Some mistakes shouldn’t be learned from

Posted: June 17, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Advice, Social Media | Tags: , , | Leave a comment »

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonythemisfit/

After weeks of twists and scandals, Rep. Weiner admitted his mistakes and is finally on his way out of Congress and (what is perhaps even more of a relief) out of the news cycle. Yet, an angle that hasn’t grown stale for news media is one of Washington sex scandals over time. They’re  plotted on timelines, recapped and reanalyzed. After all, this certainly isn’t the first digital scandal that involves smartphones, pictures and social media.

Most of the time, I’m all for learning from past mistakes, but this isn’t one of them. If you sit in on a Senate hearing, the first thing you notice won’t be the suits sitting up front or the pretty ceiling. It’ll be the cameras or the multiple tables reserved for journalists or the journalists themselves as they pull out their laptops and chargers, because the space we reserve for journalists in courtrooms and government hearings is our precious connection to an institution so many claim to be disconnected from.

So if an opportunity comes along for politicians (or in many cases, their staff) to field succinct (say, 140 characters) comments and questions from their constituents on the go, then that opportunity should be embraced, not feared. Media like Twitter, when used appropriately, have the potential of being the equivalent of a digital handshake. It’s a person in power reaching out to those who put him/her there.

In the shadow of Rep. Weiner’s insistence that he had been hacked, congressional tweet frequency dropped 27 percent among Republicans and 29 percent among Democrats. It’s disheartening that Members of Congress are scared to leverage such powerful technology simply because some of them don’t know how. Sometimes, it’s better to learn from the best than to learn from someone else’s mistakes.

5 reasons your campaign needs a mobile app

Posted: May 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Social Media | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

One of the biggest mistakes new businesses and campaigns make is assuming that accounts on every social media outlet will guarantee a win or an edge. The truth is that not everyone is cut out for every piece of technology, not to mention that technology changes faster than you can say web savvy. A while back, I wrote about the reasons you don’t need a mobile app. Here are the reasons you might.

5. You have a lot of multimedia to share. Think in terms of very short videos and low resolution photo albums.

4. You provide opportunities for interaction. This could be anything from a quiz on the candidate’s views or background to a game where birds fly at your opponent.

3. You provide more opportunities for interaction. There’s a reason that someone who downloads the app will open the app. Interactive calendars, updates from events and lots of volunteer forms and links.

2. You might include a PayPal button within your app, but it’s an afterthought. The main goal is to provide service to your supporters.

1. You take the virtual oath to update often, where often translates to every day from now until the polls close.

5 ways to win against information overload

Posted: May 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Advice, Social Media | Tags: | Leave a comment »

So there are these great new ways to get your candidate’s name out to the world. But is there such a thing as too many great new ways? Here are five ways to stay on the good side of information overload.

5. Go back to basics. Host a town hall or a reverse town hall (yes, in person) to get a sense of what people are willing to ask you face to face. If you must live tweet the event, make sure it’s under a unified hashtag. Win by posting videos of your candidate’s answers instead of using only text tweets to answer questions.

4. One message per medium at a time. If your Facebook album is all about how much you love small businesses, then push it in your wall too. It’s so easy to fall for overload. Win by making it easier for your audience to focus on what you’re saying by actually focusing what you’re saying.

3. Write real letters. It takes less than a second to scan and delete an impersonal email, but a handwritten note to your supporters won’t be forgotten as easily. Show that there are real people behind the curtains. Win by encouraging them to write back.

2. Take advantage of the overload. Someone equally as overwhelmed as you, but with more access to a healthy sleep schedule has done great things with the overload, so make good use of the tools that are available to curb it. Win with free accounts with Del.icio.us or Diigo that allow you to gather and organize websites and material. Use social bookmarking to compile resources or articles for campaign and volunteer staff.

1. Streamline. Don’t visit seven different news websites. Win with one visit to your Google Reader or designated RSS feed. Don’t log onto four email accounts. Win by forwarding and color coding them within a single account.

Don’t let yourself drown in information overload. Embrace the steps that will help you wade (or at least float) through it.

Tools that will revolutionize your campaign

Posted: April 27, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Advice | Tags: | Leave a comment »

It’s time to move into this century. If you’re not recommending these tools to everyone on your staff already, then you’re behind. Here’s the scoop on the best tools to increase efficiency at little to no cost.

  • PayPal for iPhone- Manage your online account right from your phone. Great for events on the road and perfect for times when you need to show cash on hand, but can’t make it to the bank.
  • YouChoose from YouTube- Everything you ever needed from YouTube in one convenient place designed especially for political campaigns. Mashable’s review of YouChoose states, “supports branding, longer videos, custom thumbnails, and includes Google Moderator and YouTube Insight for video analytics.”
  • Google Campaign Toolkit- This is less impressive, because it just repackages resources from Google Apps. Chances are, you’re already using Google docs and this feature will streamline what you need most often.
  • Dropbox- I very much recommend this one. It’s the simplest way to keep track of updated files and share them with staff or candidate for approval. The only drawback is that your files are stored online, so they’re naturally less secure. (If you’re already using Google docs, then you’ve already overcome that). The biggest advantage is that you’re not carrying around five flashdrives that you may or may not have forgotten in the last bus, coffeeshop or retirement home. You can pick which files you share with whom. They’re conveniently both on your desktop, as well as in an amorphous web cloud. It doesn’t get much better. Oh, and the account is free.

