Category: Politics
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Top 10 Most Important Online Political Events of 2008
Dec 30, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Politics | Comments (0)Our political web design firm watched and participated in the 2008 elections with great interest and vigor. 2008 was possibly the watershed year for online politics where all candidates finally realized that the Internet wasn't just a fad or a gaming platform, but actually serves as perhaps the most powerful and efficient tool to mobilize volunteers and win votes.
There were many success and failures in the 08 cycle, below is the list of the top 10 that we put together. If you have ideas for other events that we left off, be sure to leave them in the comments. Also, we invite you to vote in our poll and weigh in on what you think were the most important online political events of 2008. In the New Year, we'll release the final results of the poll and the most popular events that people felt we left off our list.
Enjoy the list and please join the conversation by leaving a comment or voting in the poll!
10. Mitt Romney's YouTube Ad Contest - Romney crowdsourced an ad that actually ran on TV. The campaign gave supporters an opportunity to make their own ad using Jumpcut's video editing technology. While Moveon.org and Chevrolet had used similar strategies before, Romney was the first of the 08 candidates to use the technique and it was a great success garnerning 129 impressive submissions and producing this final ad.
9. 5 Friends YouTube Video - An independent, funny, non-partisan viral video of celebrities urging people to vote. The video embraced the viral nature of the web and encouraged people to pass along the Google Polling Place Locator to 5 of their unregistered friends. The video and its sequel garnered more than 5 million views, mentions on hundreds of blogs, and were highlighted by many mainstream media outlets.
8. YouTube Debates - At first the Republicans were hesitant of having a debate mediated by questions submitted via YouTube, but in the end, both parties hosted fun, but rather non-controversial, YouTube debates. Itwas undoubtedly the first time debate questions had been asked in the form of songs and there was added emotion when soldiers in uniform asked about national security plans, which made the debates an interesting and innovative experiment. Also, as the debates were co-sponsored by CNN and YouTube, it was an interesting and prophetic meshing of new and old media.
7. Ron Paul's Online Fundraising - While most of the online fundraising attention was directed at Barack Obama, almost more impressive is what Ron Paul was able to do as a longshot candidate that wasn't even allowed to participate in the debates. No backing from the party and little media coverage didn't stop Paul from setting a GOP one-day record for online fundraising by hauling in $4.2 million in 24 hours on November 5, 2008. It was all due to an independent grass roots campaign tie to the commemoration of Guy Fawkes Day through YouTube videos, blogs, and social networks.
6. Disorganization of McCain's Online Campaign - While Obama's campaign will go down as the prototype for a new media campaign, McCain seemed to be stuck in the stone ages. Obama had dozens of staffers dedicated solely to online operations, while many reports have the McCain campaign dedicating fewer than 5 people to the web campaign. While Obama's campaign was busy mobilizing millions of volunteers through the web, McCain was content to go on the record saying he did not know how to e-mail. The lack of online effort by McCain is almost as significant as Obama's innovation, as it defined McCain as a candidate of the past that didn't understand today's generation.
5. Politico.com, HuffingtonPost.com, Fivethirtyeight.com - In this election, it seemed as Internet news sites had the upperhand on most of their "traditional" counterparts. By being flexible and quick to update, these sites were the go-to sources for the obsessed campaign watchers that wanted the latest breaking news. Their style forced media stalwarts to change their style and be more willing to update news on the fly and have permanent blogs on their homepages.
4. Obama Driving Online Signups Through VP Text Promise - While this event wasn't strictly online, there's no way we could leave it off the list. Obama's VP announcement text was able to signup millions of interested voters, many of those registered online or were pushed to the website to further engage with the campaign. The VP announcement was texted to nearly 3 million mobile devices. Over the coming months, Obama would use the numbers to push people to the campaign website, have them watch the DNC, and thank them for their support.
3. Hulu, YouTube, Blogs, etc on Tina Fey's Palin Impression - Fey's impression of the VP candidate may go down as the most famous impression in history. The videos have garnered more than 20 million views on NBC.com and YouTube, and more importantly, it let Fey define Palin before the Governor could do so on her own terms. Without the web, the impression would not have been nearly as ubiquitous and "mavericky" may have never entered our vernacular, however, through video sharing sites, the video was able to reach an audience exponentially larger than a typical Saturday Night Live broadcast. Not only loved by the public, the impression was also a critical success, leading to Fey being named one of TIME's people of the year and the AP Entertainer of the Year.
