techPresident blogs

Does Bob Barr Twitter for Himself?

2008-07-20T09:05:28-04:00

I'm sitting in the Austin airport waiting to board my Southwest flight to Houston and on home to BWI after a great conference at Netroots Nation. Who sits down two rows away but Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr. I went on over to ask what anyone would ask: do you Twitter for yourself?

Indeed, Barr says that he does twitter on his own. Barr joins the growing ranks of Twittering elected officials like John Culbertson and Tim Ryan. But unlike fellow Presidential candidate Barack Obama, Barr twitters himself. No staff, no help. (And that may explain why his tweets are a bit...off, at times.

So, congratulations, Congressman Barr, on taking the dive and Twittering for yourself. Have a great flight and and keep the tweets coming.

You’ve Got a Friend in Barack Obama: Integrating Social Networking Tools into Political Campaigns

2008-07-19T12:42:35-04:00

Cross-posted on e.politics

On the first day of Netroots Nation, Chris Hughes and friend-of-e.politics (and new Obama campaign employee) Judith Freeman led an overview of how the nominee-to-be's campaign has used social networking tools of all kinds to bring in new supporters, organize locally and (most importantly) put volunteers to work on their own. Let's break down the tools and how the campaign uses each.

MyBarackObama

MyBarackObama is a "walled garden" social network, meaning that it's a campaign-specific site and not a public social network like MySpace or Facebook. Whether it's an actual social network with cross-connections among users has been questioned, but it and its million+ members are clearly extremely useful to the campaign. The critical point is that the MyBO features give participating activists tools to organize in their own communities, for instance by throwing house parties and fundraising drives, BEFORE the campaign has begun to direct volunteer activities from above.

For instance, based on Chris and Judith's presentation, it sounds as though MyBarackObama is most important in the period before the campaign has a chance to set up an official organization in an area, since it gives people an immediate outlet for their political enthusiasm. And when official campaign staff do create a presence in the area, MyBO provides them with an automatic pool of local helpers and a pool of data about online activity, making it easy to identify the all-important super-volunteers. Once the campaign is up and running in a given area, the professional staff will begin to direct more of the local volunteer activity, but even then MyBO usage does not appear to drop off significantly.

Organizing on Facebook

Of course, as we've covered many times before, relatively few political organizations will be able to set up a system like MyBarackObama, in part because of the difficulty of hitting critical mass and in part because of cost, so the Obama campaign's outreach tactics for mass audience online social networks (Facebook, MySpace) are more likely to be useful as a model. Obama's Facebook outreach breaks down into three elements:

Profile page. The best known part of Obama's Facebook outreach, his Page currently has 1.15 million "friends," three times as many as any other Page (political or not). Critically, having a Page allows the campaign to mass-message its supporters, providing an email supplement/replacement whose messages are guaranteed to get through. And of course it's a convenient catch-point, creating that initial supporter contact that the campaign can then leverage to encourage deeper levels of activism.
Local groups. All through the primary election process, Obama field organizers were told to create LOCAL Facebook groups, which can actually grow very quickly from a small nucleus — Facebook Newsfeeds automatically promote the signup process, since your friends' feeds are updated when you join a group. And again a local Facebook group is another email supplement/replacement for one-to-one or one-to-many organizing messages.
Facebook Application The Obama Facebook App spreads campaign messages directly to supporters' friends as they visit the supporter's profile, greatly increasing distribution — like a badge or a button, but with constantly updated messaging from the campaign. So far, hundreds of thousands of people have installed the Obama App, and I'd be fascinated to know how many conversions have come directly from people seeing it on their friends' sites.

MySpace

As anyone who's used the two sites knows, MySpace pages allow much more customization than Facebook profiles, meaning that MySpace offers great flexibility to a political campaign. For instance, on MySpace it's much easier to add obvious and easy email signup forms to ensnare supporters and to provide clear links back to important features on the main Obama campaign site.

It's also relatively easy for individual MySpace users to add different features to their own profiles, and the Obama campaign has created a slew of buttons, badges and widgets to help them spread the word. Ultimately the campaign is trying to use each MySpace supporter's profile page as a communications hub in that supporter's own social circle, ginning up volunteers friend-to-friend.

The Obama campaign has also been active on other soc nets such as Black Planet, and in each case they adapt their approach to meet the particular rules, requirements and customs of that site. But despite impressive fundraising, the campaign's resources are limited, and it would be difficult to have a robust presence in every place they would like.

Lessons

Though it's good to see how a well-funded and well-organized campaign approaches online social networks, most political organizations won't have to resources to do in-depth outreach and build a devoted cadre of super-activists — much less cultivate their own walled gardens. But as we've discussed before, providing supporters with the tools to promote a candidate or cause on their own is relatively simple — profile pages, badges, buttons and even widgets are easy to build (believe me, if e.politics can have a widget, anyone can). In other words, campaigns don't have to dive right into the deep end — sometimes a dipping a toe or two into the pool of Facebook and MySpace fans will be enough.

– cpd

Microtargeting Myth vs. Fact

2008-07-18T23:33:30-04:00

There's a lot of hype surrounding microtargeting -- which is the process of targeting voters scientifically based on consumer and demographic data. This piece in Salon yesterday on "Obama's super marketing machine" is no different. But as someone with a bit more than a passing understanding of what microtargeting is, I have to shake my head a little at articles like this. Because the media gets it almost completely wrong -- whether it's hyping relatively mundane technologies or celebrating "sexy" examples (dial up 40 year old Vodka drinking Volvo drivers!) that have almost no bearing on microtargeting's usefulness in real life.

The Salon story is a textbook "what George Bush/Barack Obama/John McCain knows about you" approach to the topic, of the kind we've seen on a pretty regular basis since 2004. Let's start the nitpick from the beginning:

About every week or so, you get an e-mail from Barack Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, or top deputy Steve Hildebrand, or maybe Obama himself. They're breezy and informal, addressing you by first name at the outset (before they ask you to donate money at the end). But that's just the beginning.