An incumbent advantage

Posted: April 22, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Ethics | Tags: , | Leave a comment »

In the  midst of a tornado of investigations by the Senate Ethics Committee, Sen. Ensign (R-Nev.) has announced that he will resign next month. Originally, he had claimed that he would finish his term, which runs through 2012, and then step down instead of seeking re-election. You may be wondering what this has to do with campaign advertising. So, consider this: One Republican, Dean Heller, and one Democrat, Shelley Berkley, intended to run for Sen. Ensign’s seat in 2012. With his sudden resignation, the governor of Nevada will have to appoint someone to the seat until the 2012 election. The governor of Nevada is Republican.

Rumor has it that Gov. Brian Sandoval will go ahead and appoint Heller to the seat. Come 2012, Berkley will be running against an incumbent Republican instead of vying for a seat left open by the unethical antics of a Republican. Chances are, Berkley is going to need to overhaul her campaign strategy over the next few months.

What do you suggest Berkley should change? What would you do if you were in her place?

Twitter vs. Sen. John Kyl

Posted: April 13, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Social Media | Tags: , , | Leave a comment »

If you’ve been following the budget debate over the past week, you know that one of the issues it’s tangled up over is funding for Planned Parenthood. In fact, if you were paying attention to the news in the hours leading to the potential shutdown this weekend as I was, you probably saw that no news broadcast could make it to the two minute mark without repeating the phrases Planned Parenthood and abortion.

And of course, our representatives chimed in, as well. Arizona Sen. John Kyl said, “If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood. And that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”

False. It’s actually 3 percent. A statement from Kyl’s office later said that his statistic “wasn’t intended to be a factual statement.”

The issue here isn’t that Kyl screwed up. It’s not even that his office added insult to his injury by screwing up again. The issue is that it’s still news, despite the fact that it’s been five days since the incident.

This can be attributed in large part to late night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Stephen Colbert has sent out at least 40 tweets playing on the office’s statement by using the hashtag #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement. According to Politico, these were being retweeted or replied to 40-50 times a minute at times on Tuesday. That’s FOUR days after the statement itself.

The fact is that politicians are no longer allowed to make mistakes, because they will inevitably be haunted by them forever. This isn’t even an election year, but when it does roll around, all a constituent has to do is expend one click for information on John Kyl. Thanks to the Library of Congress, thousands of tweets mocking Kyl will literally go down in history for all to find.

What do you think?
Other than better research skills, what can you do to save face on Twitter in the short and long term against a campaign out to destroy your credibility, such as Stephen Colbert’s #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement campaign against Kyl?

Political ad parodies

Posted: April 2, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Television | Tags: | Leave a comment »

I’ve been wanting to watch Swing Vote for a while now, but it’s too old for Redbox to carry and I’m too wary of my traditional video store. I was looking for trailers online when I came across these campaign ad spoofs. Some are funny, most are boring, but all of them exploit the humdrum of what has become tv advertising. What’s your favorite campaign spoof ad? What do you think of these unreleased clips from Swing Vote?

Citizens United v. FEC

Posted: March 21, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Television | Tags: , | 2 Comments »

What is Citizens United v. FEC ?
It was just over a year ago that the Supreme Court struck down part of the McCain-Feingold Act to allow Citizens United to broadcast their documentary Hillary: The Movie on television in the blackout period before the 2008 Democratic primary.

The New York Times commented on the decision in an editorial, saying “The Supreme Court has handed lobbyists a new weapon. A lobbyist can now tell any elected official: if you vote wrong, my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.”

Your thoughts on spending?
Is there too much money being spent on political advertising? Should there be stricter or more lenient restrictions on how much and how often candidates can spend on? Or would you rather restrict who can give and how much can be given to a candidate?

Learn more about Citizens United v. FEC
Intrigued? The Oyez Project will let you listen to a recording of the oral argument and the opinion in the Citizens United case. Here’s a link where you can follow along with Oyez’s recording on a transcript.

5 reasons why you don’t need a mobile app

Posted: March 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Advice | Tags: | 1 Comment »

Have you heard of mobile technology? Thought so. Your constituents probably have, too. Now, what are you going to do with it? Or better yet, what aren’t you going to do with it?

Scratch your plans for a cool mobile app if…
5. Your neighbor’s son’s cousin is the one who convinced you that every new candidate has to have a mobile app to win.

4. You plan to pay your neighbor’s son’s cousin $50 to build the app and have no intention of ever paying another $50 to make sure it gets updated.

3. Your website is not mobile friendly.

2. The idea behind the app was to generate illegal contributions, 99 cents at a time.

1. You lack content to update it with.

Put a smile on

Posted: March 2, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Advice, Television | Tags: , , | 4 Comments »

One of the best pieces of advice I got from a mentor was to smile at work. She said that in addition to convincing others that you’re nice, a smile increases your approachability exponentially.

Carly Fiorina, California’s Republican nominee for Senate in 2010, published this campaign ad of her Democratic opponent, Sen. Barbara Boxer. The ad bluntly defies the instinct, wisdom and research that viewers’ attention span lasts a few seconds. The fact is, this ad lasts nearly 8 minutes. You don’t even have to work the math to realize that equals hundreds of seconds. One thing is for sure: it did get attention. Ian Chillag breaks down the ad into highlights for his NPR blog, not to mention that the ad made ABC’s list of most intriguing political ads of 2010.

It’s probably because no matter what part of the video you move your cursor to, Sen. Boxer is likened to an an attention-seeking, conceited, constantly expanding blimp headed to California. The further in you begin watching, the more likely the blimp is to explode. If the blimp wasn’t enough to scare you, there’s also the screeching of nails being pulled across a chalkboard. Yet, if you continue watching this ad alone, Fiorina shows up with a smile. She appears happy, kind and action-oriented. Her smile is ever present, even when she is attacking her opponent. Fiorina just simply doesn’t stop smiling. The blimp may be a graphic to scare viewers, but it sure doesn’t look like it scares her.

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