Like many new media folk I suffer from "info imperatance" - the insatiable desire for information and the deep anxiety that I may have missed something important. Occasionally, I will get off of my high speed rocket to smell the roses and gaze upon the Web 2.0 scene.

We bring you once more a look at the latest sites and companies to grace the new media arena.

• Website Analytics - Google analytics not doing it for you? Why not try Woopra. One key difference... it provides live tracking of website statistics. No need to wait hours to see who is on your website. Also, set up your stats to notify you of traffic spikes and more...
• Activism - Need some action? No, not that type of action. The Point is a new website where you commit to do something in exchange for something else. It can also be used as a force for change. For example, if my company doesn't offer me a dental plan I could use The Point to have 5,000 people call the HR department. A local furniture company can agree to buy a table for a school if the PTA raises $1500. I think you get the idea. I'm not sure what to make of it... but it could prove fun for a disgruntled blogger out there.
• Searching Enhancements - Do you like Cover Flow? You know, the nifty iTunes function that lets you flip through your album covers? SearchMe.com allows you to do just that. Right now its in private beta but it could prove to be a winner... if it can overcome a very real infringement on some very proprietary Apple concept. Can you say lawsuit?
• Content - Lists and more lists. I've profiled Listphile before, but this new new comer has a great concept. A top 11 list!? I guess it stands out. But what does stand out is the cool interface for ranking these lists of everything. Check it out: Onzilist.com
• UI - How much time have you spent trying to grab some guy's cool JavaScript for a mouseover menu? Fret no more... head on over to IzzyMenu and create your own fine looking drop-downs. Believe me, I've spent countless hours scouring the net for the best menu creator and this is it!
• New Tech - I remember one of my great aha moments about the Internet came in 1997 when I downloaded an add-on to my email application that read my emails aloud (much to my wife's chagrin). This next service wants to do the same with EVERYTHING text. Are you anxious to get on the road but just can't wait to devour the latest Mark Steyn column? Try ReadtheWords.com... better yet... listen to this post below!
• Got an iPhone? Got Twitter? Good. Now get Hahlo!
  
• Efficiency - I recall a TV ad about a decade ago where a virtual doggie fetches tickets for his hip owner and then pays the bills with a wag of the tail. While this virtual pet is still on the horizon there's a small incarnation of this reality over at Swotti, a website dedicated to combining reviews on everything from dog leashes to digital cameras. Check it out.
• Images - Ever worry about some Joe (not Mansour) sending you a cease and desist order when you use his image on your website? Instead of blowing half of your paycheck at iStockPhoto (or all of your paycheck at Getty Images) hop on over to PicApp to embed free images and even editorials on your webiste. I used it for the image above.
• Email Marketing - Not satisfied with iContact or ConstantContact? Try Campaign Monitor, which allows you to skip all of the pithy and annoying templates and only pay for the service when you use it. At $5 and 1 cent per email it's not a bad play.

More to come soon! Stay tuned. Meahwhile... read this post aloud!

 

Patrick has a good post on the Virginia election. I was working a bit with Lynn Chapman to unseat a one-term Democrat for the 32nd delegate seat in Loudoun county (west of Fairfax). We failed.

Loudoun has been the fastest growing county in the country for the past few years. Major issues: traffic, education, taxes, immigration in that order. The Dulles Greenway (which goes part Dulles airport) costs about $3.50 per pop and is going up to $5 dollars in the next 5 years. There are 12 elementary schools in the main town of Ashburn (there were two schools 9 years ago). Immigration is challenging but not a HUGE deal like in neighboring Herndon.

The main challenge for the GOP is the purple-ing nature of the county. The blueness of the counties that surround the Beltway are moving out here for larger houses and more land. Loudoun county had a bare majority last year for the marriage amendment and some precincts voted against it overwhelmingly. Here's what I found post-mortem:

No meticulous local GOTV. The local campaign managers had a targeted list of GOP activists and supporters but basically "hoped" they would come out to vote. There were plenty of poll boosters giving out sample ballots and literature but there were no poll watchers to call back the people who had and had not voted. (Note: the Dems didn't do this either... but it was there for the taking).

