9
Dimensions of Campaigns in the Age of Digital Networks
Alan Rosenblatt
Electoral campaigns still need to win on message and organization, but a digitally networked polity is an increasingly chaotic environment in which campaigns take place. Not only are there more tools and channels to connect candidates to voters, but those tools and channels are available to the voters, not just the campaigns. To make matters more chaotic, in many ways the voters are better at using these new digitally networked tools and channels than campaigns, even better than political parties, the media, and other for-profit and nonprofit organizations.
A few years ago people were asking when the Internet would win a presidential election. Today we recognize that no one can win the presidency without an Internet strategy. Indeed, it no longer makes sense to talk about Internet strategy in isolation. The use of digital network strategy is integral to every part of a campaign, from field organizing to fund-raising, from branding/messaging to press relations, and from registering people to vote to getting people out to vote.
Campaigns always come down to message and organization, regardless of the technology used. But digitally networked technology, especially the Internet and mobile, offers more ways to package and deliver messages, and more ways to connect and organize volunteers, supporters, and voters than ever before. Touching on every aspect of a campaign, digital networks create economies of scale and the ability to overcome time and distance, both representing significant advances in campaign capacity.
What distinguishes network technologies from earlier campaign tools is that voters have many of the same tools at their disposal as campaigns. And with voters being way ahead of campaigns in their use, this increases the democratizing force/potential of the organically emerging grassroots during a campaign. Additionally, organized grassroots actions by advocacy groups are further cluttering the political marketplace.
Consider how the 2008 Obama presidential campaign allowed the formation and growth of an opposition group on its own social network website,
my.BarackObama.com (MyBO); clearly the rules are changing as technology evolves. Indeed, the anti-FISA (Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act) vote group on MyBO swelled quickly to about 25,000 members and continues to apply pressure from within the Obama community, even after inauguration, calling for a reversal of the position he took on the FISA vote when he was in the Senate. And through the campaign, Obama welcomed the dissension on his own web servers, something old-school issue management would never do.
The Dimensions of Digitally Networked Campaigns
Online campaigns can be envisioned in three dimensions (or versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, if you prefer a computer metaphor). At the core, the dimensions are about the strategic flow-direction of communication (
Table 9.1). One-dimensional (1-D) campaigns are about broadcasting a one-way campaign message, with tight language control, to voters. 2-D campaigns are about building a transactional or two-way relationship with voters; getting them to register to vote, for example. And 3-D campaigns unleash the masses, with communication flowing to and from the campaign, as well as in any direction between and among voters. And in reality, 3-D campaigns are 3-plus dimensions because digital networks allow for time shifting and overcome distance obstacles in addition to facilitating omni-directional messaging and organizing.
Table 9.1 Strategic Dimensions of a Digital Network Strategy for Campaigns
Campaigns that effectively tap into the power of the Internet and mobile networks, fully integrating these new dynamics into campaign strategy, will have a decided edge on opponents. Just as online strategies integrate into, rather than replace, offline strategies, these online dimensions also integrate together. Campaigns will have 1-, 2-, and 3-plus-dimensional characteristics.
Voters’ ability to take campaigns into their own hands is the big game changer for politics. Because voters can talk to each other, produce and share their own media content, create local and national countercampaigns (even from within a candidate’s own campaign website), they can take the campaign in directions of their own making. By enabling voters to create mass messages, process large numbers of transactions, and build large social networks, they are able to make impacts on the political process once reserved to well-funded countercampaigns or the occasional mass ground protest.
Two Examples of Voter-Generated Chaos
ParkRidge 47’s Think Different
The 2008 Obama campaign faced two moments of voter-generated chaos early on. The first occurred when an anonymous video producer, ParkRidge47, produced and posted a video “mash-up” commercial for Obama on
YouTube.com.
1 The video took the 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial featuring Big Brother on a video screen while a blue-lit audience of citizens watches mesmerized and superimposed a video of Senator Hillary Clinton giving a speech on Big Brother’s image and her voice replacing his on the soundtrack. Then a runner enters the room wearing an Obama T-shirt and hurls a hammer at the screen, smashing Clinton’s face into a million pieces.
