Yesterday I began work full-time as communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party. I take over a job that, in the past, has only been filled during campaign years. The party has no official presence on YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, or any of the other social networks. The good news: its website is created with WordPress, so making it more bloggish won't be difficult.

The other good news is that Tennessee has a pretty robust political blogosphere, and the media here is increasingly paying attention to what's on the blogs and the social networks.

I also have to run the traditional media relations side of things - the press releases, media response, etc., which means setting priorities is very important.

So, my question is, with regards to the online stuff - where should I begin?

I'd love to read TechRepublican readers' suggestions as to where to start, what to do first, etc. Remember, I'm dealing with an almost perfectly blank slate here - using WordPress for the website is the only "given."

Please enter your suggestions here in the comments, don't email them to me, because I think the ensuing conversation might be worthwhile for more people than just me.

David All wrote in the post just before this one about the growing Republican revolution.

It is with great excitement that I announce that I will be joining the headquarters staff of the Tennessee Republican Party in late October to serve as the party's communications director.

Democrats currently control the state House 53-46, while the state Senate is split 16-16-1. It has Republican leadership thanks to one Democrat who voted for a Republican to lead the Senate, offsetting the one independent who was a former "Republican" who regularly voted for the Democratic leadership.

Gaining a majority in the state House and solidifying Republican control of the state Senate is a good goal and one I'm happy that I'll be on the front lines of pursuing. Indeed, the job feels like a calling to me. It also feels like a natural progression for me as more than five years ago I combined my interest in politics and state-level policy issues with my 15 years of experience in journalism to create BillHobbs.com, a blog that went on to impact policy debates at the state level and help usher in a new era of citizen bloggers watchdogging state government and politicians in Tennessee.

Tennessee has one of the most robust political blogospheres of any state in the country, and I look forward to now applying my more two decades of combined experience as a reporter and editor, in media relations and with blogs and the new social media, along with my political knowledge and policy involvement on behalf of that goal.

I start on Oct. 29.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain will be interviewed live on the web today by Hoover Institution fellow Peter Robinson, whose Uncommon Knowledge video interview series I first became aware of recently thanks to his excellent Fred Thompson interview, which has been viewed on Google Video by more than 26,000 people so far.

The McCain interview live webcast from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University begins at 7 p.m. Eastern time (that's 6 p.m. in the Central time zone, 5 p.m. Mountain and 4 p.m. on the Left Coast). It will be available on the home page of the Hoover Institution, www.hoover.org .

UPDATE: Technical problems prevented the John McCain interview from being streamed on the Hoover Institution's website but McCain's appearance, a part of Stanford University's AlwaysOn Summit, is on the AlwaysOn website here.

No snarky jokes about the inability of folks at Stanford, right there in Silicon Valley, to set up a webcast, please. But I will say this: Webcasting something live isn't all that technically challenging, and every Republican campaign should have its own in-house web expertise and an "off the shelf" solution ready and waiting.

If an event is being captured on digital video, all it takes is the right cables to feed it into a laptop and upload it to a streaming company like, say, EonStreams.

Among the "straight talk" from McCain during the 68-minute talk and Q&A sessions with Hoover Institution fellow Peter Robinson and AlwaysOn Network founder Tony Perkins: A promise to reform the Social Security system, which is currently fiscally unsustainable. They also discussed a variety of other issues, including the terrorism and the war in Iraq.

Dumb. Stupid. Idiotic.

There's are the most accurate words to describe any Republican presidential candidate or campaign that skips the September 17 CNN/YouTube debate, in which the candidates are to answer questions submitted as YouTube videos by members of the public. Skipping the debate is a mindless dissing of the web-addicted, politically engaged and mostly younger YouTube democgraphic.

According to the Washington Post a few days ago, though, several GOP candidates are skipping the event.

The WaPo reported that, four days after the Democratic CNN/YouTube debate in Charleston, S.C., more than 400 questions directed at the GOP presidential field have already been uploaded on YouTube. But as of a few days ago only Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) had agreed to participate in the debate, co-hosted by the Republican Party of Florida in St. Petersburg.

"Aside from those two candidates, we haven't heard from anyone else," said Sam Feist of CNN, which is co-sponsoring the debate with the popular video-sharing site.

Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mitt Romney, both with dozens of videos on their YouTube channels, have not signed up. Neither have the rest of the Republican candidates, including Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.), whose "Tancredo Takes" on his YouTube channel draw hundreds of views.

Sources familiar with the Giuliani campaign said the former New York mayor is unlikely to participate. Kevin Madden, Romney's spokesman, said the former Massachusetts governor has seven debate invitations over a span of 11 days in September. "We haven't committed to any of them yet," Madden said.

In an interview Wednesday with the New Hampshire Union Leader, Romney said he's not a fan of the CNN/YouTube format. Referring to the video of a snowman asking the Democratic candidates about global warming, Romney quipped, "I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman."

Well, when you're president, Mitt, you can make that call and refuse inquisitive snowmen. Right now you're just an ex-governor with a nice resume and a hefty personal bank account who is using mostly other people's money to run for president. You're not the president yet. Which means you have to kiss a lot of babies, shake a lot of hands, give a lot of speeches and generally do whatever it takes to convince voters to hire you for the job.