2. My.BarackObama.com - While other candidates were happy setting up supporter pages on Facebook and MySpace profiles, Barack Obama took it to the next level by hiring one of the Facebook founders and "re-inventing the wheel" by building his own social network, my.barackobama.com (MyBo). More than 1 million people registered with MyBo, but the power of MyBo wasn't just registrants but the tools that the site put at their disposal. Unlike the other campaigns, Obama used his social network to mobilize volunteers and give them the tools to fundraise and engage friends. In the end, according to the P2P foundation, more than 1 billion emails were sent from MyBo, over 100,000 events had been scheduled, and hundreds of millions of dollars had been raised.
1. Campaign Websites Finally Come Into Their Own. This was the first election year in which every Presidential candidate put forth a significant effort online. In '04, Dean was the first to really "get it" and use his site as more than just a brochure. This year, every candidate, specifically Clinton, Edwards, Obama, and Romney embraced the Web by having social networks, active bloggers, flash video, user generated content, and more. The revolution wasn't just limited to these top level campaigns, as many Congressional level and even state races embraced the web as the engaging, efficient, and effective medium that it has become.
That's our top 10 list. Let us know in the comments what we left out and be sure to vote in our poll for the most important online political events of 2008. Some close runners up were Sarah Silverman's Great Schlep, the Google Polling Place Locator, and the GOP crowdsourcing their platform.We're excited to see the new online political innovations in 2009; what this year did most successfully was convey the importance of online efforts to campaigns at every level.
For more insights on the everchanging landscape of online politics, sign up for our online campaigning newsletter.
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Loss of Industry Pioneer - Mike Connell
Dec 22, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Politics | Comments (0)Online politics tragically lost an industry pioneer over the weekend. Michael Connell was killed Friday night when his plane crashed in Akron, Ohio. Connell was the founder of of New Media Communications, a Cleveland-based political web firm for Republicans. The firm has replaced their homepage with a tribute to Connell.
Connell was one of the most innovative and successful thinkers in the online political space. He was in charge of online outreach for both of President Bush's campaigns and served as the lead online consultant for dozens of Gubernatorial and US Senate races.
Being a partner at a political web design firm, myself, I was always impressed with the formidable business and client list Connell was able to assemble in a short period of time. Personally, I will always remember the phenomenal work he did for Dick DeVos in the 2006 Michigan Gubernatorial campaign; to this day, that was the best use of video blogging that I have ever seen.
As a Cleveland, OH native involved in politics, I frequently heard stories about Connell, his firm, and their great work. Whenever we competed for business, I considerd it an honor to be in consideration with such an industrty veteran. He will be missed, but will always be remembered as a pioneer.
A scholarship has been created by Mike's family and friends to benefit his four children that he left behind. You can visit the scholarship page and make a donation here.
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SEO and Political Campaigns Done Right Requires Planning
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) covers a number of strategies that can be used on a website to help it appear higher in search engine results. Smaller political campaigns generally underutilize SEO as a cost effective way to drive a message and save on ad spending. This lack of planning is a shame, as SEO is a completely free way to gain exposure to voters. Like any other component of a campaign, SEO should be addressed strategically so that maximum results can be achieved with a campaign's limited resources.
The first part of the strategy should be defining the keywords that are important to your race. This should include combinations of the candidate's name and the office he/she is running for, along with combinations including generic political terms and issues that people may search for. To get an idea of the kind of search volume your terms generate, you can use the Google Keyword Tool. It will also suggest keyword variations that might be useful. It can be a challenge to measure volume since interest in a campaign can be low initially. A good tip to determine relative importance of keywords early in a race can be to check you generic terms for a higher profile race.
Once you have defined your keywords, you need to execute on your strategy. For information on how to approach SEO in general, a good place to get information is straight from the horse's mouth: Google's SEO Starter Guide. Below are some tips specifically for political campaigns and the challenges they face.
- Start your website early.
Seeing results from an SEO campaign takes time -- at a minimum a couple of months. The earlier you begin your strategy the better off you will be. In political campaigns, typically the site is being built from scratch as well. This means that a new domain will likely be used and Google will need to index and rank it for the first time. We recently launched votethesite.com and got all kinds of awesome inbound links but it still took Google a month to give it a rank. - If possible, blog, blog, blog.
