grace

… filling in the negative space with positively everything

How *NOT* To Win An Online Campaign : PT II

In How *NOT* To Win An Online Campaign : Part I, I cautioned any political candidate (or business or nonprofit organization) who wants to wage a successful online/social media campaign to heed the following advice:

  1. Do NOT Start Late.
  2. Do NOT Confuse a Presence with a Strategy.
  3. Do NOT Play Dr. Frankenstein.

I was going to write about specific tools for “Part II,” but decided that this next point is so critical and essential to a winning online campaign that it deserved a post devoted entirely to it:

4.   Get Your Team to “Get It.”

Not long ago, I wrote an article for AYN Brand on How to Get Your Group on Board with Social Media. It was a direct response to feedback from attendees of my social media and online marketing workshops. While the attendees themselves were enthusiastic about “joining the conversation” online, one of the biggest challenges many faced was a fear of new media among their organizations’ board members and senior executives. The people who ultimately decided when and where financial and human resources should be allocated did not understand the reach and use of online tools, so they decided to ignore developing anything beyond a basic website. Rather than learn how online networking could help their organization, those stakeholders chose to remain out-of-touch and dismissed social media as “just for kids.”

It’s NOT. As I wrote, successful campaigns like President Obama’s prove:

How *NOT* To Win An Online Campaign : PT I

Since the 2009 Houston mayoral election, it seems everyone has a theory on “why Locke lost.” It would be nice if some (any?) of those theories were informed by what actually happened at Locke headquarters during the period that led to the December run-off. (Before the run-off, everyone seemed astounded that a first-time candidate with little-to-no name recognition or campaign experience was able to beat out sitting City Council Member Peter Brown, who outspent both Parker and Locke throughout the race and achieved the greatest visibility of all the candidates on television.)

I have my own ideas of why Parker won. If you want to know what they are, send me a tweet and I’ll tell you over coffee some time. But for the benefit of all the political candidates running for office this year – including Bill White for Texas Governor and Gordon Quan for Harris County Judge – I’d like to share what I learned from the campaign trail.

In 2010, White and Quan will be running against incumbents for their respective offices. In the 2009 mayoral race, while it was open due to term-limited White vacating, Parker and Brown could be considered the “incumbents” Locke faced, as they were both seasoned politicians who had developed strong support bases over years (and even over a decade for Parker) of campaigning. Similarly, it will be an uphill battle for the “new” candidates to build online support that can effectively compete with their opponents’.

NOV 4 : VOTE & Twitter Your Voter Report!

On November 4th 2008, millions of Americans will go to over 200,000 distinct voting locations and using different systems and machinery to vote.  Some voters will have a terrific experiences, and others will experience the same problems we have been hearing about for years – long lines, broken machines, inaccurate voting rolls, and others will experience problems that we haven’t heard about before. That’s why a new citizen-driven election monitoring system called Twitter Vote Report (www.twittervotereport.com) was just launched. Using either Twitter.com, iPhone, direct SMS, or our telephone hotlines, voters will have a new way to share their experiences with one another and ensure that the media and watchdog groups are aware of any problems.

And YOU can help!  Be a citizen journalist!  Submit a report about conditions at your polling place.

Four ways to submit reports to Vote Report:

  • Twitter: include #votereport and other tags to describe the scene on the ground
  • SMS: Send text messages to 66937 (MOZES) starting with the keyword #votereport plus other hash tags
  • iPhone: We have a Twitter Vote Report iPhone app in the App store!
  • Phone: Call our automated system at 567-258-VOTE (8683) to report about conditions, using any touch-tone phone

And if you would like to talk to a human to report bad conditions you’ve observed, please call our partner 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

Share your voter experience via Twitter!

Share your voter experience via Twitter!

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