Including answering questions from the YouTube generation, even if they want to ask them with a video featuring a snowman.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican like you, Mitt, called called the YouTube Debate format "the people's debate." It's a good name for it.

As Patrick Ruffini, former eCampaign director at the Republican National Committee who served as online adviser to Giuliani for a few months earlier this year, said in the WaPo article, it would "very problematic" if the Republican candidates declined to participate in the YouTube debate.

Says Ruffini: "What's worse -- questions from the public, many of whom are supporters, or questions from the media, who many Republicans believe are biased? This is YouTube. That's not something they'd want to snub."

He's right.

I can picture now the YouTube grassroots attack ads that will be aimed at GOP candidates who skip the YouTube Debate: A video of the question, followed by an empty podium with the nametag of the no-show, and the sound of crickets chirping.

No candidate I was advising would skip the YouTube debate. Heck, with more than 400 possible questions already online, I'd have my candidate taping answers to each and every one of them right now, a few a day, casually and informally on the campaign trail.

PBS is working with the Media Bloggers Association to credential bloggers to cover the Presidential Forum of Democratic Candidates next week at Howard University in Washington D.C. If you are a blogger and want to cover the event, click here for details. Members and non-members of the Media Bloggers Association are welcome to apply.

PBS' "ALL AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL FORUMS ON PBS" are hosted by Tavis Smiley. THe next one, June 28th, 9:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. ET at Howard University in Washington, DC., will include U.S. Senator Joe Biden, U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd, former U.S. Senator John Edwards, former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel, U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, U.S. Senator Barack Obama and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson.

Here is the PBS press release and the event web site.

The MBA reports that credentialed bloggers will be with the rest of the media in the media center, watching on TV. There will be wi-fi service. After the debate, bloggers will have the same access to the candidates as any other credentialed media.

The MBA plans to have on its site an aggregator of RSS feeds from bloggers covering the event.

If you are a blogger but would prefer to cover a Republican presidential forum, don't despair - PBS will hold a forum for GOP candidates in September and the bloggers who participate in the coverage of the June event will be given priority for the September event.

In addition to writing for TechRepublican, I also write the ElephantBiz.com blog and, of course, my own blog, BillHobbs.com. After noticing that the latter is listed on the blogroll of Fred Thompson's pre-campaign website, among several conservative blogs, I decided to check the blogrolls on the websites of the other 10 Republicans currently running for president, and found something interesting:

Not all of them have blogrolls. Not all of them even have blogs. And some of them have a very different view of how to interact with the world of new media, grassroots media and social media than do others.

That led me to write a series of posts surveying the websites of the 11 candidates for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination to report on how they interface with the "new media," a/k/a/ the "social media" world of blogs, MySpace, YouTube and such.

What I found was a rather wide disparity. Some candidates had the requisite links to official campaign pages on social media platforms like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, while others actively court the independent conservative blogosphere with "Bloggers For ____" lists and other ways to reach out the the grassroots media.

I also found that money, or the lack thereoff, bears little correlation to how a campaign is able to incorporate the social media into its efforts.

I presented the survey in a series of 11 posts at ElephantBiz.com on Monday, giving each a grade.

Below are links to the 11 reviews. Your comments are welcomed.

Sam Brownback Web Review
Jim Gilmore Web Review
Rudy Giuliani Web Review
Duncan Hunter Web Review
Mike Huckabee Web Review
John McCain Web Review
Mitt Romney Web Review
Tom Tancredo Web Review
Fred Thompson Web Review
Tommy Thompson Web Review
Ron Paul Web Review

Yesterday I and other bloggers posted the video of a 15-minute interview of Fred Thompson by Hoover Institution fellow Peter Robinson. Thompson's proto-campaign website, ImWithFred.com, also posted it, on the Fred Files blog, and it soon drew a very interesting and, dare I say it, ear-opening comment from a reader named Mike McConnell. I'm going to reprint it in its entirety because what Mr. McConnell has to say should be heard - and acted upon - by every single Republican running for office at any level of government.

Mr. McConnell addresses the problem of deaf or hearing-impaired voters not being able to hear the audio portion of online video clips - and he offers a possible solution.

He writes:

Fred,

http://www.deafrepublicans.com

Republican candidates and campaign pros, hear what he has to say.

You are not using the Internet to its full potential if you don't include the available technologies to make your website content and online outreach accessible to the hearing-impaired and the visually impaired.

A few weeks ago I did a little research for a client that involved creating a list of Republican, conservative or libertarian-leaning political blogs in Oklahoma. Coming from the robust Tennessee political blogosphere, heavily populated by a number of well-read (and well-written) blogs by people from all over the political spectrum, I thought my task would be to immerse myself in Oklahoma's political blogosphere and find the 10 or 15 best and most-read political blogs in the Sooner state.

Boy, was I wrong.

What I found was a very anemic conservative political blogosphere. I had trouble coming up with a dozen political blogs total, never mind finding 10 to 15 really good blogs with goodly sized readership.