You know, of course, that Obama has your e-mail address. You may not have realized that he probably also has your phone number and knows where you're registered to vote -- including whether that's a house or an apartment building, and whether you rent or own. He's got a decent estimate of your household income and whether you opened a credit card recently. He knows how many kids you're likely to have and what you do for a living. He knows what magazines and catalogs you get and whether you're more apt to get your news from cable TV, the local newspaper or online. And he knows what time of day you tend to get around to plowing through your in box and responding to messages.

The 5 million people on Obama's e-mail list are just the start of what political strategists say is one of the most sophisticated voter databases ever built.

There is nothing technically wrong with these claims, but conflating Obama's 5 million person email list (thanks to Mike Madden for confirming its size) with microtargeting is a bit of a stretch. To get on Obama's email list, all you have to give is your e-mail and ZIP code. Campaigns keep this registration process fairly simple to attract the most possible signups. But as a result, it is nearly impossible to match these records to consumer data without something more concrete, like a first & last name, and hopefully a street address.

Is Obama sending you emails tailored to your individual tastes, beyond simple registration or demographic preferences? Unlikely. E-mail is the cheapest form of communication, and so it's not necessarily cost-effective to microtarget. I also have not encountered an Obama national email circulated on the Internet that is different than the versions I have personally received. You microtarget on stuff that's expensive, like phones.

Madden goes on to claim that Obama's operation is far more sophisticated than Bush-Cheney 2004:

The sheer scale of the operation -- because of Obama's large network of supporters and heavy emphasis on field organizing -- means the data can be sliced in ways that the Bush-Cheney campaign couldn't have dreamed of in 2004. It's most likely also more advanced than what either side did in the 2006 elections, or, for that matter, what John McCain is doing now.

Is this Obama's campaign vastly more capable in the microtargeting realm than Bush's was? I can't tell from this article. That's because the processes it describes were either around in 2004 or are relatively rudimentary Web technologies embedded in most technology platforms, including Drupal, which runs TechPresident.

This gives us a basic primer on what microtargeting is:

All that data gathered in one place may seem a little spooky, though the average credit card company already has it and then some. Ultimately, the approach is about greater sophistication and efficiency. It means the campaign may not wind up wasting time contacting people who are probably voting for McCain, and that when Obama aides or volunteers go out looking for supporters, they have a pretty good idea of what issues those potential supporters care about most. It's the political equivalent of what big corporate marketers have been doing for years: If you're a baby boomer living in Westchester County, N.Y., golf gear catalogs will show up in your mailbox, but if you're a 20-something living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, you might get a free trial of Spin magazine instead. Now the same goes for politics -- if you're in a demographic that makes you statistically likely to have children, Obama might send you an e-mail about education policy instead of one about taxes.

No argument here. Just thought it would be helpful to have in for your benefit.

What goes into these microtargeting files?

if you've ever registered a product -- a TV, a computer or a microwave, for example -- chances are the campaign knows you own it. Likewise, they know if you've signed up for the frequent customer club at your local Whole Foods, or if you've joined the American Civil Liberties Union. (Yes, those last two probably make you an Obama supporter). Or whether you own a gun and have a current hunting license. (An indicator you're less likely to pull the lever for him in November.)

But as a Democratic strategist (wisely) explains none of these variables alone tell us much. Yes, the campaign may "know" you own a particular model TV -- actually, something that granular may be abstracted into some broader, more useful variable given the multitude of TVs out there -- but it's not like they're using it to spy on you. It's just a blip in a dataset somewhere that no one will likely every physically set eyes on.

"People get hung up looking for a silver bullet," said Ken Strasma, a Democratic consultant whose firm, Strategic Telemetry, worked on more than 100 races in 2006 and is mining data for Obama now. "They want to know, is it cat owners or bourbon drinkers or some nice buzz phrase like that. It's when you see the interactions between hundreds of different data points [that patterns emerge] -- it's rare that you see one single indicator pop."

Now, it gets interesting. Madden starts getting into the meat of how Obama may have built a better mousetrap:

Now Obama's campaign is aiming to be ahead of even the GOP's standard in applying sophisticated data mining techniques across the board, supported by all the traditional canvassing, door-knocking and other work it's been doing. The campaign is collecting some of the most helpful data on its own. For example, aides can track what time you open e-mails from them, and if you show a consistent pattern, they'll start sending them at around that time of day. "The marginal benefit of sending some people an email at 2 o'clock vs. 3 o'clock vs. 4 o'clock might not make sense [at first]," said Michael Bassik, a Democratic consultant with MSHC Partners, the firm that did John Kerry's online advertising in 2004. "But once you start getting an e-mail list that's 3 million, 4 million, or 10 million people, increasing the returns for a fundraising e-mail by 5 or 10 percent means additional returns of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars."

There are no specifics on how Obama is using door knocks to enhance microtargeting, so this claim is difficult to evaluate (I can tell you this concept is not exactly unknown in Republican circles, though). But the bit about timing emails is interesting.

Could Obama be timing his emails to different segments of his list depending on when they open? It's definitely an interesting possibility, and definitely doable (though a lot of work). The other day, Soren forwarded me an email he had received from Obama at 6 in the morning. I received the same email at around 8. Being more of a night owl, I guess that could explain it -- but it's also true that sending to a 5 million person list is a massive task that takes several hours, so the discrepancy isn't prima facie evidence of anything. If the send-timing thing is true, it's very smart. At a minimum, campaigns should send at times of day when supporters are statistically more likely to open (usually 9am), and send first to the people most likely to take action.

This starts getting into the mundane:

If you're one of the 1 million people who have a login on Obama's social networking site, they know how often and when you visit, and they can use that to gauge how committed you are to the campaign. A few months ago, the campaign sent out a three-page survey asking people about their voting habits, how often they go to church, which groups and issues they identify with and whether they've given money to political candidates in the past. The point of all of the online gadgetry is to get people to show up for offline events. "We've tried to orient the tools less as a social network and more as a mobilization network," said Joe Rospars, Obama's online director. "We're creating opportunities for people to get out there and do things -- the campaign is election-outcome oriented."