The video made waves through the early Obama campaign, first because it was such a compelling, voter-generated commercial, and second because its creator turned out to be Phillip de Vellis, an employee at the Obama campaign’s Internet consulting firm Blue State Digital. De Vellis created the video at home on a Sunday afternoon because he “wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process.”
2The controversy set off by de Vellis cost him his job. But the impact he made hit home, as he quickly landed a senior position at a top Democratic media firm. But the impact of this video went deeper. True, de Vellis was a professional with high-end video editing software, but the Think Different video could have just as easily been made with a $99 piece of software.
3In the months that followed, the campaign saw many videos pop up on YouTube that captured the attention of the media and the voters. From the scantily clad Obama girl singing her Barack a love song to the more rotund McCain Girls singing out of tune and with gusto, lots of videos helped shape the public perception of the candidates.
4 Indeed, within the Obama campaign, a decision was made to work with volunteers to help them make videos, in addition to the campaign produced clips.
Joe Anthony’s MySpace Page
When Barack Obama was elected senator, Joe Anthony launched a MySpace page in support of the new senator. Anthony made his first foray into political activism after being “blown away” by Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention.
5 Anthony had built his
MySpace.com/barackobama friend list up to about 30,000 by the time Obama announced his candidacy. With the announcement, the number of friends on the MySpace page grew fast, getting more than 160,000 friends in short order. Then a power struggle emerged between Anthony and the campaign over control of the page. The campaign offered Anthony a job in Chicago to come run the group from campaign headquarters. Anthony declined the offer and asked for a buyout instead.
Leaving aside the specifics of the negotiating, in the end the Obama campaign wrestled control of the URL from Anthony by appealing to MySpace directly. But Anthony was allowed to keep his community list for his own MySpace page. In the span of a day, Obama’s MySpace page went from number one among candidates with 160,000 friends to last, with zero.
6 Despite this setback and the controversy around it regarding the takeover of the page, Obama was able to rebuild his friend list and overtake all opponents within a few weeks. As of the writing of this chapter, Obama’s MySpace friends list is still climbing and exceeds a million people.
While neither of these events derailed or guaranteed a win for any campaign, they did create a “must deal with” issue for the campaigns to manage. And while there are always things popping during campaigns that must be dealt with, these examples illustrate a whole new capacity for individual citizens to make a substantial impact on a large audience.
1-D Strategy
Optimists would say these new tools will transform E. E. Schattschneider’s underrepresented masses into an organized (even if in a swarm fashion) political force. Already, the multiplication of online communications channels is creating a voter-driven challenge to campaigns seeking to distribute its message. One-way broadcasting is being supplemented, and at times replaced, by narrowcasting: distributing messages to targeted and microtargeted audiences. While many voters still rely on email, many others are moving to other channels like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, SMS text messaging, or instant messenger for their primary mode of online communication. Others are compartmentalizing their channels, preferring personal communication through some channels, work communication through others, consumer and political through others.
Given this proliferation of online channels to reach people, campaigns are already finding new challenges when using network technology to deliver their message. In the early days of online campaigns (before 2000), setting up a website and building a modest email list was the extent of online voter outreach. Websites were seen as informational storefronts and email lists were focused on sending out campaign messages. Indeed, an email list of 5,000 supporters in a congressional district is still incredibly valuable, especially for organizing volunteers. And a candidate’s website is still an essential front office. But disseminating a message can no longer rely on centralized, limited channels if a campaign wants to reach the majority of voters. Respecting communication channel preferences is essential for campaigns seeking to develop deeper relationships with voters.
It is important to note that traffic volume is not the only, or even a necessary, metric of success for a campaign website. In some cases, it is less about how many people visit a campaign website and more about who visits the site. In 1998, for example, NetPolitics Group created a campaign website called MissedVotes.org for a Democrat running for an open seat in Ohio. The site simply provided a list of links to the Ohio state legislature’s online roll call record to document the many votes the Republican candidate missed while serving in the statehouse. The site had very few visitors, perhaps only dozens. But among those few were most of the reporters covering the race. Whenever the Democratic candidate claimed the Republican candidate missed a particular vote, the reporters went to the site to verify it before writing up their stories. The website was a primary factor in shaping the earned media for the campaign despite its small immediate audience. The lesson here is that it is always important to know who your audience is and deliver content that matters to them.