Robo calls for GOTV are ineffective. Basically, Richmond set up a massive auto-call to remind people to vote on Monday. No call on Tuesday and no one called in person.

Mailers crafted in Richmond will not work. While 2nd amendment issues were prominent in one race in Fairfax they had no bearing on the race out here. The RPV sent out 2 big glossies touting NRA endorsements and gun rights... a non issue for the new Suburban-ites in Loudoun.

Lack of coordination across local candidates on the GOP side. Small entrenched factions for supervisor and other offices worked together ignoring other new GOP candidates trying to take a stand.

No bussing of support for the GOP. The Dems got the local unions to ship a gambit of people into town and literally lather the town in Dem candidate sinage. Of couse sinage isn't everything but its one thing we didn't do.

 

That's my 2 cents.

As we noted in our piece on "Big Seed Marketing," a marketing "virus" must infect one or more people. Anthing less than a 100% infection will peter out and eventually die off. As Watts and Perreti note, designing a truly "viral" campaign is almost impossible. Most viral efforts are flukes and exceptions. Better, say the authors, to hit a large swath of people with a message, hope for a decent viral rate and then gather in more people as the message slowly decays back to parity.

Here is an update on a case study I published last week (a petition about an Oprah show), the results we saw from our petition, and how we calculated the "viral" or reproduction rate.

By any measure, the petition has been a success. To date 21,000+ people have signed on. This from a seedbase of no more than 7000 emails. So, what was the viral rate of this campaign? It's more difficult to calculate than you think. First let's set up some definitions:

• General Viral Rate - This is calculated by taking the number of recipients divided by the number of people infected over one generation of the email. So, for example, if I send an email to 10 people and half of those people send it on to one other person then the viral rate is 50%. Without using software such as ForwardTrack this number will be an estimation because we don't know the number of generations that have been processed nor the true number of "opens" and forwards.
• Impression Viral Rate - This percentage narrows our focus to the number of people who have actually opened the email and sent it on to other people who actually opened the email.
• Click-through Viral Rate - Now we're getting down to those who actually clicked through to a landing page to take action.
• Conversion Viral Rate - Lastly, we're looking for the % of people who actually signed on to the petition.

This is a fairly young science and we're treading on new ground here. Some of these rates we can calculate pretty accurately. Others, not so much.

Here are the facts on the ground frame from Phase 1 of our (which ran from 10/3 through 10/9):

Recipients: 6871

Total opens: 4136

total click-throughs: 1912

Unique petition page visitors: 25000

Conversion rate: 45%

Sign-ups: 11000

Here's a verbal walkthrough: On October 3rd we sent out our petition request to 6800 recipients. Over the next 4 days the original emails were opened by 4136 people (this includes the original recipients and people that received the email in return) and nearly 2000 people clicked through the links in those emails. In the end, however, 25,000 people visited the petition page and 11,000 of those people signed the petition (a 45% conversion rate). Apparently, people created their own emails and forwarded the link onto their friends. (Note: we use iContact for our email system and Google Analytics on the website).

There are quite a few unknowns here. So let's go with the three facts that we know for sure: number of original recipients, unique visitors to the pettion form and petition sign-ups over those 4 days.

RECIPIENTS OR OVERALL VIRAL RATE

Basically, we want to determine what the infection or viral rate would have to be on the original number of recipients (6800) to get to 25,000 visitors on the petition page. There are two ways to calculate this. 1) use the 6871 number as assumptive starting point or 2) assume a 30% open rate and bring the starting number down to 2061. In other words: should the viral rate be calculated to the overall bucket of recipients or the assumed 30% open rate? Well, let's do both.

Total Recipients To get to the magic number of 25,000 unique petition page visitors we come up with a viral rate of 78.5% over 30 generations. Which looks something like this:

Basically, this chart shows a total accumulation of 25,000 people by the 30th generation. Of course this assumes that everyone clicked through to the petition who received the email. This is the extreme case and unlikely but this model gives you an idea of what were doing here.

30% Opens

Starting at 2000 who opened the email we need an average viral rate of 91.9% over 50 generations to get to 25K.

Of course, we don't know what the viral rate was between successive generations and it's likely that the open rate was different for different people.