By frequently updating a blog, a campaign will continually be adding additional content to Google's index. This content will make it easier for visitors to find the campaign's site through a keyword search. Additionally, a good blog will motivate supporters to be more active and possibly blog about the candidate themselves generating links to the campaign site. - At a minimum have a news section.
If blogging isn't possible for the campaign, at least have a recent news section that is frequently updated. The more often a site is updated the better it will perform for search engines. - Candidate and State/Race in title.
The keywords that you use in the titlebar of your site as well as main headings will be the keywords that search engines most associate the site with. Be sure to use the candidate's name as well as information about the race in these areas to perform best for those crucial keywords. Your Content Management Software should give you control over at least your title tags – if it doesn't, make sure the developers make it the default for each page to contain the candidate's name and district. - Get social.
If you're campaign website is innovative you will get noticed. Take advantage of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter at a minimum. These venues can be a great way to drive traffic to your site and motivate supporters. If you create especially creative content you can even capture the attention of social news sites and drive massive donations. This was done in the last cycle by a candidate running for a Kansas State House seat.
There's nothing worse than having your name Googled and bad press showing up at the top of the rankings above your actual campaign website. This mishap is completely avoidable by putting forth a little extra effort and making sure that your site is optimized for Search Engines. A golden rule of campaigns is to always be in control of your own image – a SEO strategy allows you to shape the first impression that voters get of you when doing their due diligence.
- Start your website early.
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Congratulations to All of Our Candidates
As a campaign website designers, we had our eyes glued to the TV last night, monitoring elections in numerous states where we had candidates. Overall, it was a good night for our team, winning 12 out of 17 races that we were involved in, which is over a 70% win rate. The wins ranged from Congressional down to local judges; we think each of our candidates did an exceptional job in their races and we were honored to be involved in each of these races.
One accomplishment that pops out is that we won in every levy or ballot issue that we were involved in. We had ballot issue websites in Arizona, Florida, and Ohio, winning a total of 6. These victories pop out to me, because I think frequently ballot and levy issues overlook the importance of having a strong web presence. However, I think it can really make the difference when educating people on what can sometimes be very complex ballot language and mobilizing supporters from across the state. Vote Yes for Polk County and the hometax Amendment in Arizona are two campaigns that really embraced the web as a medium to educate and mobilize voters from around their state.
One race that didn't turned out as we hoped, but I still think deserves praise is Larry Joe Doherty's campaign in Texas. LJD ran in a district that no Democrat was ever supposed to be competitive in, and he was able to make the race extremely close, losing 52-48 (UPDATE: LJD Actually ended up losing 54-43 after all votes were counted. Thanks to Bob for the clarification). The campaign embraced the website by putting a priority on having us design a robust and attractive campaign website (as verified by www.votethesite.com's results). They leveraged email marketing techniques, pushing people to their site, raising tens of thousands of dollars online, and signing up hundreds of volunteers. While the race didn't end up in the W column, we want to commend the campaign for doing an amazing job and catching the attention of politicos from across the country.
We're thankful that we were able to work with such a great bunch of candidates and wish the victors all the success in their new positions.
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Be Sure to Go Vote
Nov 4, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Politics | Comments (0)Just a friendly reminder from our team here to make sure you go out and vote today. We pride ourselves on being pretty big political dorks and already have plans to have an office election party tonight and watch the returns come in together. Even if you're not too much of a politico - it's important to get out there and vote so your voice is heard. Our office is one block away from a polling place and our parking lot was jammed full this morning of people walking down there to cast a ballot.
We'll step down from our soapbox now. Happy Election Day!
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Why a Microsite Can Help Market Your Company
Oct 29, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Microsite, New Media Campaigns, Politics, VoteTheSite, Web Marketing | Comments (2)My last post was about how to successfully market a microsite for your company, and it outlined the current steps we're taking to market our recent microsite votethesite.com. However, I realized today that in that article, I didn't put forth the basic tenets of why a microsite can be a very good choice for many businesses.
I think the general philosophy behind a microsite is one that Jason Fried articulated in his keynote at Northwestern (if anyone has the video, leave a comment):"Out teach, out share, and out contribute"
Fried was describing how the marketing of celebrity chefs demonstrated to market online, and I think that quotation is nearly identical the goals of launching a microsite.