The optimal 1-D campaign strategy uses all available channels, each targeted to the appropriate audience, to get the message out. In the early days of the Internet, there were relatively few channels and only a couple dominant ones: websites and email. Today there are too many channels to track. In addition to websites and email, people also communicate via social network sites like
Facebook.com and
MySpace.com; mobile/Internet networks like
Twitter.com; social media sites like You
Tube.com,
Flickr.com,
Digg.com, and
Eventful.com; and via instant messenger online and SMS text messaging over mobile phones. And it is likely that there will be new channels in time, just as some of these existing channels may die off.
Increasingly, the challenge is to rise above the noise to deliver campaign messages to voters in a respectful way, a way that will be received positively. Voters have preferences for how they wish to interact with campaigns. The receivers increasingly are choosing the channel for getting their messages, whether they are political or personal. If campaigns do not deliver to the right channel for each voter, that message may never be seen or, worse, may be seen as a sign of disrespect because the campaign is not sending it through the preferred channel.
2-D Strategy
An essential element of the online experience is the ability to couple transactional tools to the information being disseminated. Networked communication technology allows us to integrate action tools, like emailing Congress, donating money, registering to vote, or writing letters to editors, not to mention facilitating meaningful feedback, into any piece of content delivered to voters.
Delivering opportunities for online citizens to take action is not only desirable and necessary but is expected by the people. The people, to a large extent, are more adept at using the Internet and mobile networks than campaigns, more even than all public and private institutions. That creates great expectations for campaigns and a sophisticated level of scrutiny. This is especially true now that the Internet has overtaken television as the primary source of political news for eighteen-to twenty-nine-year-olds and of approximately equal use for thirty- to forty-nine-year-olds.
7There are several technology vendors specializing in building campaign websites, complete with the 2-D action capabilities. Among them are Blue State Digital, which built President Obama’s campaign website; Democracy in Action, which built dozens of progressive congressional candidate websites; PICnet, which specializes in open source Joomla websites; Complete Campaigns; and many more.
These platforms have much in common. All can be used to build a basic candidate website with essential features: email list sign-up, donation processing, and content pages that present essential candidate- and issue-related information. The best of these ensure that the ability to join the campaign email list, volunteer, or donate money are present on every page of the website.
How campaigns use these websites is a set of strategic decisions that can vary across campaigns. Each page on the site presents information that should encourage voters to want to support the candidate, during the campaign and at the voting polls.
The challenge of every campaign is to present the right combination of information about the candidate that encourages voters to look to the campaign website early and often to stay informed. Where in the pre-Internet days campaigns steered totally clear of giving any coverage to what the other candidate is saying, partly to avoid giving the opponent validation and partly because the bandwidth to deliver information to voters was limited (limited inches of news column space, limited pages of pamphlets and postcards, etc.), in the Internet age, scarce bandwidth is no longer a factor.
With increased bandwidth for presenting more thorough information, campaigns can now present their opponents’ views fairly, but framed with their own context and response. The 2-D aspect of the Internet creates a new pressure to present both sides of arguments. In this case the dynamic is twisted a bit. If a campaign does not show both sides, voters can take action by opening up a search engine, like Google or Yahoo, and find the opponent’s website. Once voters leave one candidate’s site for another, the ability for the first candidate to frame the information is lost. By preempting, or delaying this action by giving information about an opponent on a campaign website helps to ensure that voters process the opponent’s campaign message with the first campaign’s context.
The key to the second dimension of online campaign strategy is to make sure all campaign messages and content are in some way actionable and that the action is one click away.
3-D Strategy
The greatest source of chaos in the political environment is the enhanced ability granted by the Internet for people to connect with each other in any combination, across time constraints, geographic boundaries, and with the same array of tools available to campaigns. The potential for a Joe Anthony, a Phil de Vellis, or a Joe da Plumber to steal attention from the campaign is ever present. And while many claim to be able to create viral campaigns, the truth is we have little idea what causes one idea to go viral and another to fizzle. The same network strategy employed by two different candidates cannot yield the same result. And like chaos models, changing the starting point of a campaign strategy will change its results.