 

Alternate Calculations

One alternate theory is that the first generation email of Phase I was above 100% on average and that the rate slowly degraded from there. This is possible but again difficult to calculate.

Lastly, we can work ourselves backwards by increments and guestimate what happened:

1. 11,000 people signed the petition during Phase 1 (solid number)
2. 25,000 people visited the petition page with 45% of these converting (signing ) the petition (solid number)
3. Assuming a 25% click-through rate we get 125,000 emails that were opened (estimation)
4. Starting with the 6800 recipients we would need average viral/reproduction rate of 94.5% over 100 generations to get to the 125K number.

My conclusion is that our viral rate was probably above 80% and below 100%.

Next Steps

In Phase II of our campaign we sent a follow-up email to the 11,000 signs-ups and encouraged them to forward it on to two other people. After another 4 days we had essentially doubled the petition sign-ups. Working off the same model of total recipients and 30% open rate we came up with 51% viral rate over 10 generations and 84% over 45 generations respectively. As you can guess ,the open rates and click throughs were lower for phase II as would be expected.

Rinse, lather, repeat. Tomorrow (Monday) we will send another email out to the new 11,000 emails who signed up over Phase II and try to anticipate the number of new sign-ups. My guess is that we will see similar results but a decaying number of sign-ups. We've put a few new measures in place to track things more accurately. Stay tuned.

 

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So, the primary season is coming to a close. And then... it starts all over again! Only this time... the opponents will be clear and the focus will be forward. Time to prime ourselves on what it takes to raise money.

Here's the one rule you need to know about fundraising, everything else is ancillary. It is the one guiding principle I've used to set expectations and predict success over the last three years.

In short: fundraising is very hard work.

But with the right model in place and the requisite sweat equity, you can accomplish amazing things.

Here are some quick thoughts on what it takes to raise money. First and foremost, understand some of the underlying rules of fundraising:

1. "People give to people to help people" I've been working with non-profit organizations for almost a decade. Without fail, a general clarion-call for money will fail compared to a plea for a specific cause, especially when it is linked with a picture and a story. You need to have a compelling story with a person who can conjure up a compelling reason to compel people to open their wallets.
2. "People give relative to their means" No matter what the cause, the dollar amount donations from the 35-65 crowd will far outweigh the 20-30 crowd for one simple reason: they have $ to spend. This is why online fundraising has not yet exploded on the scene. As Patrick Ruffini has noted, the Dean revolution was an email revolution not a website coup. The Facebook, blogging and Web 2.0 crowd are truly young at heart. It will be a few years before they can churn out the $$$ to make a difference in the fundraising sector.
3. "Those closest must set the pace" When Romney kicked off his exploratory committee with a national call day January 8th, the 5 Romney boys set the example for the other 400 fundraisers by sticking at their tables for the entire duration of the event. When Meg Whitman, CEO of Ebay takes 9 hours out of her day to sit down and ask her friends for money it makes an impact on everyone around her. The candidate, the board, the members, the founders must make their efforts public and powerful.

Next we need to take a look at the trends in fundraisings. I note some of the efforts that I've been involved in as quick case studies for each point:

1. Growing use of the Internet for fundraising. Again, "growing" is the operative word. By most accounts donations raised via the Internet are pithy and underwhelming. Only a handful of non-profit organizations and candidates can boast more than 6 figures in online fundraising. The trend is obviously toward the Internet but it has not been the harbinger of $$$ that many expected.
2. Innovation and adopting new practices and models. The key to fundraising is innovation. I wager that any one of us receives half-a-dozen letters a week soliciting for donations. Standing out above the noise is the key to successful fundraising. Take for instance Romney's "Students for Mitt" program where college students can receive 10% back on everything they raise for the campaign.
3. Involve everyone in fundraising I know some professional fundraisers who were very upset at the Romney campaign for opening the floodgates to anyone and everyone. But it's paid off. For example, as a "Patriot" level fundraiser I have the ability to create "associate fundraisers" I get credit for whatever money they bring in and they in turn get credit for being part of a successful team of advocates. Many non-profit organizations are building bonus structures for their staff based donations that they bring in.
4. Contemporary corporate marketing practices Like any aged market, the political sphere has its own consultants, approaches, and software packages. Most every political campaign uses Aristotle Publishing for voter lists and most every 501(c)4 uses Capitol Advantage for online advocacy. Romney has broke the fundraising mold by utilizing a contact management system called SalesForce.com typically utilized by large and dispersed sales and business development groups. Many non-profit organizations are using ROI models to predict success and maximize margins on the donations.
5. MOST IMPORTANT: FOCUS ON DONORS When you give $2300 dollars to a campaign you are the man (or at least you should be treated like "the man".) Next to your unpaid fundraisers, you must focus like a laser beam on your high end contributors. By creating incentives and time factors into your efforts you create an energetic need to get involved and "max out". Everytime a donation comes into the Lighted Candle Society, I personally call the contributor to thank them.

