ThinkStream

So true. Hat tip to Allen Fuller: Small talk with a web designer by The Anti Pimp.

Todd Zeigler at Bivings gets it right: splash pages can be annoying and technically present an extra step between users and data they are searching for, but as long as they continue to work, developers are smart to continue to use them, as long as best practices are observed: In Defense of Splash Pages

I was a guest on the Digital Politics: “The Art and Science of Targeting Voters” podcast yesterday, and relayed my thoughts about the recent Politics Online conference, the state of the industry, and the importance of a database centric strategy for political campaigns.

The Digital Politics podcast this week will focus on how web tools can be used more effectively to identify likely contributors, volunteers, supporters, and voters.

My guest today is Matthew Dybwad, Senior director of Internet Strategy, emotive LLC, a Virginia based Internet consulting firm. Matthew moderated a panel at the IPDI Politics Online Conference in DC this week and we will be talking about where the political insiders are seeing the most potential for the next round of online campaigns.

Get in your ROFL Copter. This is from Josh Trevino:

About 30 minutes ago, I posted this:

http://twitter.com/jstrevino/status/1479268821

About 10 minutes ago, I got a call from a producer at Nightline, asking for my source.
The answer? Steven Seagal’s 1992 classic, “Under Siege” –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Siege

So disappointing. But now you know they’re watching.

Wow. They should have called me. I’d have been happy to put up a website with no information for them for 1% of that price. In fact, they could have gotten any competent firm in town to put that together for 0.003% of that price.

Obama’s stimulus-spending Web site short on details – The Back Story – Washington Times – Politics, Breaking News, US and World News

Here's the link to the story I mentioned on the "Using all the tools
in the box" panel.

http://politicsmagazine.com/magazine-issues/february-2009/long-tail-nanotargeting/

Along with a handy bailout calculator showing your share of the bailout (no, not what you are getting, what your share of the debt it creates will be)  Right.org showcases very succinctly the folly of the impending Obama bailout.  They are also incentivizing their users to submit video asking where their own bailout is, and giving $28k (your average personal share of the bailout) away to the best video. 

Can the right create its own netroots? – By Christopher Beam – Slate Magazine

Among the excellent points made in the article are a few that bear refining. Chief among them is that trying to replicate the Obama campaign will FAIL for the Right, because the Right is not Barrack Obama. Now that the message of “running the last successful campaign again won’t necessarily work” is finally sinking in, Republicans seem to want to run the last successful campaign of their opponents. Good luck.

The key, as pointed out by Beam, is to move onto the next thing, “Web 3.0″ as Karl Rove has said. My opinion is that the “next thing” is facilitating centralized coordination with decentralized activism, which is a whole series of posts for another time. However, that notion follows along the other of Beam’s critical points, which is that without an effort that bolsters the entire movement online, certain groups have the opportunity “mobilize online and hold the party hostage,” thereby splintering the GOP.

What we need to do as a movement is not only give the tools away that will facilitate group blogging, online activism, fostering community, etc, but make those tools all work together for everyone so that efforts are not duplicate and that the movement can prosper as a whole, in spite of all of its disparate parts. Yes, we need a common narrative, yes we need an army of bloggers, yes, we need inspiring candidates, but without an easy, distributed array of communication, coordination, and activism tools, what we have are thousands of interest groups reinventing the wheel over and over again.

From a political perspective I think campaigns are now getting to the point where they are ready to embrace outrech efforts that go past the usual “give me money now,” and “vote for me on election day.” The article below is a good synopsis of the potential of episodic video content to be the best ongoing representation of a brand (or candidate) available. As production technology gets easier and easier this type of content should proliferate across campaign websites, and candidates and staff should start thinking of their campaign itinerary in terms of opportunities to record and repurpose their offline activity for online gain.

MediaPost Publications Goodbye Banners, Hello Webisodes! 01/27/2009: “Where banner ads simply flash a message, and rich-media ads only invite interaction, good content and Webisodic series hold the customers’ attention for minutes at a time, lure them back for repeat exposure, and communicate much more than the often forgettable ‘buy me’ messaging of a traditional 30-second spot.Where banner ads simply flash a message, and rich-media ads only invite interaction, good content and Webisodic series hold the customers’ attention for minutes at a time, lure them back for repeat exposure, and communicate much more than the often forgettable ‘buy me’ messaging of a traditional 30-second spot.”

Hillary Clinton is renting out her list (Ben Smith’s Blog: Renting out the list – Politico.com), hoping to cash in on other “aligned” groups who will pay to solicit to people who gave Clinton their email addresses when they supported her political campaign.

How many of those people do you think anticipated getting hit to participate in completely disparate organizations? How effective do you think that list is going to be the 5th time they rent it? The 10th time? I wouldn’t want to be the poor liberal cause that gets stuck at the tail end of that list’s usefulness. Nor would I want to be on that list, even if I were a supporter, since my reason for opting in clearly no longer exists.

This is one more reason why: a) rented email is at the very end of the list of outreach opportunities I suggest to campaigns and, b) amassing large lists for strategic campaign use is ultimately futile, once the specific issue that galvanized people to support the cause has become irrelevant.

This is a theme I’ve been discussing with great frequency of late in relation to the Right’s need to scramble toward a model they are familiar with: listing building and rented email. My thought here: focusing on building mammoth lists for use by the entire online Right is a waste of time.

As a means for groups to try to build up their own base and/or identify online activists, a contact cultivation program that utilizes online advertising to bring users to simple online engagement devices is far more cost effective, scalable, target-able, optimize-able, (insert your favorite “able” here) and ultimately brings the organization more qualified contacts.

Not to mention the list churn issue, which will only get worse as a lists get larger, older, and more diverse.

I agree that email is the killer app, but I take issue with the idea that building and holding huge lists that can be messaged by different smaller groups will ultimately prove nearly as valuable as enabling groups to easily access and leverage the kind of tools they need to cultivate their own contact base. After all, no contact is more valuable than the contact that actually opts into your organization specifically.

If what we’re trying to do is shoot fish in a barrel, instead of trying to just make one fish barrel bigger, why not give everyone their own barrel along with all the tools they need to fill it with their own fish? Then we can focus on making it easy for barrel owners to let their fish interact smartly with one another so that all the players gain the maximum amount of benefit from the community of fish.

In other words, we give organizations the tools that they need to identify and cultivate their own supporters while at the same time ensuring that those tools also facilitate the process of leveraging those supporters across the spectrum.