Wow! A website that tracks when you've logged in, how long you've been, and how often you come back. Psst, but the rest of us techies call that an access log! There is nothing remarkable about this technology. What is rarer is people using it effectively. My dashboard on My.BarackObama.com tells me my rank based on my (limited) activity on the site, and having logged in a few times, blogged once, set up a fundraising page for demonstration purposes, and joined a couple of groups, I am ranked 88,432nd, or in the top 10%. This is just a matter of reading rows from a database and assigning a point value for each one. You can see my access log below:

I've also analyzed how My.BarackObama.com is driving people to take action offline. But the point is that this is hardly new and innovative. Both Bush and Kerry had systems like this in '04, and this type of activity streaming comes standard with most social networking platforms nowadays.

Finally, and this is credit-worthy, is this bit:

Offline, volunteers are canvassing neighborhoods where they think they'll find supporters, or getting contact info at Obama's big rallies, picking up chunks of similar data. Unlike with previous campaigns, Obama's aides dump all the information they get into one centralized database. So if you give the campaign $50 from an online solicitation, then show up at a rally organized offline, the campaign knows that. Likewise, if you join Obama's Facebook group (approximately 1 million strong), then later buy an Obama '08 umbrella, aides file that away for possible use later.

The part about centralized databases is big, and not to be underestimated. But without being able to peek under the hood, it's hard to tell whether this is more or less sophisticated than what, say, the RNC has -- as they've been dealing with the same issues at a very high level of complexity. Getting different databases to sync up properly is a big challenge, and if Obama has figured out a fix, hats off to them.

The part about Facebook is likely a generalization. It is impossible to harvest Facebook fan or group data and the existing technologies don't let you get into the nitty-gritty of who joined what groups, or more aptly, who signed up on Obama's page. It is impossible to vector this data (beyond simply knowing that someone is signed up on Facebook) with in-house data, which is one of the frustrations of using Facebook for political organizing -- they own the data, not the campaign.

A broader point to be made about articles like this is that they emphasize the whiz-bang aspects of microtargeting: here's a segment of Whole Foods-loving Obama umbrella owners! But those narrow segments are rarely of use to a real-world campaign. Used properly, microtargeting is all about mining of data points to categorize people into broad buckets (R, D, I) or (social / economic / national security conservative) when the existing methods fail (hard ID, survey responses, party registration, etc.)

As I've written before, there is a danger in over-segmenting the electorate. And this is where microtargeting goes wrong. If you're using the technology to divine minute differences between 80 different segments of the electorate and then sending them 80 different messages, you need your head examined. This is Mark Penn's microtrends gone amuck. Not only are you wasting time with 20 or 30 times amount of work you need to be doing, but if you try to communicate everything, you end up communicating nothing. As brilliant as the Obama/Bush microtargeting model is, both candidates understood the power of central, unifying messages that cut through the clutter. Why is the word most associated with Obama "change"? Message discipline!

A better model for microtargeting is to use it to find your One True Supporter. Say that we know that the ideal Obama donor is a Mac-addled, latte-sipping urbanite. Then throw all your resources at finding more of those people (a successful application of this would have been both parties trolling the iPhone lines for new tech talent), rather than persuading reluctant middle aged moms to join the ranks. Done right, microtargeting can be used to reinforce your one true brand, rather than splinter it.

Daily Digest: The Bloggers at Night Are Big and Bright...

2008-07-18T13:06:07-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

The Heritage Foundation's Rob Bluey laments that being a conservative at a tech/politics gatherings is "too often...quite lonely." But this week, at least, Rob will have some company. As we type, Austin, Texas, is playing host to not one, but two, blogger conferences: the left's Netroots Nation and the right's RightOnline Summit. Jose Antonio Vargas has a terrific profile of the two events. Jose rightly points out that, with some 2,500 attendees, Netroots Nation is about five times the size of RightOnline; it also has attracted about six times the credentialed press. Another sign of the distance the right still has to travel online is that while the big names at its event belong mostly to pundits, Netroots Nation boasts more or less a who's who of the Democratic Party leadership. The New York Times' Caucus blog has more on the dueling bloggers' conventions and the Wall Street Journal covers Netroots Nation. It's pretty clever: with Netroots Nation in the news this week, would the press be writing about the RightOnline if not for the fact that it's happening 12 miles down the road? Who's to say.
Why Get on a Plane?, Part I: Now that Twitter has acquired Summize, it's easy peasey to follow the action down in Texas; just track the hashtags #rton08 and #nn08. Alternatively, check out TheRightTweets.com and the Huffington Post's Netroots Nation-dominated Twitter page. Both mark the new use of tied-together tweets function as crude group blogs -- albeit group blogs with very, very short posts.
Why Get on a Plane?, Part II (at least as far as Netroots Nation goes): The Talking Points Memo video team is prowling around the Austin Convention Center and has already logged interviews with General Wes Clark on NATO's role in Afghanistan and DNC chair Howard Dean on the non-ATMness of the Internet.
A look at Barack Obama's schedule for June suggests that his $52 million haul that month might mark a shift from online to in-person fundraising.

The Candidates on the Web

Do site stats tell us that John McCain is newly attracting the attention of supporters of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, two candidates popular with the GOP's more conservative wings during the primaries?
The RNC is telling Cafe Press to quit printing up keyrings and t-shirts featuring the GOP elephant.
The guiding vision for John McCain's acceptance speech in Minneapolis-St. Paul this fall, according to the New Republic's Michael Crowley, is to offer an alternative to Obama's "narcissistic world of Facebook and YouTube and Scarlett Johansson."The goal, interprets Newsweek's Andrew Romano, is to frame Obama as a millennial. But you know who's also into all that fuzzy-wuzzy social media stuff? The Army, which, reports Wired's David Axe, recently added blogging to their graduate school curriculum.

TechCongress and Beyond

The Next Right profiles three Republican congressional candidates successfully experimenting online. Check out the beautifully-produced IAmNotaPolitician.com, from Illinoisan Marty Ozinga, the owner of a concrete business now running for Congress. Also worth a look: Warner Wire, a news aggregator-style site dedicated to Democrat Mark Warner's campaign to become the next senator from Virginia. (Disclosure: This writer once worked for Warner as he explored a presidential run.)
Nation fellow Amy Alexander explores the color line online.
Why Tuesday? -- the effort to fix our farblunget voting system, starting by moving elections to a more sensible day of the week -- has recruited New York Democratic Rep. Steve Israel to serve as a correspondent. Equipped with a Flip video camera, Steve promptly began quizzing tourists, staffers, and fellow members of Congress. The move was picked up by Newsday, Israel's local paper. Steve, the author of the Weekend Voting Act, breaks the issue down for newbies: "When I came to Washington, I thought there was a good reason to vote on Tuesday. There's not."
After Boing Boing posted a link to an xkcd-style web comic from Sean Tevis, a candidate for Kansas state house, his fundraising took off. According to Tevis, the fact that more than 4,000 people donated pretty much sextuples the record for donations for state rep race in the Sunflower State.