Lastly, you need to understand WHY people give:

• They believe you are making a difference in a cause they care about.
• They value your work
• They see it as an investment
• They get something in return
• They feel good about themselves
• Returning a favor
• Solving a problem
• Sending a message
• Receiving quality information
• Aligning with peers
• Bringing justice to the world

If you cater your message to these efforts your fundraising effort might just work. But note this: by my calculations 60-70% of the money that Romney has raised has been at in-person events.

You may have heard about the $80,000 we've raised at MyManMitt.com for the Romney campaign. I should admit here openly and honestly that $40,000 of that money came from me working the phones. Of course, the website became the fulfillment engine for those donation, but the work to get the people there was manual. But once that momentum was in place I was able to do some amazing things online.

In the last two days of the quarter we raised $5,000 and I didn't make a single phone call. I basically customized an email to my previous donors and asked them to make a difference. Next week I'll talk in more detail about why I think the Democrats have been so much more successful at fundraising online that the GOP.

There have been a gambit of political websites launching over the last few months but this one, IMHO, takes the prize.

Launched by former CNET founder Shelby Bonnie, "Political Base" boasts a bunch of interactive features to help you through the political season.

Many political sites offer interactive money maps but I think that the PB app is tops. It allows for instant hover-over look at money and a county-level drill down. They also do a good job calling out specific money centers... take a look at their Leonard Nimoy page.

They also provide detailed bios, not just on the candidates themselves, but also on political consultants, media gurus, academics and more...

Beyond that I really like the issue matrix and the clean forums they provide.

I hope this will be instructive and I hope you, the reader, will also provide some instruction. Looks like I’m going to need it.

Currently, I work as Vice President of Communications for the Lighted Candle Society, a non-profit organization fighting pornography. When I started with the group in June our email list was sparse and fleeting. We needed to build a larger base of support both for our activist efforts and our contributor base. We redesigned our main website, launched a blog, built a targeted interactive website, and promoted some “sticky tools” to drive interest in our cause.

We then set out to build on our existing base of subscribers and contributors to expand our message to their friends. We built specific "landing pages" for each member of the Board of Trustees (see mine here) and helped them send out emails to their contacts. The results were positive but the growth was incremental. That's not a bad thing but I'm always looking for those special "inflection moments" when you can capatalize on a timely situation and grow some things exponentially.

Enter Oprah. About three weeks ago we received an email from a subscriber who was at a taping of an Oprah show and came away shocked at the content of the episode. We made some quick inquiries to Harpo Productions and discovered that the show was going to air on September 25, 2007. The show featured several "sexperts" advocating casual sex with friends, pornography for women, and "open marriages". Needless to say, most of our supporters would be very interested in giving Oprah a piece of their mind.

We sent out an email to 1300 of our subscribers to call Oprah and send her an email about the episode. There wasn't enough time to drive a huge petition effort so we kept the request to self-action as our medium. Of course they aired it anyway... but we received so much email on the subject we decided to drive this a little further.

We decided to build a petition to let our supporters voice their concerns to Oprah and drive more support to our cause.

A note on petitions: They are usually ineffective in actually causing change but they are very effective in bringing together a group of supporters and building energy among advocates.

Email 1

Using iContact as our email system we identified a small number of "power users." We defined "power users" as subscribers who had sent on the initial Oprah email onto 20 or more friends. The results were positive (the 12 "power users" reached 87 people). But we realized the subject line ("Well, she did it...) was ineffective and didn't tell the people what we wanted them to do (pass it on). Sent on Monday October 1st.