The 3-D nature of digital networks gives an individual the ability to set off movements, even if small, through the polity. Consider the efforts of Eli Pariser and David Pickering, two college students whose email petition opposing a military response to 9/11 spread like wildfire as it gathered 500,000 signatures in less than one month.
8 Their success helped supercharge
MoveOn.org when Pariser took his list and became its executive director. There are many more stories of students launching new advocacy groups from their dorm rooms and of a few friends getting together to start a group online that becomes a prominent voice in a campaign.
9In a world where the power of the people is enabled by digital and mobile networks, campaigns have to adjust how they view their supporters. Rather than viewing them as message receptacles and followers to organize, campaigns have to treat supporters as strategic partners.
Regardless of whether or not campaigns treat followers as strategic partners, many of them will implement some strategy to organize their own personal networks. It is important to remember that the 2004 Howard Dean campaign discovered 7,500 voters already organized into monthly meet-ups across the country on
MeetUp.com. And like the Dean campaign, all campaigns must monitor these types of developments and develop a strategy for incorporating them into the campaign plan—whether or not they become a formal part of the campaign. And as the 2008 Obama campaign showed, enabling new individual efforts to emerge and flourish is now a permanent part of the campaign playbook.
The Tools of the Trade
Keeping up with the networking tools available to campaigns is a daunting task, to say the least. And the odds of a new one emerging by the time this chapter is published is high. That said, it remains helpful to understand the types of software available and some examples of each.
Grassroots Organizing Tools
The core of any campaign is organizing the voters, especially the most engaged and supportive of them. Many of the online tools available to political campaigns are variations of tool suites developed for the advocacy community in the mid-1990s.
One of the key features of grassroots organizing tools is the ability to match people to their political jurisdiction (state, district, and precinct) by their zip code and/or address. This allows campaigns to collect basic contact information from voters, information relatively easy to collect, and build a contact list that can be microtargeted based on the political culture and configuration of each precinct.
Once voters are matched to their precinct, the campaign can send email alerts with links to take action to anyone on the list. With zip code matching it is possible to automate the process of sending contextualized messages to every voter; messages that refer to specific impacts of an issue or a policy to the area where the recipient lives. This increases the stickiness and persuasiveness of the campaign message. And it increases the likelihood that people will do what the emails asks them to do—give money, volunteer, register to vote, and so on.
The products in this category of software are available from Democracy in Action, Blue State Digital, Capitol Advantage, Convio, Aristotle, Vocus, NGP, SoftEdge, and Grassroots Enterprise. These tools have overlapping functions and serve a majority of the campaign market.
Constituent Relations Management
As campaigns build larger lists of supporters and constituents, they must be able to sort them based on a variety of factors, including demographics, issue opinions, level of influence, and behavior interacting with the campaign. But beyond being able to sort and target communications, it is crucial that campaigns develop meaningful relationships with voters, in terms of providing each side with value and respect.
A constituent relations management system (CRM) allows campaigns to track and cross-reference information about supporters, integrating everything from contact information to attendance at events, to donations, to what emails people open and what web pages they visit. With this information, some aspects of the campaign/constituent relationship can be automated, such as delivering newsletters and web pages that reflect the interests of each person. The manual aspects of the relationship are enhanced, allowing for more meaningful personal communications, such as fund-raising phone calls.
While there are many small open source and proprietary CRM software platforms, the industry leader is Salesforce. Coupled with email management systems like Eloqua, another industry leader, the email relationship and the website relationship can be fully integrated with the backend Salesforce database. Likewise, fund-raising systems also integrate in the back end with the CRM.
Content Management
Campaign websites must be able to evolve over the course of a campaign. The flow of content onto and off of the site can be difficult to manage. Thankfully, content management systems allow campaigns to enter content into a database that publishes the content to the website. CMSs are especially helpful when individual pieces of content are being published to multiple web pages and when many people are responsible for updating the site. It also makes archiving website content easy.
Blue State Digital, Convio, and Kintera are among the proprietary CMSs. Drupal and Joomla are among the open source CMSs.
