputed 2000 election and the Iraq war all have helped focus liberal anger like a laser. [...]

[The Right has] also suffered over the past decade because they lacked a coherent narrative about what they would do with government once they controlled it - or at least a vision that could sustain a majority of American public opinion support. They needed new ideas and communications channels for these policies. Liberals are working on such a comprehensive model. [...]

[The Right] will never possess liberals' passion for the prize. But they need to build new advocacy institutions simply to fight back against the increasingly sophisticated and effective liberal infrastructure. If they don't, the "just leave me alone" conservatives will get some unwelcome company, overrun by the insurgent liberals at the gate.

This cannot be emphasized enough.  The Right is not just being beat at the polls.  That pendulum will swing back and forth.  The Right is being beat at the communications game.   You cannot lose the communications game and expect the pendulum to swing back in your direction.  It may swing away from the Left again, but it will not swing back to a "limited government, leave-us-alone" Right unless the Right can identify its unifying grievance, and communicate a clear, coherent, consistent and compelling narrative - an alternative vision of government to the one currently being sold.  

New distribution channels do not simply allow us to communicate "more"; they will allow us to move messaging, money and mobilization outside of the traditional establishment channels - from the entrenched bureaucracy of the Right, to a new, more vigorous and relevant "leave us alone" movement.

During this election cycle, we've talked a lot about the collective advantage the Left, and by virtue of that, the Democrats have online -- both media-wise and in terms of basic design aesthetic (check out Patrick Ruffini's gallery of campaign website screenshots). But, yesterday, when I was checking the dates of the Democratic convention, I was half-shocked by the DNC's website for the event:

A ton of white space, uneven columns, a somewhat generic looking banner, and no central, unifying feature on the page. It's not memorably bad, of course, it just looks unfinished. Meanwhile the Republicans have produced this:

Tonight, as I was tapping away on my phone, a text message interrupted me. It said:

Barack will announce his VP candidate choice through txt msg between now & the Conv. Tell everyone to text VP to 62262 to be the first to know! Please forward.

I was expecting something like this from Obama. After all, this is the cycle that saw his candidacy (and Hillary Clinton's) announced online. I've written before how candidates can use a Big Moments Strategy to aggregate supporters on their website, collecting email addresses and the prospect of future money. Announcing the VP pick online is the next logical step in this progression. It's a piece of long-anticipated and prized information that the campaign has a complete monopoly over and can release on its own terms.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a similar idea for how McCain could capitalize on his VP selection. It wasn't text-driven, but it was a different use of email -- with the objective of maximizing e-mail address capture before, during, and after the announcement.

The premise is that the campaign would release the name of the VP nominee one hour in advance to 100 supporters selected at random from those who signed up for McCain e-mail list as a result of this campaign. This truly would have been "hearing it first" because no more than a few dozen ordinary people would actually "hear it first." 

An hour later, the announcement would be webcast on JohnMcCain.com, with a big fat e-mail signup field and donate button next to the video.

Sure, if you sign up for Obama's text messages, you'll get the news first -- along with a million other people, including the press. But what if a campaign could use technology to simulate the feel being a real insider -- with a closed loop of 100 people, who would instantaneously pick up the phone and tell their spouses or siblings the news. If nothing else, it would be an interesting experiment in how fast word spreads in a networked age.

Who wouldn't want to sign up to be a part of that?

Lately, it seems certain narratives about the youth vote and digital media have been coming up time and time again, without much analysis of how useful these things actually are, so I thought I would hit on a few issues with the youth vote and new media as a college conservative.
 

Facebook doesn’t work. This kills me. Facebook constantly comes up in discussions about the digital age and it’s still pretty useless. While the importance of social networking cannot be overlooked in terms of keeping in contact with those you might not otherwise and cementing ties from introductions and the like, Facebook still isn’t a platform for political discussion or information retrieval (unless it’s photos from last weekend). The candidates’ pages are largely like comment-enabled static web pages—sort of useless, unless you’re looking for a fight. A candidate who actually made a Facebook page, replete with favorite movies, their former college networks, and a candid photo album or two might be an interesting experiment, though.

Where Facebook does hold a lot of potential is in its corporate and outside applications. Facebook's privacy policy is a nightmare; information never leaves its servers, even if you deactivate, it remains there. In terms of micro-targeting and data collection on voters, Facebook may be extremely useful if it can be utilized properly, but I don't get the sense that it's being used to its fullest on either the data side or the interactive approach to actually contact and motivate people.

Promoted. There's nothing that annoys me more as online political professional than politicians who refuse to continue the conversation with supporters after the campaign. Many of the former Republicans have hundreds of thousands of supporters they could mobilize for John McCain... or even keep themselves relevant and build a base for future runs or their activities in Congress. And yet most just don't. Only Huckabee is doing this well on the Republican side. -Patrick

As Hillary Clinton preps to concede that Barack Obama has the delegates to secure the nomination, I wonder about the future of her online presence.  Will her website continue to project her political activity -- positions, whereabouts, and calls to action?

Or, will she commit web suicide like so many viable major federal candidates before her?

You may ask why we should care about Clinton's online presence.  We should care because once she's a loser, she will join the cast of dozens of Republicans who lost in '06, and that will lose in '08, and we should learn from her mistakes.

Promoted -- we need to reclaim the idea of the web as a place for organic self-organization and self-government in contrast to the top-down philosophy of the left. -Patrick

What is the blogosphere saying?  Can we get it on the web?  How can we use this to raise money online?  

These are questions that each of us who are "online" strategists hear from our clients.  And they miss the point about the power of the Internet for political change. 

Not to beat a dead horse, but the web -- as a medium, as a place -- plays a crucial role in politicking today, and we can foresee it playing an ever-increasing role throughout the 21st century.  It is key part of the solution to the right's woes, but it plays a minimal role in the problem.  The problem, as Alex Castellanos, veteran media strategist identifies in a National Review column, is that Republicans can't communicate a core principle (singular). 

Read on.