Email 2

This email went out to the entire list of subscribers with the subject line: "Forward this email. Tell Oprah not again". This turned out to be a winner. The open rate was 27% (356 opens) but ultimately led to over 1500 opens as the people began to foward it on to their network. Sent on Wednesday October 3rd. See email here.

Petition and Realtime Email Tweaks

Once we realized that we had a real chance at success we posted a graphic indicating how many people had signed up and updated it throughout the week. We also replaced the graphic within in the email dynamically to drive some more interest. Sign-ups began to pour in. We posted the petition on a few key blogs and had the BOT send out the notice to other friends.

Email 3

I crafted an email to 500 of my personal contacts and sent it out from my email address via iContact as a personalized forward message including the previous crafted email in the body of the email. Again the results were very positive. 35% open rate (so far) and double the number of true opens.

So far we have 4000+ people who have signed the petition with 75+ people signing up per hour now. Through a combination of tweaking, blog posts, and personalized emails we have amost tripled our current base of subscribers. Next question to you reader... what do I do with these people?!

TechCrunch is to technology what the Drudge Report is to politics... one of the most influential news rags that can make and break a man, a company or a country.

The TechCrunch40 is a list of top 40 start-ups that are making waves across the world. TC recently hosted the TC40 conference and featured these start-ups.

Here are some of the relevant start-ups you will want to follow and even try out if you part of the blog revolution.

Multimedia
Viewdle - Imagine if you could hone the google links around all of your blog assets to make sure that users would be even more inclined to click on them. For example, imagine if you could change the links dynamically based on who was in a 30-second clip playing on your blog. Say you plug an interview between Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn, and the links spanning back and forth between Hugh's Romney book and Steyns indispensible America Alone. Cool. Enter Viewdle.

StoryBlender - I bet the folks at HotAir will love this one. Online collaborative video building. Good stuff!

MusicShake - Koean-based company to help the non-Mozarts among us. Interesting story and approach to this one.

Social Networking
TruTap - We talked about something like this previously. IM, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and now Digg... all of these profiles. No way to manage them all. This is where TruTap comes in. Another one featured in the TC4 is Orgoo.

Flock - Quoting from TC40 :"A social web browser. When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.

Teach the People - This of this site of How things Work with Social networking. Interesting field with a growing host of start-ups. 1 GB of storage, voting, docs, blogs, and other treats make this an interesting place to watch.

Publishing
8020 Publishing - Publish your own magazine online! Become the next big National Review!

Honorable Mention
Faroo - Right now thousands of people are looking for Steve Fossett and his presumed downed plane using satellite images of the Nevada landscape. Faroo takes the notion of the power of individual computers to rival Google's network farms of massive servers. In short, imagine if you could index everypage a user actually visited on their own computer. Cool stuff!

I'll let you digest these for a moment. Back with more in a few...

Fall is a great time to refresh your website and meet the growing demands of your audience by providing value through unique and original interactive tools. Here's a quick run-down of what lies beyond YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the like.

DYI Mash-up/Widgets - This is the holy grail of Web 2.0 applications. For those of your with kids its the equivilent of "stone soup" for the internet - taking open source applications, adding in a bit of this and a bit of that and creating a new beast altogether. Some of these (like FeedFlash) do one thing well, others (like Pageflakes) extend things a bit more.

• Pageflakes
• Wigipedia.com
• Openkapow
• Click2Mapâ„¢
• FeedFlash widget,
• mockatoo.com
• Snipperoo
• Spinlets

Surveys - There's no better way to drive a bit of stickiness to your site than through interaction. Interactive surveys have been on the web for a while. Old stalwarts like Zoomerang are slowly falling by the wayside as these dynamic new apps will attest.

• FormSpring
• QuestionForm

Email/Communications - As Patrick attests, this is and might always be the "killer app". The professionals use mostly Lyris as their software platform but the big and clunky interface may soon fall victim to one of these upstarts. Personally, I've started to use iContact and I find it effective, inexpensive and easy to use.