Email
The partner to CRM is the blast email service. Rather than try to use an end user email client, like Microsoft Outlook or a web email service like
Gmail.com, campaigns must use an email service that is designed for mass emails. The email services include keeping your email blasts from being black-listed as spam. If you try to use your office email server to send mass messages, you may quickly find that you are unable to send email to anyone.
Online services like Constant Contact are stand alone and inexpensive options. Many CMS and CRM systems have email blasts built into their service. And there are many email marketing vendors that can provide the email services, as well as strategic advice.
But as with all use of technology, it is about delivering the right message over the right channel. From a strategic perspective, the disintermediation of communication channels has shifted control over the distribution channel from the producer of the message to the consumer of the message. A new approach to email blasting systems, as originally conceived and developed by a company called OwlBee, is to deconstruct email messages into component parts, separating text from image and long versions of text from shortened versions. Then, depending on how subscribers receive the messages, the system assembles the right package for the message—rich media email, text-only email, short text message, and so on.
Social Networking
Social networking affected electoral campaigns for the first time in 2004 when
MeetUp.com swept Governor Howard Dean into the front-runner before the first caucus and primary. MeetUp let people register online to form offline groups that met monthly. By 2006, social networks had evolved to Facebook and MySpace, wildly popular online communities that allow people to create robust personal networks and share all forms of media within it. Indeed, these networks continued to provide offline organizing tools, like MeetUp, but so much more could be done online with them that the impact of the offline activities was boosted considerably, as evidenced by Obama’s ability to turn out more than 100,000 volunteers for the Texas primaries and caucuses.
10With over 175 million Americans on Facebook, more on MySpace, and hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans of social networks like
BlackPlanet.com (African American),
MiGente.com (Hispanic Americans), and
Eons.com (seniors), organizing online communities is as important as organizing individual states.
Despite popular perceptions, these communities are not just for kids. At the time of this writing, growth of adult and senior members of Facebook had doubled in recent months, with millions in each age-group having profiles. Facebook now boasts over 11 million members age 25-34, nearly 7 million age 35-54, and nearly a million over 55. And growth is fastest, by far, for the two oldest age-groups.
11To the extent that these social networks are where the voters are and to the extent voters prefer to be contacted via them, campaigns must have a strategy for organizing and distributing its message on them.
Social Media
The other side of the social web is social media. Sites like YouTube, Digg, Flickr, and Eventful let people share with the world all types of media they create or find interesting.
YouTube, Google Video, and other sites let people share videos. Given the experiences of Virginia senator George Allen and Montana senator Conrad Burns, getting caught on tape in an embarrassing moment can destroy a campaign, even if the mainstream media ignore the story. George Allen’s famous “macacca” video and Conrad Burns falling asleep at an agriculture committee hearing set to music helped derail both incumbents.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, user-generated videos like Obama Girl and 1984/Think Different captured the news cycle and drew popular attention to the Obama campaign. While hardly a decisive factor in his win, these videos took to life in a way that could never have happened before the Internet.
If the media to be shared are photos, then Flickr and Facebook are the tools. Eventful is a popular tool for networked influentials to promote events they are attending. And for all things media, sites like Digg, Reddit, and C2NN allow campaigns and people to promote media content they find online and take advantage of peer reactions to vote the content up or down in the rankings presented on those websites.
By posting content to these sites and then mobilizing supporters to view the content and vote it up, campaigns can better expose positive media coverage of the candidate (or negative coverage of opponents). And, of course, any voter can use these tools to the same effect.
Blogs
The rise of blogs in general and political blogs in particular has dramati cally altered the media landscape. As much as any other development online, blogs represent the epitome of the 3-D characteristics of the web. Bloggers have large audiences of devoted readers, engage in crossblog communication, and are capable of driving the political narrative.
As a result, campaign strategy must adapt. The agenda-setting power of the blogs, A-list blogs and others, means campaigns must implement a comprehensive strategy for monitoring, responding to, and engaging bloggers.
12Monitoring blogs using specialized search engines like Technorati .com and Google’s blog search (
blogsearch.google.com) gives campaigns the ability to identify emerging issues.