In Case You Missed It...

Armed with his trusty Nokia N95, Micah Sifry is broadcasting live from Netroots Nation. Ping him via Twitter at @mlsif if there's something in particular you'd like him to capture.

Geeks Answer Kansas Candidate's Call for Backup

2008-07-18T10:01:55-04:00

"It's impossible," says a naysayer to cartoon version of Sean Tevis, a Democratic candidate for state house in Kansas's District 15. "Impossible?," he responds. "This is the Internet!" Tevis, running to represent the city of Olathe in the northeastern part of the state, is raising much-needed campaign cash by using a web comic styled after xkcd, a cartoon series popular with the geekiest of geeks. (h/t Carlo Scannella) The strip, called "Running for Office: It's Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner," puts out a call for 3,000 contributors to kick in $8.34.

This is the Internet, indeed. At last update, at 8:18 CST this morning, a reported 3,612 people had come together to fund the Kansan's campaign. New panels tacked on to the comic have the naysayer asking "Who are these people who are donating?" Cartoon Tevis: "I know who they are...backup." No candidate for state rep in Kansas, according to Tevis, had ever attracted more than 650 or so donors.

How'd it happen? Boing Boing, the arbiter of online culture, posted a link to Tevis's site yesterday. Tevis, who, according to his campaign bio, is an information architect at a cooling technology company in Overland Park, is running against Arlen Siegfreid, a Republican elected in 2003 with 55% of the vote.

The comic succeed in pulling in cash and attention from places far beyond Kansas. It's a siren song to geeks. According to the strip, Tevis is running on "open government, personal privacy, real science standards, an end to regressive taxation on those who can least afford it, and," in a nod to net neutrality, "putting someone in office who understands by the Internet cannot and should not be censored." Also namechecked are nuggets of Internet culture like downmodding and rick rolling. In addition to the Boing Boing posting, it was Dugg just over 1,400 times.

Tevis also keeps up a blog -- and a rather frank one for someone running for public office. In a recent post, Tevis talked about throwing away the majority of the issue questionnaires PACs are sending his way.

Two weeks ago, Washington State Democrat Darcy Burner, a candidate in the eight congressional district, ran out of her burning home wearing a shirt reading -- xml code for "end war." It was a secret handshake (though, in Burner's case, an unintentional one), a way of reaching out to geeks. Fundraising took off, and Burner's campaign raised more than $80,000 in the first 24 hours after the fire.

In Tevis's case, all the online attention was enough to get the site Boing Boinged, or shut down. Tevis himself joined in the Boing Boing comments, saying: "Thank you so much for your warm and generous support. The site is being hammered way above what I expected." He wasn't complaining; all that attention is a very good thing.

Oh, why the ask for donations of $8.34? It's simple math. Tevis explains that his campaign needs $26,000 by July 26th to be able to compete with Siegfreid. Three thousand people chipping in $8.34 meets that goal while hitting the sweet spot of affordability. It was an ambitious approach, especially considering that just 6,300 total people cast ballots in the district in 2006. (The Democratic candidate that cycle lost pulled in 2,822 of those votes.) The xkcd call was an attempt -- and a seemingly successful one -- to rely upon the generosity of micro-donors everywhere.

That said, bigger donations are welcomed, of course. Chipping in $500 gets you "a DVD video from Sean Tevis' mom telling you how wonderful you are, because you are." It's difficult to resist kicking the geek a little cash.

Netroots Nation 2008, Live Video Here

2008-07-17T17:04:01-04:00

I'm in Austin, Texas for the Netroots Nation conference today and tomorrow, and will try to do some live video interviews as I bump into people and post them here. I'm speaking tomorrow on a panel on "Transparency, Participation and Reinvention in Government in the Next Administration Through Web 2.0 Tools and Culture," which I think could have had the shorter title of "Rebooting Government in 2009" but you get the drift. I'm looking forward to meeting and talking with my fellow panelists, Justin Hamilton, Silona Bonewald, Andrew Hoppin, W. David Stephenson, and Jeanne Holm. Andrew and Jeanne are both with NASA, so hopefully they've brought some good schwag, like a miniature Saturn rocket or something. Ping me via Twitter (@mlsif) if there's something or someone on the agenda that you want me to track down.

Obama and Politics 2.0: Documenting History in Real Time

2008-07-17T14:30:47-04:00

(Originally posted at nancyscola.com.)

I'm taking a crack at liveblogging an event tonight [ed. -- now last night] at NYU featuring Arun Chaudhary, director of video field production for the Obama campaign, in conversation with Ellen McGirt, senior writer at Fast Company and author of magazine's April 2008 cover story "The Brand Called Obama." Arun left his job as an adjunct film professor at NYU to produce video that pulls from public events, behind the scenes, and one-on-ones -- unique creative content that populates BarackObama.com and a YouTube channel. Let's get started.

Asked about the new media team, Arun describes at least 50 people crammed into one corner of an office building floor with with "pictures of JFK and graph paper tacked up on the wall." Arun says the new media team spends a fair amount of money, but they're buying fishing poles rather than fish; the broadcast quality footage they capture, for example, can be used for advertising in addition to online video. Asked about past campaigns he tried working with, Arun says they saw media as "too precious" to take creative risks with.