Perhaps the biggest reason to build a microsite is to drive traffic to your organization's main site. Due to the fact that you're out contributing to your space, people will be driven to your site. It's nearly impossible to make a corporate site go "viral" and quickly spread around to thousands of people - however, an interesting microsite can easily take off and start referring traffic to your main organization's site. In addition to the upfront traffic from initially marketing your microsite, there will also be a longtail, as different blogs continue to pick up the site down the line and it continues to rank on Google for keywords.
One great example of a long tail generated by a microsite is Website Grader. This microsite was created by an internet marketing and SEO company named HubSpot. It started off as a fun experiment and microsite for their team and has resulted in thousands of sites linking to the tool, references from major blogs, and more than 400,000 URLs being graded. The microsite captures people looking for a free website evaluation and then drives a portion of that traffic to HubSpot as; almost all of these visitors are part of the company's main target.
Another great reason for a microsite is to establish your firm as an innovator in the space. This would be considered out teaching. By creating a forward-thinking microsite that has great content and addresses an important topic, people will begin to look to you as a thought leader and innovator in your space. This was certainly one of the motivations behind votethesite.com; our firm has always done a great job of developing political websites, but the microsite helps establish us as a thinker in the space that is exploring how online campaigning is affecting real elections. By taking the time and putting in the effort to build an innovative microsite, people will realize that you're a leader in the space and a company worth following.
A microsite also allows you to create powerful spinoff content, whether it is blog posts, free reports, white papers, or others. Giving this content away would be classified as out sharing. Our microsite wasn't just a one-off solution, we've used it to generate several good blog posts (one of which drove nearly a thousand visitors to our site today), and it will also allow us to repurpose the data for reports and white papers. A microsite gives you an ideal opportunity to generate valuable data and content that you can continually use for your company's advantage.
These are a few really compelling reasons to build a microsite. It is certainly a time investment, but is well worth it when you think of the longtail and the ability to create spinoff content. However, be sure not to half-ass it; if you're going to build one, really throw yourself behind marketing it and getting value out of it. Have you had success with a microsite? If so, leave a comment and let us know your story and why you decided to build it. -
Six Hours In: Launching a Niche Microsite
Oct 29, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Blogging, New Media Campaigns, Politics, VoteTheSite, Web Marketing | Comments (4)Earlier this evening, we launched a microsite at www.votethesite.com to allow people to vote for their favorite political websites. In just six hours, the site has already recorded 3,000 votes, received dozens of comments, and been viewed by hundreds of visitors from across the world. This site wasn't just launched with an "if you build it, they will come" strategy, but is the result of a multi-stage, concerted effort by our team to publicize and market it.
We launched the site hoping to gain as many votes as possible, and hoping to get picked up by outside political blogs and circulated around the designer community. We knew that we had to crawl before we could walk, so first we needed to get traction with low hanging fruit, such as friends and family. So far, we've followed a pretty regimented roll out; here are the steps we're taking to market our microsite.- Send to friends and family - Everyone on the NMC team sent the project to their friends and family, encouraging them to pass along to others. This was kind of a light launch that let us fix any problems that arose, knowing that the visitors would "love us no matter what" as my grandma told me when her district's screenshot didn't appear correctly. This led to a good first wave of traffic and gave the voting some momentum, encouraging others to vote when they got to the site.
- Distribute to Favorite Social Networks - For this stage, we all posted on the social networks that we spend the most time on, which are still composed of mainly friends, but more distant than in stage 1. We each posted the link as our Facebook status, Tweeted it (follow me for more updates on the site), put up as our Gchat away message, and a couple more. This round was really successful, leading to several re-tweets (including from complete strangers), and getting picked up by a North Carolina newspaper's blog.
- Email out to list of political contacts - As a political web design firm, we have a pretty sizable amount of consultants and campaigns that we work with, who we knew would be interested in the site. We sent them all individual emails, encouraging them to try the site out. This resulted in some good feedback and even a call from a contact that we hadn't spoke to in months who wanted to hire us to work on a new site (nice!). In addition to just our personal political clients, we also sent out an email to each contact from the campaigns featured on the site, letting them know that they had been highlighted and to let us know if they had any feedback or changes for us.