Technorati.com also provides a measure of a blog’s authority (or influence) by indicating how many other websites link to that blog. Other sites like
Alexa.com and
Compete.com measure the size of a website’s audience. Together, these tools allow campaigns to identify which bloggers will have the biggest impact on the race.
Once a campaign identifies blog posts and bloggers that need to be engaged, there are three basic ways to do so. First, a campaign can post comments on the blog in response to an article. It is important that these comments be authentic. If the commenter is a campaign representative, that should be disclosed, to avoid backlash for misrepresentation. If the commenters are volunteers mobilized to post responses by the campaign, those comments should be in the commenters’ own words. Otherwise, the appearance of “canned” comments would create backlash from the bloggers.
Second, a campaign can reach out directly to bloggers to ask them to cover a story from the candidate’s perspective. When doing this, it is important to remember that bloggers are publishers, editors, and reporters all rolled into one. Because they answer to no one, they must be treated with extra care. Before making contact, preferably one-on-one contact, be sure that the campaign representative is familiar with the blogger’s writing. Ensuring a positive, respectful exchange with bloggers is essential to success.
Finally, while there is no
quid pro quo, if a campaign is advertising on a blog, it is likely that the interactions on particular stories will go more smoothly. Advertising on blogs can be placed using a variety of services. Many blogs use
Blogads.com to serve their ads. Others use the Common Sense Media ad network (
csmads.com). And still others use Google ads.
Mobile
Perhaps the most exciting tools available to campaigns are the least understood. Mobile devices, especially smart phones, are delivering a combination of voice, text, and Internet communication channels to individuals on the go. While much attention has been focused on the digital divide between rich and poor on the Internet, minority populations that are severely underrepresented on the Internet are overrepresented on mobile networks. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 71 percent of whites have a mobile phone, compared to 74 percent of African Americans and 84 percent of English-speaking Hispanics. Of those owning a mobile device, whites are 73 percent likely to send or receive data on them, while African Americans are 79 percent likely and English-speaking Hispanics are 90 percent likely.
13And while early use of basic SMS text messaging over cell phones has been effective at fund-raising, volunteer coordination, demonstration mobilization, and message distribution, perhaps the most powerful applications are those that integrate the Internet with mobile networks. The leading application in this space is Twitter.
Twitter is essentially a microblogging platform that delivers posts via the web and SMS text messaging. Posts are limited to 140 characters, thus developing skills for conveying effective messaging in short bursts, often compared to the art of writing haikus, is the key to success.
While the service is still young and difficult to grasp by many, Twitter offers a few basic features that have enormous flexibility for organizing and driving public discourse. The key to using Twitter rests with its three builts-in methods for creating hyperlinks. The first, and most basic, is the ability to distribute live web links.
Second is the ability to use the “@TwitterName” convention to send a public message to anyone on Twitter. This form of hyperlink not only identifies the conversation partner but also provides a direct link for any reader to explore the posts from that person and allows Twitter users to aggregate and read posts directed at them.
The third type of hyperlink, the hashtag, is perhaps the most powerful. By including in any post “#topicX,” users are able to associate their comments to public conversation. Each conversation, by using a common hashtag, effectively creates a group, or community, on Twitter. Each hashtag becomes a hyperlink to search for all posts employing the tag (via
http://search.twitter.com).
Developing conventions for the meaning of these hashtags can create powerful organizing effects. For example, an emerging convention is to pair the #p2 and the #digg hashtags with a URL (web address) for an article posted to
Digg.com, the social media sharing site. The purpose of this presentation is to alert the progressive community on Twitter (#p2, or possibly other progressive groups like #topprog or conservative groups like #tcot) that people should visit the link, read the article, and then Digg it (give it a “thumbs up” vote). By getting many people to Digg articles this way, those articles can be catapulted up to the top of Digg’s most popular articles. This gets the article featured on
Digg.com’s home page and exposes it to an audience of millions.
Other examples of how mobile networks have been used to shape the outcome of elections include the flash mob demonstration of 900,000 people the day before the incumbent Spanish government lost the election following the al Qaeda train bombing and the use of an audio recording of the president of the Philippines trying to fix the election with the head of the elections commission as a ringtone that spread across the country like wildfire.