Arun explains his hire by the campaign by saying 'you can learn the politics. You can learn how to navigate these worlds. But you can't really learn the trades very quickly.' The campaign has been attracting successful people that way, he says, naming Facebook's Chris Hughes, who came on to handle social-networking. Arun then screens a well-crafted mock movie trailer calling people to a rally in New York's Washington Square Park that features Obama in slightly goofy situations. Ellen: "We've never seen anything like this before":

Ellen asks if the technology was in place three years ago to make video like this. "The technology was there three years ago, but I don't think the right audience was," says Arun. Back then, he jokes, there were just six hundred of the same people commenting on political blogs and that's it; online participation today spans a wider segment of the population.* Ellen ask how he managed to get approval for the trailer video from the campaign and the candidate. Arun laughs a bit nervously, "I don't know if the candidate saw it," but says that it made its way, he believes, to the level of campaign manager.

The next video was crafted to call people to the pre-Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, as, Arun says, showing organizational strength was the key to getting attention and momentum in that state. Ellen asks if there was a concern that Obama and guest attendee John Legend were the only African-Americans seen in the clip. Arun pointed to the Internet Archive's Prelinger Archives as the source of the overly white footage. (At the actual event, the video team had five cameras and five videographers in place capturing footage.):

Next video. An Iowa call-to-caucus piece, says Arun, is a campaign classic. It both asks Iowans to caucus for their particular candidate and educates voters on how to actually go through the confusing caucusing process. Both the Obama campaign and the Edwards campaign went the route of a dated instructional-style video, he says. (Arun praises the Hillary Clinton campaign's call-to-caucus video which featured Bill Clinton eating a cheeseburger and saying something along the lines of "exercising is hard, but caucusing is easy."):

It was the campaign's "traditional media" team, says Arun, that whipped together a quick response to the Clinton campaign's 3 a.m. phone call ad. But the new media team tracked down the young girl in the stock footage, Casey Knowles, an Obama precinct captain in Washington State. In the one-minute video, Casey deconstructs the techniques in the Clinton ad -- the blue tint to the footage, the "scratchy voice" -- and slams the "politics of fear." An ad like that, says Arun, would never make on air, but works well online:

The candidate was in Terre Haute, Arun says, when the news broke that Obama had earlier made remarks in California concerning "bitter" Americans. Obama inserted a response to the incident in his Indiana speech. The new media team, says Arun, edited, packaged, and released the candidate's own words within 19 minutes of the speech's delivery. A lesson learned, says Arun, is that people are actually interested in the "sound blast," and will watch long clips in their entirety:

He also cites Obama's speech at their Chicago headquarters.The 14 minute clip shows the candidate addressing his staff, both in person and through a conference call (which creates a few minutes of less-than-thrilling footage when the call goes dead and Obama has to stall while it's reconnected). It wasn't deliberately shot low-fi for an extra dose of authenticity, Arun says, as some people suggested. There was no intention to create some sort of "Tanner 88" moment. It was just, he says, that there was an intern manning the camera:

Asked by Emily about what an Obama administration might bring, Arun says that the role of video in an administration would be even more powerful than in a campaign. He mentions the broadcasting of health care meetings -- creating a broader base of people who are able to keep an eye on the proceedings. The idea, Arun says, is not 'telling people who tell people to tell people,' but to use video to tell people directly. The role of video in governing, he says, is to achieve the goal of "cutting out the middleman."

Q&A

Question: There's a discontinuity in your work with high video quality and no sound mixing. Why?
Arun: We shoot as high quality as we can because it might be used for broadcast, but get used to it -- a lot of the networks are going so broke that they're getting rid of their "sound guys."

Question: What role with user-generated content play in presidential campaigns?

Arun: Using voter-generated content while probably remain "an unrealized ideal." Much of the content that gets sent to them is "a little strange."

Question: Why is new media going to make young people come out and vote?

Arun: It isn't. Barack Obama is what is going to make people come out and vote.

Question: If you embrace an interactive politics 2.0, how do you avoid politicizing governing?

Arun: I think we're ready for 1.5. We'll [ed. -- a clarification: "we" here is a reference to political campaigns in general, and to the tools that might come into common use -- not a reference to the Obama campaign in particular] have virtual townhalls, for sure.

* Updated to correct: The original line referenced political blogs; in making the joke, Arun was referencing hard-core blog commenters.

Daily Digest: The Well-Oiled Campaign Machine

2008-07-17T11:07:41-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and -- sooprise, sooprise -- Rep. Ron Paul came out on top in Slate's veep picker. Paulites are still coming out for their man in full force, swamping, reports Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland, the GOP's platform-crafting website. Should the fact that Paulies are consistently able to totally overwhelm blogs, chat rooms, and wikis with their calls for a return to the gold standard make us worry about how useful unmediated political forums can ever really be?

The Candidates on the Web

You're a Vanity Fair-reading, Subaru-driving mother of three. You rent a two-bedroom walkup, read your emails late at night, and recently switched from Safari to Firefox. How did we get so smart? We didn't. But Barack Obama did, reports Mike Madden in Salon. The well-oiled campaign's data operation is, says Mike, "an ambitious melding of corporate marketing and grassroots organizing that the Obama campaign sees as a key to winning this fall." TechPresident's Zephyr Teachout, a Dean campaign veteran, is quoted: "It's not an innovative campaign, but it's an extraordinarily professional one."
A President Obama would appoint a National Cyber Advisor with a direct line to the Oval Office. Imagine the awesomely geeky lunches she and the cabinet-level CTO would have in the White House mess.
While Barack Obama is skipping Netroots Nation starting today in Austin, Texas, the campaign's deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand and new media director Joe Rospars will be there to meet and greet.
Last night in New York City, Obama's field video director Arun Chaudhary gave a peek at how professionally-crafted video fits into the campaign. Arun revealed that the Obama new media team, currently numbering around 50, has "pictures of JFK and graph paper tacked up on the wall."

TechCongress and Beyond

Big Media Matt is now Think Tank Matt. Matt Yglesias -- who began blogging in 1982, at the age of one -- has The Atlantic to mount the barricades on behalf of the progressive Center for American Progress. Interesting stuff, this young writers leaving the fuzzy-bordered world of journalism for the fuzzy-bordered advocacy world. Matt, for one, doesn't see this as a big change: "From a reader's point of view, this probably won't make a huge difference."
Fox News jumps on the Twitter Dome story, reporting that the ongoing crafting of the House's new media rules has "riled Republicans." Rep. John Culberson, quoted in the piece, makes a clarifying point: digital information flows like water these days -- from Qik to Twitter to Flickr -- and so attempting to regulate vessels is a fool's mission.

