techPresident - Fred08.com: An Outside Insider's View - 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.

Fred08.com: An Outside Insider's View

Michael Turk — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:12:58 -0500

I have been silent for some time due to my involvement with the Thompson campaign. With that campaign having ended, I would like to share my thoughts on what went right with the online effort despite many people focusing obsessively on what went wrong with the campaign generally.

There is a lot to learn from this campaign, and I invite you to take a look. However, the post is lengthy, and I tend to get zealous and preachy. Take that with a grain of salt. It's just who I am. If you feel like discussing it further, feel free to drop a note.

For the brave, read on...