techPresident - Fred Thompson - Comments

Integrating the net

richardbelldc — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:20:20 -0500

Political consulting can be an amazingly conservative business. In a winner-take-all environment, it's not surprising the campaign operatives are more comfortable using the tools and techniques that have worked for them in the past, rather than going through the extra work that would be involved in trying something new. As the blogmaster of John Kerry's 04 campaign, I found Mike Turk's reflections on his tenure with Fred Thompson's campaign raises issues which I encountered, and which have not gone away.

Senior campaign consultants just don't know what to do with a disruptive technology like the net. Is it IT? Is it communications? What about volunteer recruitment? And fundraising? Does anyone sitting at the campaign strategy table have enough understanding to at least ask the right questions of people who are not in the room?

The thing I liked the most about Mike's recommendations is his emphasis on building community. Of the various functions which campaign managers think about, building community is likely to be at the bottom of the list, if it's on the list at all. But the most powerful aspect of the Kerry experience for me was participating in the emergence of just such a community. And every single one of those people, in addition to the time they spent online, ended up working hard for their local Kerry operations.

Kicking and screaming, the campaign operatives of yore are slowly being dragged into the 21st century, but the process is not pretty if you're the staffer on the inside fighting upstream.

On the other hand, as Ron Paul's supporters have shown us, it's now possible for voters to use the net to do an end run around all of the bureaucratic obstacles that can greet efforts to innovate inside a campaign's leadership team.

Have a good rest Mike. You deserve it.

Banner Ads

Michael Turk — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:19:12 -0500

While I was trying to make a larger point about there being a largely untapped front on which you can engage (online communications and advertising), I'd actually still answer "yes".

Buying Fred's name or variations of it was effective, but issue terms (even immigration, on which Fred was very strong), other candidate names, generic party terms, etc., was useless. They generated a limited number of clicks, but no conversions - costing us money without bringing anything to the table.

Search ads are, in essence, that out of work friend that shows up at your house, drinks your beer, and never kicks in gas money or a six pack. If they were hysterically funny and also attracted hot women, you could forgive them.

In that way, if you're using them to drive traffic, great. If you're buying them to drive donations, sign ups, or other quantifiable outcomes, I found they were largely a waste.

Why banner ads?

Luigi Montanez — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:15:27 -0500

Interesting that the question to ask the Comm. Dir is on banner advertising. Why not search (Google/Yahoo) advertising? Is it your finding that banner ads are more effective and have better ROI than search ads?

The Web Strategist

Michael Turk — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:48:06 -0500

So the short answer, which I decided not to bury at the bottom of the long answer, is I agree. The Internet should not be buried in Comms. But I think due to the size, cost and complexity of large campaigns, it's likely the entire structure will be forced to change. Keep reading for further explanation, or avert your eyes now...

My belief is the "web strategist" will always exist in the same way the "media strategist" exists now, but either the role of the Communications Director or the campaign structure must change. (Keep in mind, I'm talking primarily about Presidential campaigns in this instance.)

I think campaigns need to look at themselves as corporations rather than political entities. The campaign manager for a modern Presidential campaign is essentially the CEO of a 300-500 million dollar corporation. They have to spend between 18 months and 30 months building a huge business in preparation for a massive fire sale. It's unlike any job in the world. Nobody else builds $300 million enterprise just to drive it out of business in one day.

So just as the modern CEO needs to be versed in investor relations, marketing, sales, brand development and advertisement, manufacturing, distribution and everything else, I think the modern Presidential campaign manager needs a comprehensive skill set. They need to understand microtargeting, voter ID tactics, fundraising tactics, and traditional advertising, but they increasingly need to understand web traffic drivers, banner advertising, blog outreach, etc. They can no longer afford to outsource the Internet to someone buried three levels deep in the organization.

I definitely believe you need to divorce Communications and the web entirely, but I'm no longer a big fan of making it a stand alone division. I think, instead, you need to view it in the business world context.

In the business world, the role of the Net has many masters. The IT department may be responsible for supporting the hardware and software necessary to run it, the marketing and sales departments are more likely responsible for building awareness of it, and running it, and the Communications shop (read that as traditional media and investor relations) has a channel on which to place their press releases, but those are not the major thrust.

Look at the websites for just about any consumer product in America and you probably won't find a press release on the front page of any of them - press releases are boring and nobody reads them. Instead, you'll see all of the marketing language and promotions they have developed.

Campaigns, however, see these as one and the same for some reason. They seem to think that the press release is the same as a marketing campaign despite the fact they are clearly aimed at two different audiences, namely the media versus the general public.

The web operation, political, and polling/strategy/advertising should be a seamless operation because together they form what is essentially your sales and marketing team. They are responsible for understanding the customer, developing the brand, marketing the candidate and ultimately closing the sale.

Just as I would never put the same team in charge of media/investor relations and sales/advertising (they're completely different skill sets), I think major campaigns do themselves a disservice by jamming communications with reporters and communications with the general public into one place.