Daily Digest: "Who's Web Savvy Now?"

2008-07-16T12:26:53-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

Celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton is not at all pleased with John McCain recently saying "I don't believe in gay adoption," and he's letting his audience know. (For the record, McCain is now attempting to reel those comments back in.) Now, Perez might not be the most reliable of sources -- he's well known for having repeatedly reported the death of Fidel Castro last summer -- but his traffic numbers are huuuge. On a daily basis, he has touches an audience that might not otherwise be closely tracking the '08 race.
PledgedNotBound.com is a new anti-Barack Obama site making the case that the Democratic National Committee's own rules permit delegates to switch their allegiances at the nominating convention. "What the Left giveth," says the site, "the Left can taketh away!"
Time for a fun new JibJab video! "Time for Some Campaignin'" is set to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'" and has a requisite 2.0 twist -- you can put yourself into the piece. The digital throws some pointed elbows, sure. But something about the equal-opportunity mocking is oddly uplifting. To democracy!

The Candidates on the Web

"Who's web savvy now?" snarks McCain campaign blogger Michael Goldfarb. Team McCain used a Wikipedia-inspired tool called Versonista to track screen captures of the Obama website, as Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland reports. And, as first reported by the New York Daily News, the service found that in its section titled "Plan for Ending the War in Iraq," the Obama campaign replaced an excerpt from 10-month old from Iowa speech with one from North Carolina from this March, did away with a section on the troop "surge," fleshed out a plan for Iraq, and deleted one bullet point on immediate withdrawal. The Obama campaign's response? This is a website, not the Dead Sea Scrolls. We update it as events warrant.
The Next Right Patrick Ruffini wonders if the Obama campaign's investment in field organizing -- including the involvement of paid organizers in local groups on My.BarackObama.com -- makes Obama '08 the "spiritual successor to Bush-Cheney '04."
Have some hump day fun with whatever.wecanbelievein.com, where the whatever can be, well, whatever. The URL produces a gorgeous Obama poster emblazoned with your slogan. Big Gotham fans, we made onemightygoodlookingfont.wecanbelievein.com. The site, which features a McCain ad, is being used to protest Obama's vote on the FISA bill. (via @matthewstoller)

TechCongress and Beyond

In his continuing effort to become a "real time representative," Texas Rep. John Culberson held a groundbreaking virtual townhall meeting last night that made use of telephone conferencing software, UStream, Twitter, and an online chat room. Culberson was stuck in his Cannon Building office but was able to reach his Houston constituents where they live. With Gallup pegging Congress's approval rating at a rather extraordinary 14%, maybe inviting the people into the People's House is the way to win back favor. Culberson's event was remarkable -- innovative and informal, with staffers milling about in the background (and laughing at an unfortunate slip of the tongue by Culberson, which, let's just say, involved a new twist on the word "Twitter.")
A tip from us to you: keep an eye on TheRightTweets.com.
Ask the Speaker is a Digg-like tool for putting together a Q&A with Nancy Pelosi at this week's Netroots Nation conference. The top three questions at the moment center around the impeachment of George Bush; the wisdom of arresting Karl Rove and Harriet Miers; and the moving of Congress to small-bore donations.
We've drawn attention in the past to an interesting fissure in the conservative landscape: the battle over broadband access. And we'll do it again! After Michigan Republican Party chair Saul Anuzis and TechRepublican's David All penned a Politico column that sounded alarms about telecom companies' Internet stifling, conservative new media guy Eric Odom expressed disapproval. Shorter Odom: "Good grief."

Daily Digest: "Loud Anomaly" or Dem Base?

2008-07-15T12:42:31-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

\ˈnet-ˌrüts: The Next Right's Matt Moon steals some of the thunder of the clever portmanteau's acceptance by Merriam-Webster by suggesting that the "netroots" is, to borrow a phrase from the New York Post's Kirsten Powers, "a loud anomaly" that overvalues partisanship and confrontation -- and not a true, sustainable grassroots movement.
Game on! Days after the RNC launched an innovative collaborative platform-crafting tool (profiled by me, Nancy Scola), the DNC's new platform committee chief, and Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, announced that the Dems would be doing, err, pretty much the exact same thing. The Obama campaign had announced a set of online tools to facilitate "Listening to America" parties, but the effort didn't stack up all that well against GOPPlatform2008.com. (Related: IBM's rather neat Many Eyes "shared visualization" project now has a hub up and running for the Democrats' in-person platform parties. May we all become a nation of chart-toting Ross Perots.)
This video report from the Washington Times' Carrie Sheffield explores the idea that Republicans are "scrambling to play catch up" when it comes to online fundraising. Note the appearance of TechRepublican's David All, who explains the lag by saying that many of the Americans still without affordable and speedy Internet access lean Republican.
Republican strategist Mindy Finn suggests that we've more or less reached the point where "online political strategy" is just plain ol' political stratemegizin', rooted in "the timeless fundamentals of participatory democracy."

The Candidates on the Web

Newsweek's Andrew Romano, for one, couldn't care less if John McCain can use "a Google" or not. The four-term senator's "computer illiteracy," argues Andrew, "doesn't reflect a lack of curiosity -- it reflects a lack of necessity."
Wall Street Journal: "Latino Bloggers React To Candidates’ Outreach Efforts." You're busy, so I'll summarize: the Latino community is hardly homogeneous, and reactions are mixed!
The Huffington Post's Amanda Michel asks an excellent question: why the different press reactions to Mayhill Fowler's gotcha moments with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson's hot mic ("I want to cut his...") oopsie on Fox? Amanda calls the disparate ways the incidents were handled "the basic psychology of hypocrisy."

TechCongress and Beyond

Future Majority's Kevin Bondelli's is quite "riled up" over House Republican Policy Committee chairman Thad McCotter's sarcastically commie-flavored video on the Twitter Dome Scandal. Perhaps most irksome to Kevin: the pro-soc-net video -- posted on an account less than a week old -- spells YouTube as "UTube."
Social networking is reshaping charitable giving. One reason? It seems to hold true for both politics and panda-bear protection efforts -- people are more likely to respond to friends and acquaintances than to professional fundraisers.
Threadless loves democracy! But it doesn't <3 partisanship, so if you are going to enter the community-driven t-shirt company's latest design contest, make your t-shirt neither red nor blue.