• Letterpop
• Feelbreeze - email campaigns
• Geesee - Free chat
• Kontactr
• iContact.com

Multimedia - Whether you need a quick graphic fix or an interactive video embed for your site, these new upstarts offer some interesting apps. My favorite is Bubble Guru.

• Empressr
• favicon.ico Generator
• EasyCropper
• Fresh Badge Generator
• Bubble Guru

Blog marketing - Eyes are everything to a blog. Here's a unique start-up aiming to help the lowly blog out.

• Blogsticker

Content/Data - While widgets are the "in" thing right now... the next big thing IMHO are content and data services that can help you gather and present content in a unique way. Here are some initial approached to this issue.

• SNiPiTRON
• MyownDB
• Dabble DB
• Texty
• Listphile

Interactive tools - Whether you need a google map or a PDF conversion tool... here's a host of interesting sites that can help.

• Demofuse.com
• WriteMaps
• Web2PDF Online Widget
• Bravenet

Social networking - So you got the facebook group, your on MySpace and your YouTube is grooving. How what? Well how about managing all your profiles in one place. Here's an original idea for social networking.

• profileomat.com

Presentations - Everybody uses PowerPoint these days... How about putting those online. No problem.

• Preezo
• PreZentit
• WebSlide

I'm an admitted fan of Romney but if I look over the political chess board this week I see an opportunity for Fred to land a serious blow to the other candidates. Thompson has indicated that he will announce his candidacy on Thursday avoiding the Wednesday night debate in NH. This has riled many in the field being seen as a ducking move... but there's a way that Fred could turn the tables on the rest of the field in a dramatic way. Here's what I see: WHAT DOES FRED NEED?

• Positive free press that will put him at the center of attention.
• A starting momentum that will carry him to the end of the year.
• "White-horse-like" positioning, coming to save the day.

WHAT FRED CAN DO:

Sunday night (Sept 2) send out a poll to online supporters indicating that he's getting pressure to attend the debate. The question: "Should I?" (email req'd for poll)

Publish the results on Monday and keep everyone guessing.

Tuesday, announce that you are going to the debate with an online video (need some unique twist here - perhaps a play on the old Clint Eastwood western standoff)

It's a risky move but it would improve the image that Fred is ducking the debates and would launch him to full-time candidate status in an innovative way.

At the recent Modern Media Strategies workshop at the Heritage Foundation, Patrick Ruffini focused his entire presentation on the eternal killer app: email (see here).

"Eyeballs" are everything for your online presence. As Ruffini put it: "Email is still the closest thing we have to mass communication on the web." He rightly notes that the famed Dean online revolution actually happened via email.

In May of this year, the Harvard Business Review published an excellent piece by Duncan Watts and Jonah Peretti entitled: "Viral Marketing for the Real World". In it they examine the elusive phenomenon where a single email thread or online piece replicates like wildfire across the Internet.

They point out that this type of "viral" event is really accidental, difficult to reproduce, and impossible to predict. Instead they advocate "big-seed marketing." Essentially, big seed marketing:

combines viral-marketing tools with old-fashioned mass media in a way that yields far more predictable results than “purely” viral approaches like word-of-mouth marketing.

They note that true viral marketing involved a "reproduction rate" of 1 or greater. That is, for every personal that receives the message he or she spreads it to more that one other person, thus leading to exponential growth. As the authors note:

By contrast, viral messages with an R of less than 1 are generally considered failures. That’s because purely viral campaigns, like disease outbreaks, typically start with a small number of seed cases and quickly burn themselves out unless their R exceeds the epidemic threshold, or tipping point, of 1.

Not everyone is into "forwarding like it's hot" (ala Michael Scott). Instead, your email send will slowly peter out to zero generation after generation.

However, the authors tell us that this "failure" can be seen as a boon if the initial seeding is large enough. For example, if you have a list of 10,000 and a email infection rate of 0.5 each generation would pass it on to half as many recipients. The math goes like this 5,000 + 2500 + 1250 + 625 + 312 + 156... After 6 generations your email infection burns out but you've reached an extra 20,000 in the process! Not a failure after all.

The authors note several examples of this type of viral marketing. An excellent read with great advice for any blogging marketeer.