With Fred's campaign, I specifically built the site with no vehicle for putting press releases on the home page. We had a blog feed and we had a feed of news articles from around the country but none of our "headlines" were deep-linked to stale press content. If the media wanted to find content, they had a nice big link in the nav that said "news room". Other than that, the front page content was for the voter, not the Washington Post.

(Of course, having said that, I may have contributed to them not liking us. They actually had to do some work when they came to our site.)

Role of the Web Strategist

gibson_stevens — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:10:08 -0500

Michael -

Great article - interesting thoughts. You talk a lot about the internal focus on the campaign website, etc. What about external focus, like making the candidate available for blogs, etc? Shouldn't that also be a focus of the campaign web strategist?

Also, you end your post with questions for the comunications director. Do you agree with the idea that the role of the campaign web strategist has grown to the point that it should not be buried within the comm shop, and that the right person should participate in senior leadership decision-making?

I go into this in more detail in my post. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

More of my musings...

Outside the box

Michael Turk — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:43:45 -0500

That's exactly right.

My wife once worked as the Finance Director for a campaign and the campaign manager sounded like Michelle from American Pie. "This one time, on Randy Tate's campaign..."

She held out that one campaign as the epitome of all campaigns and insisted on trying to relive it on every campaign thereafter. There was no out of the box thinking. There was only the attempt to relive some glory day like an aging high school athlete.

Those who don't evolve die off.

Good to have you back in top form

Patrick Ruffini — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:35:14 -0500

I think that the most lasting legacy of the early Fred Thompson campaign was to broaden the horizon of what it means to be the "Internet candidate."

At the end of the day, it's NOT about embracing blogs, podcasts, video, Twitter, and user generated content. Done right, those are simply the tactics that flow from having a candidate who gets it at a basic, gut level.

The Internet candidate is the one who embodies the authenticity, accessibility, and responsiveness of the medium not just in what he or she does online, but in what he or she does offline.

Before he announced, Thompson effectively channeled the frustration many grassroots conservatives felt. He actually engaged people. His team seemed to understand that the strategic landscape had changed: that by getting the bloggers, you gained a powerful foothold among the media and opinion leaders that read the blogs, which then translates to better media coverage and poll numbers.

The Internet wasn't just a cool tool at the periphery of the campaign, but a central element of the campaign's strategy. From the top down, everyone seemed to get this -- not just the Internet team.

For reasons you can speak to better than I, the strategy flipped to a more conventional one in mid-campaign.

I don't know if any candidate will "win" because of the Internet this year. But it's pretty certain that those campaigns who either turned away from it or failed to embrace from the outset will be the first to lose.

This isn't about a direct cause and effect (e.g. candidate loses because they fail to harness the net). It's that campaign people who don't think aggressively and outside the box about online stuff won't think aggressively and outside the box about offline stuff either.

Fred08...and communication channels

Stuart ONeill — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:00:49 -0500

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.

Amazing article in the light of my own, completely ignored efforts, to get much of what you advocate incorporated into campaigns.

The simple video blogging technique above could be a huge asset.

I'm on the other side of the aisle but we share much of the same vision. I should bring up GIS multi-layered datamapping and datamining as new techniques that could be used in innovative ways to expand and assist funding a campaign.

Off the Bus

Jon Garfunkel — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 13:16:24 -0500

I'm still failing to see how "Off the Bus" is any different from any other blog/press coverage... Amanda and Zack are nice folks, I've met them both, but under what sort of metrics is their coverage better?

There's no way to view the archives, so it's very difficult to compare. The Nevada caucus coverage is telling:

On January 18th, "psericks" (who he?) blogs:

"On the eve of the Nevada caucus, the Clinton campaign is again betting against voter turnout, making encouraging statements about a lawsuit that would have shut down nine caucus locations and disenfranchised tens of thousands of shifts workers just hours before the caucus --- with little chance to make other plans to participate."

(psericks was merely repeating what he read in that ol' standby of horserace coverage, the MSM-- specifically, the Las Vegas Sun.)

But, after the caucus, Zack Exley was telling a different story:
"Before the mainstream media descended on Nevada, I spent several days with the Clinton campaign there in early December. The field campaign, led by State Director Robby Mook and field director Marlon Marshall turned out to be an incredible example of passionate, yet cool-headed management and results-focused organizing. ... Meticulous organizing and good management by the local Clinton Nevada staff have made the difference."

Obviously, Zack had put a lot of time into this story (a habit of the ol' MSM) and couldn't quite abandon it (another MSM habit). But the rest of Off The Bus was making the case that it was dirty politics that would put Clinton over the top (Meanwhile, as was reported elsewhere, Obama still won in the delegate count.)

I read the NYT coverage as well. It briefly noted the lawsuite, as well as this point: "The campaign took on an increasingly negative tone, with phone calls identifying Mr. Obama as 'Barack Hussein Obama' and Spanish language radio ads suggesting that Mrs. Clinton 'does not respect our people.'"

Aha, this is interesting. So I go Google around, and learn about anonymous robocalls, and their inconsistent enforcement at the state level. Elsewhere on Off the Bus I read about the whisper campaign against Obama in S.C.-- via flyers handed out through church membership.