Collaborative (and Polite) Platform Crafting

2008-07-14T19:53:30-04:00

I want to do take a longer look at something I briefly mentioned in today's Daily Digest but which deserves more consideration -- GOPPlatform2008.com. The Republican National Committee is calling it an "historic online platform." Simply put, it's an innovative attempt to collaborative craft the GOP's manifesto before its convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul this September.

In the past when our national political parties wanted to craft their platforms, the process was simple -- and, largely closed off from the political base. In 2004, for example, when the DNC set out to craft its "Strong at Home, Respected in the World" platform, anyone not one of the two hundred or so members of the DNC platform committee had two ways of participating. The first: get out a pen and piece of paper and send in recommendations to DNC HQ. The second: request permission to testify at the Platform Drafting Committee's public hearings. But as the DNC warned at the time, "the opportunity to present testimony in person is limited based on timing and logistical considerations."

Listening to America: The Democratic Platform for Change

In the 2008 cycle, the DNC is attempting to extend the process -- but only slightly, when you study it. The Obama campaign has launched Listening to America: The Democratic Platform for Change, which is a more or less a series of Meetup-style house parties. These "listening" events, suggests the campaign, should be are centered around a single issue. What the gathering agrees to on that one point will be submitted through the campaign website, and will then, says the campaign, "be reviewed by the team responsible for the Democratic Platform." It's still a largely closed, off-line process.

GOPPlatform2008.com

The RNC has gone a different route. With GOPPlatform2008.com, they've built a tool that solicits the ideas from the public on where they party should plant flags -- on everything from government spending to judicial nominations to the war in Iraq. Users can freely post text suggestions and upload YouTube videos, as well as hash over the issues in Google groups. A widget promotes the site's top 3 most discussed issues and a Facebook app displays the top 10.

There's no formal agreement on whether the fruits of the online platform will make their way into the official party platform. On this point, I spoke with the RNC's eCampaign Director Cyrus Krohn earlier today. The RNC, under the direction of RNC chairman Mike Duncan and the platform committee chairs Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Senator Richard Burr asked Krohn's Internet team to build the site -- indicating buy-in from the top.

On the site, Chairman Duncan offers a welcoming message via video, insisting to visitors that "we need your ideals and your insights." Platform chairman McCarthy, representing a district just north of LA, frames the project thusly: "Coming from California, I have seen how technology has changed our way of life." And for his part, platform co-hair Burr helpfully directs users how to log in and navigate the site. It represents a groundbreaking opportunity, he says. And "in that spirit, I hope you'll review the posting guidelines... May we all strive to keep the level of these discussions respectful in honor of the process." That last warning is interesting.

Mediated Crowdsourcing ---> Governing 2.0?

Interesting why? I'd suggest it's noteworthy because of the explicitness of the idea that GOPPlatform2008.com is a mediated and controlled effort. It's bottom-up, sure. But as Burr's warning makes plain, there's a good dose of top-down involved too. And as we see experiments progressing in opening up governing, we're running into the question of just what happens after we open up the doors and invite the crowds in. Democrats are set to battle over openness and what role the Democratic base will play in guiding the party, as we saw with the Get FISA Right experience on MyBarackObama.com.

On the GOP online platform site, there's no set-in-stone agreement over what happens with what gets created -- but maybe there doesn't need to be. We'll see how it develops. But there's a chance that Republicans are comfortable working within the bounds of collaborative civic engagement that still has gatekeepers involved -- which might put them in a position to make great leaps when it comes to harnessing the energy and wisdom of their base.

Daily Digest: And It Is Us...

2008-07-14T13:10:38-04:00

The Web on the Candidates

Figuring out how to wrangle a 23,000+ member group might be a high-class problem to have, but it is indeed a problem. Jon Pincus, one of the organizers of the Get FISA Right movement is tapping into the wisdom of Clay Shirky's 2003 essay "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" to figure out next steps. MyBarackObama.com's klugey mailing lists are, Pincus reports, scaring some members into thinking that the campaign is censoring their communications. And so, just as high-profile web entrepreneur Jason Calacanis gives up the blogging game to go the more personal email list route, Pincus is pushing for the opposite tactic: pushing for the group to switch from email to organizing around the GetFISARight.com discussion forums. Get FISA Right is proving to be a fascinating look at how a handful of loosely-joined connectors (Pincus, Mike Stark, and others) can harness the power of an even more loosely-joined collection of passionate people.
Two ambitious beta projects worth keeping an eye on: (1) Free Government, a bill builder and poll clearinghouse from the Free Government Party, and (2) Open Cabinet, a collaborative effort to piece together the next presidential administration -- including filling a possible CTO spot. (And yes, it is gauche to nominate yourself for a cabinet slot. Get yer mom or best buddy or office mate to do it instead.)

The Candidates on the Web

The Republican National Committee has launched an appealing project: GOPPlatform2008.com, a discussion site released in preparation for the upcoming convention in Minneapolis-St.Paul. The Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas has the reporting. The DNC and Obama campaign, for the record, has announced a series of in-person "platform meetings." The benefits of doing it on the web? Asynchronous and online, the process is open to anyone with an Internet connection at any time and from anywhere in the world. There's no promise that what the masses come up with will go into the official GOP platform -- only that the text and video-based contributions "will be reviewed and taken into full consideration." It's a bottom-up and top-down approach, but one that -- if the conservative blogosphere's relationship with party officials is any guide -- Republicans might be comfortable with. Could keeping some gatekeepers in the process might be the quickest route between here and government 2.0?
One Republican who might need some help navigating the GOP's online platform-shaping process? Guy by the name of John McCain. In an interview with the New York Times, McCain comments on his web prowess, saying, "I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself," and reveals that he doesn't use email. Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland has the goods.