These are the stages we considered part of the initial rollout. The goal here was to gather a decent amount of votes on the site, so each race had multiple votes and to start a little buzz around certain circles that we had launched this site. Considering we launched the site at 5pm, we had modest expectations for the results of these phases, and have exceeded all our expectations so far.
Below is a brief overview of the next steps we're taking to get the site in front of more voters. I'll offer more details on these steps later this week, after we have tangible results on whether they worked or not.- Continue Blogging about the project - Over the next few days, we'll be continually blogging about the project, the programming behind it, and it's coverage. By continuing to create good content about the site, visitors to our main site are likelier to go to it, it can spark interest in different web communities, and will more likely get indexed by Google.
- Submitting to popular news aggregators - This is the stage where we really try and take the views to the next level. We'll be submitting to Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, and some others. If it gains steam, these sites could drive some serious traffic.
- Reaching out to industry decision makers - In this stage, we'll reach out to the big time players, such as Politico, large newspaper blogs, and other relevant sites. Hopefully, they will like the idea, see that it has already been fairly popular, and write up the site. This would result in huge traffic and give the site a lot of credibility. This would be the ultimate win.
Well, there's still 6 days before the election, so we think people have plenty of reason to check out votethesite.com and vote on their favorite political sites. Per #4, we'll be keeping the blog updated as we keep publicizing the site and we'll let you know if we reach our goals and how the traffic is doing. Wish us luck and be sure to go vote - both in our fake election and in the real one!
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NY Times Interactive Debate Viewer
This is just a quick post to point out one of our team's favorite online tools, the NY Times Interactive debate viewer. As a company that has a specialty as campaign website designers, you better believe that we're real dorks when there's a cool nexus of politics and technology. The tool is very cool and useful - the video of the debate neatly plays in a Flash video player, while the margin of the screen is filled with the transcript. The transcript automatically scrolls down as the candidates speak. Also, you can search the transcript for certain phrases and words, so you can instantly hop to a section on the Economy or Afghanistan...pretty cool!
The New York Times is one of those companies that always manages to stay ahead of the curve in terms of technology, as is demonstrated by the intuitive layout, attractive design, and variety of features on their website.We love to give credit where credit is due and just wanted to share this with everyone out and to encourage you to check it out. Flash video has become a mainstay in site designs, especially political website designs, but this feature is still leaps and bounds ahead of where anyone else is. -
Google Presidential Campaign Microsite
Google has launched another tool (www.google.com/2008election/) which allows visitors to learn more about the two Presidential nominees, Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain. With news updates, YouTube videos regarding each candidate and/or his campaign, a plethora of different blog postings, quotes from sources around the country, and also a news-by-state feature, you can spend as much or as little time you want learning about both Senators and their campaigns.
The site also has links to Google's coverage of both national conventions. This simple, but informative page has streaming pictures, links to speeches and other important video images, as well as blogs from authors who attended the conventions.
On Google's official blog, it becomes explicitly clear that Google was at the forefront of both conventions' festivities. They used these occasions to launch different election tools such as the 2008 Elections site (mentioned above), the Google Maps Election Gallery which allows viewers to track where the candidates are spending their dwindling campaign days, and also the Power Readers in Politics which gives links to news sites read by the candidates and other political journalists
At both conventions, Google had booths set up where people could record YouTube video endorsements. These videos were recorded by every-day-convention-goers, party leaders, and even a few celebrities. Google is at the forefront of using the internet as a tool to be used by campaigns at any level. Stay tuned for more ways to use Google to help your online campaign.
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Another Free Google Tool To Compliment Your Online Campaign Strategy
Google released a new tool today to help voters scour through the thousands of hours of political footage on YouTube. The feature is called the Elections Video Search. A user can type in a phrase and then see what candidates across the nation have said about that specific issue.
The screen shot below shows the results returned for a search on "nuclear energy." When you play an individual video, yellow marks on the timeline delineate where the topic is mentioned in the speech. By mousing over one of those marks, you can read the direct quote.
It's a pretty neat technology and will be really helpful to voters wanting to learn where candidates stand on specific issues. Currently, it seems that the tool is aimed mainly at the Presidential candidates - it actually allows you to filter the results to show just McCain or Obama quotes.
This is just another example of a free tool to help support your online campaign strategy. Looking forward to watching how it continues to develop, scale, and be used.
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