With so many people keeping their mobile phones within arm’s reach at all times, the ability to connect voters, supporters, and volunteers via mobile networks has become an important part of the campaign landscape. But, unlike advertising on other media, there are concerns that overusing mobile messaging could conceivably turn off the audience and create a political backlash.
Again, the key here is to be respectful of the audience. Since communication channels are becoming disintermediated, the blunt use of them, as we have used broadcast channels, is less effective.
Collaboration
In
The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki explores the power of crowd sourcing, of farming out labor to the masses.
14 As we know from generations of survey research and the central limits theorem, on average, the views of the aggregate are more likely to be accurate than an individual or small sample. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann reported in
The Spiral of Silence that aggregating who people think will win an upcoming election is a better predictor, especially months out from Election Day, than asking them how they plan to vote.
15Tapping into this collective brain trust is made much easier with digital networking technology. Collaboration tools like wikis, platforms that allow large groups of people to collaborate editing a single document, make managing the process of integrating the ideas of thousands of contributors easy. And new variations of wikis that incorporate Digglike voting tools make the process even more effective.
For campaigns looking to be responsive to constituents as a delegate, in contrast to a trustee relationship, these collaboration tools help make that process manageable. For example, in 2006, when faced with a popular, well-funded incumbent opponent for the Senate, Utah Democratic candidate Pete Ashdown employed such a wiki in his bid to defeat Senator Orrin Hatch. Ashdown gave voters the ability to shape the details of his policy platform with a policy wiki on his campaign website. Such a tactic goes a long way toward deepening relations with voters.
Fund-raising
While incorporating tools into campaign websites to collect donations is a pretty simple concept, the rise of peer-to-peer fund-raising takes the process to a new level. Websites like
ActBlue.com, which is set up for Democratic candidates only, allow anyone to create a fund-raising page for any registered candidate. Once the candidate or candidates are selected, a URL is generated that can be distributed to personal networks to ask them to contribute funds.
Fund-raising pages can be set up for slates of candidates, even candidates in other districts. Many campaigns choose to use this platform instead of paying for their own.
ActBlue.com takes care of forwarding the donations to the candidate, checks to ensure donors have not exceeded their FEC limits, and provides reporting to the campaigns.
Volunteer Management
In addition to using the various social networks, social media sites, and collaboration tools to organize volunteers, there is software specifically designed to organize volunteers for canvassing and virtual phone-banking. These tools allow campaigns to upload contact databases with addresses and phone numbers. The system then parses out in small batches address and phone lists for either canvassing or phone-banking. Canvassing lists are distributed with walking maps and phone lists are coupled with web forms to report the results of each call.
Conclusion
The range of digital networking tools and strategies for using them will continue to make a big impact on electoral campaigns. That these tools are in the hands of voters as well as campaigns creates a more chaotic environment for spreading campaign messages than in the past. They also provide new solutions to getting the message out and organizing voters and volunteers. To be effective, campaigns must now develop strategies that consider all of the strategic dimensions created by these new technologies. While message and organization remain paramount, digitally networked technology has altered the playing field, not just in scope and scale but in more fundamental ways.
Notes
1 ParkRidge47 is the pseudonym for media political consultant Phillip de Vellis. His YouTube channel, where the Think Different video can be viewed, is
www.youtube.com/user/ParkRidge47. Park Ridge, Illinois, is Hillary Rodham Clinton’s hometown and 1947 is the year of her birth.
3 Justin Hamilton, who is not a professional videographer, “deconstructed” the Think Different video and recreated it with all but one small effect (keeping Clinton’s face perfectly framed in the video screen as the camera angle changed) using FinalCut Basic, a $99 software.
9 Other examples include a crew of Swarthmore College students that launched the Genocide Intervention Network and the group of
My.BarackObama.com members forming a group of 25,000 MyBO members opposing the candidate’s vote on the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
12 Kevin Wallsten, “Agenda Setting and the Blogosphere: An Analysis of the Relationship Between Mainstream Media and Political Blogs,”
Review of Policy Research 24, no. 6 (2007): 567-587.
14 James Surowiecki,
The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Doubleday, 2004).
15 Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann,
The Spiral of Silence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