So here's what I'd like to see: something like UPenn's FactCheck.org, but strictly covering dirty tricks and rumor campaigns, and using investigative journalism skills to figure out who's behind them.

Agreed

Chuckumentary — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:02:29 -0500

I think we do need to be more critical of citizen journalism, so I'm glad you point that out. I think we're in this early stage where it still feels new, we tend to pat ourselves on the back for doing it at all, and be sensitive to criticism because it's a lot of work for little/no pay. :-)

That said, we need to get beyond that stage and focus on how can we actually make citizen journalism better? We have to look critically at the content and process and basically grow up a little bit.

Until that happens, I will continue to remove my shirt while mocking Brit Hume.

Absolutely

Joshua Levy — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:09:00 -0500

Chuck, I totally agree and didn't mean to give you guys, or any CJs out there, short shrift. I'm obviously (I hope it's obvious!) a huge supporter of citizen journalism. But to my mind projects like Assignment Zero have focused a bit too much on how it gets done rather than on the fruits of its labor.

That said, you guys, the New Assignment team, and others are definitely creating actual sausage, and it's been great.

Sausage

Chuckumentary — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:00:48 -0500

Hey Joshua, thanks to linking to what we're doing at The UpTake.
I agree, CJs talk a little too much about themselves (i'm particularly guilty of that - look I'm doing it again!)

At the same time, we like to show how the sausage is made, or even better to not make sausage at all. I think it's okay to put ourselves in the story and have some fun with it. More serious stories, I prefer to have nothing between the story and the viewer.

FCC and other state monsters.

voluntaryist — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:46:00 -0500

Celebrate the sovereign individual

Ron Paul would abolish the FCC, IRS, Federal Reserve, and much more. Without the net he wouldn't have a chance and vice versa. They need each other. The net represents the last vestige of freedom of speech. Paul is the only candidate who will protect it.

Mixing state and technology is a clumsy "dance"

johnfkosanke — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:16:23 -0500

Perhaps another example would be illustrative. The FCC was created after the invention of the radio. Bleeding heart statists wanted to protect the "scarcity" of the airwaves. While this idea has been long since disproven, The FCC continues to heavily dictate spectral property and broadcasting in the same way the USSR distributed physical property and the Politbureau centrally "planned" the economy, keeping the big boys up on top.

Start-up technologies are fighting tooth and nail for a tiny piece of the spectrum - begging the omnicient and omnipotent FCC for mercy.

Now the FCC has declared by fiat that all television broadcasts must be digital by a certain date. Just when landfills are beginning to embrace the technology of recovery and recycle, they are struggling in anticipation of the mountains of toxic waste from TV sets that will become obsolete overnight.

All with a stroke of a pen.

Failure to Connect

littlebier8 — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:37:26 -0500

I had hoped that techPresident would show some sense of democracy in their ratings, but no, once again, the damning liberal-conservative bias has crushed a great opportunity to explore the Internet's choice for president. When I read the title I thought, "Hey, this is a pretty cool idea. Who WOULD the Internet generation pick for president?" But that was far from what I got. This article was not an investigation of the Republican Internet-goers choice (and marginalizing the thousands of silly "Ron Paul iz great in 08" comments), but instead it was the vision of the anointed authors of techPresident.com, totally disconnected from what the people might actually want. This article despises the intelligence of the people they claim to represent. Rather than investigating and providing proofs for the people's desire for their six points, they have handed down their pre-formulated vision for a good "Tech President". They expect us to just swallow the party line of techPresident.com without a thought given to the practical, moral, or legal implications of that grand plan.
But that is just the metaphysical objections to this article. Now lets give it shoes and show what a sham it is. We can begin by taking for granted that Rep. Paul is the Internet's choice for president (since even they admitted that). Keeping that in mind, we must assume that the people have REASONS for voting for him and have done RESEARCH about his positions. Since most people on the Internet would pick him, logically they have looked at his positions (particularly about the Internet) and decided that it is in their best interest that he be president. Net Neutrality is a door for the government to control the Internet, as is the government providing high speed to the people. If they can give it to us, then they can punish us and take it away. Since it is a [socialist] gift, they can also regulate and monitor our doings. And what is wrong with letting the market provide it? It has provided tens of millions of people with Internet access at speeds never before imagined. Can you imagine a government bureaucracy doing that? Yeah, just like the government controlled phone company did. The comparison to interstate highways is a non sequitur. Finally, his commitment to transparency is very clear in his statements, actions, and websites.
This article is basically the unilateral decision of a small group of people, predominantly neo-socialists, with a poorly researched agenda. I am most disappointed by this, considering the otherwise excellent work of the techPresident crew. This just represents a failure to connect with the people's opinions. It looks down on the masses as unintelligent people that need to be spoon-fed opinions, since theirs are the wrong ones. This isn’t a Personal Democracy Forum, it’s an Oligarchy Caucus.

Samuel Shaw
Mt. Laurel, of the sovereign state of South Jersey