TechCongress and Beyond

The New York Times covers the Twitter Dome Scandal, the brouhaha between Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), Rep. Mike Capuano (D-MA), Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and others over the House of Representatives' web use rules. Open Left's Matt Stoller has a good summary piece in which he calls the institution's strictures "regulation for regulation's sake." Also worth checking out: PdF's Dave Witzel's two latest posts on the conflict.
One thing both RNC chair Mike Duncan and DNC chair Howard Dean can agree on: how awesome YouTube's new convention channels are.
NPR has lowered the guillotine on its social-webby Bryant Park Project show. Why that's upsetting.

In Case You Missed It...

Network theorist Valdis Krebs finds himself in rare agreement with Karl Rove on the wisdom of reaching undecided voters via people already in their social universes, rather than, you know, orange-hatted strangers.

Twitter in a Teacup III: Could this be Progress?

2008-07-13T21:50:08-04:00

When I finally hit "publish" on Friday's post, "Twitter in a Teacup Part Deux: The Speaker Has Spoken," I figured I could safely head for the beach free from concern that anything exciting would happen before I made it back inside the beltway on Monday. Boy was I wrong.

The Gray Lady picked up the story today (p. A21 in the National edition). Falcone chose to emphasize the partisan angle writing "But some Republicans, like Mr. Culberson and Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader, are crying foul. They say the proposals are an attack on free speech and fear that Democrats will seek more restrictions." Otherwise, the old media got the story pretty much as it has unfolded on twitter.

However, they missed the big plot twist. On Friday Representative Culberson (R, Houston) posted a response to Speaker Pelosi's letter from the day before. In it, without any partisan posturing, he makes an entirely reasonable suggestion. Quoting his letter:

With good reason, there are no restrictions on our ability to conduct radio, television or newspaper interviews or conversations in our official capacity, and these interviews are often done using our office computers or telephones. These interviews can and often do appear in the same publication or broadcast alongside political or commercial advertising.

There is no logical distinction between communications using these old media outlets and communications using new media on the Internet. Therefore, I am recommending that our House rules treat communication over new media outlets on the Internet the same way we treat communication over the old, traditional media outlets. That is, without any restrictions except for common sense, including no video or photographs from the House floor.

What's more, Rep. Culberson said he shouldn't have made this a partisan issue. In an interview with O'Reilly's Tim O'Brien, Culberson said "I made a mistake in even mentioning Democrat or Republican... the community has helped me understand to keep the partisan labels out of it, that's good advice which I have taken to heart." He also gives props to twitterer @technosailor for helping him understand how to focus his attention.

Anyway, the storm I had downgraded from a kerfuffle to a mere brouhaha and fully expected to blow away out to sea has taken a constructive turn. Rep. Culberson wants to "bring the House of Representatives into the 21st Century and help shine sunlight into the operations of the People's House." That's something we can all get behind.

Oh. And here's a picture of the beach.

[Thanks to scriptingnews for the Fail Whale image and Rob Kohn for the beach whales.]

Networks of Voters

2008-07-12T11:06:48-04:00

[Cross-posted at The Network Thinker]

Karl Rove and I do not agree on much.

Yet, his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal does provide an opportunity for overlap.

Rove discusses Obama's 2008 campaign strategy...

"For starters, Barack Obama's manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an "army of persuasion" modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor[emphasis mine] "Victory Committee" of '00 and '04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote.

Sen. Obama's organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille's plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command."

Yes, all politics is local... and social. This is what I discussed in the white paper & book chapter: "It's the Conversations, Stupid!"

"...more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker [emphasis mine]."

Right on, Karl. The strategy of friends talking to friends beats the strategy of strangers talking to strangers — as I described in an earlier blog post from the 2008 presidential primary.

"The Obama campaign is trying to catch up with the GOP's 'microtargeting' program, which uses powerful analytical tools and extensive household consumer information to focus on prospects for conversion and extra turnout help."

And with warrantless wiretapping, the Bush Administration now has very good social network link data on all those "microtargets"! I jest, of course — there have been NO documented cases of counter-terrorism data or methods being used in political campaigns, but... that day is coming.

The bottom line is: the better you know both the nodes and links in the network, the better you can devise a strategy for one local voter to influence another. Help your avid supporters influence their local network.

The map below shows a social network. The grey links show: who talks to whom about politics. The nodes are colored by who they are leaning towards: red = Republicans, blue = Democrats, grey = Undecided. We are ignoring independent candidates in this simple example. How might the Undecideds tip based on the social ties illustrated?

Twitter in a Teacup Part Deux: The Speaker Has Spoken

2008-07-11T09:47:58-04:00

I'm officially downgrading "twitter in a teacup" or, as Nancy Scola branded it, "twitter dome" from a kerfuffle to a mere brouhaha. Capping an exciting day of flying tweets (Let Our Congress Tweet counted 356 tweets tagged #LOTC08 this morning) and crashing blog posts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally weighed in.

After demonstrating her social media quals by pointing out "I have a blog, use YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, and other new media to communicate with constituents," Speaker Pelosi's letter finally gets to the meat of the matter, saying "inaccurate rumors have been circulated asserting that the suggested standards allowing for web video outside of the House.gov domain would affect Member blogging or use of sites such as Twitter."

There you have it - the rumors are inaccurate. And I take some comfort in knowing that Speaker Pelosi reads @shelbinator's blog. (I assume it is in her feed reader, right next to LOLcat of the day.) There is some more detailed discussion of the aftermath on the Open House Project list including of Rep. Capuano's response to the response to his letter that set this whole thing off.

Two important lessons we should take:

First, two-way, timely, frank, communications with Congress is a big deal for both parties. Moreover, there is already a core of aware, connected people, willing to improve communications. We should build on this.

Second, who owns the infrastructure matters. The issue is broader than "are Congresspeople misusing public resources by sending campaign snail mail masquerading as official business." As Mark Tapscott points out, people are smart enough to recognize the ad next to a YouTube video doesn't mean an endorsement. We take for granted that communications with our elected officials will be mediated by commercial entities be they the Washington Post and New York Times or Fox News and Comedy Central. In our new age of social media should we continue to trust these intermediaries? Why should we rely on CNN (owned by Time Warner) and YouTube (owned by Google) to decide which of our questions get asked in debates? Even if twitter were stable enough to support meaningful political discourse is it the right place? Why can't our public square be controlled by the public?

[Thanks to scriptingnews for the Fail Whale image.]