I don't know U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill from Adam. She could be the sweetest, most caring person in the world. I don't know much about her, but when I look at her Twitter page, arrogance is the first thing I think of. My friend and political strategist Warren Tompkins has been writing a lot about the arrogance of the liberal elite, and I see no better example than Claire McCaskill's web strategy.

According to TweetCongress, she's the second-most followed member of Congress on Twitter, although Sen. Jim DeMint is quickly gaining on her. Despite having 36,691 followers as of the morning of March 8, McCaskill is only following one person. That screams arrogance. It’s as if she’s saying, “It's all about ME. I don’t care about you.”

Twitter is a tool for two-way communications. It's where elected officials can feel the pulse of the electorate. Yet McCaskill uses it to tell her followers about University of Missouri basketball and plans for breakfast.

As I’ve said many times, the Internet is an important tool for campaigns and elected officials to do what they want to do. From the website, to Facebook, to Twitter and email, there are endless ways to connect with voters and keep people informed. But it’s more than just letting people know what you’re doing. It’s about hearing what’s on other people’s minds too. A politico who is not following people is like that jerk at a party who has to be the center of attention, who only talks about his/her self, and who could give a damn about other people.

Yes, this is a representative democracy. People are elected to cast votes because nationwide direct democracy isn’t an effective form of government. However, because someone is elected to lead, that doesn’t mean they can stop listening to people. While McCaskill may well be browsing papers from across Missouri and brought concerns from home received by her staffers, her Twitter account is like an alarm going off.

Having a 36,000-to-one followers-to-following ratio says that she might be just a little out of touch with involved voters in the Show-Me State.

Oh, and then there's John McCain.

This week, the former speechwriter for former Gov. Jim Hodges – and current associate with Qorvis Communications -- Wyeth Ruthven, came up with an analysis of Twitter use in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial campaigns, as well as the special election for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts.

No matter your political stripe, it’s possible to take some lessons from what he put together. One main takeaway is to look at everything Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds did, and do the opposite.

According to the analysis, the Deeds campaign had three separate Twitter accounts – one for the candidate (@CreighDeeds), one for attacks on Republican nominee Bob McDonnell and connections with rural voters (@DeedsCountry) and one attacking McDonnell’s thesis and controversy surrounding it (@BobsThesis). Needless to say, doing a three-pronged Twitter strategy is not a good idea.

Ruthven makes the point: “Campaigns should resist the temptation to create a new Twitter account for each issue or micro-campaign that they are running. Multiple accounts breed message dilution. Staff should limit their own tweeting on campaign topics. Recurring issues and themes can be highlighted by creating appropriate hashtags on a unified Twitter feed.”

And while it’s great to hear that Deeds is such a big fan of groups like the Drive-By Truckers and The Band, having your candidate for governor tweet about how he’s listening to the bands while on the road, as opposed to thoughts on topical issues, is not a good idea, either. According to the study, over a three-month period, Deeds tweeted about music 39 times, and talked about his transportation plan – a major issue in Virginia -- once.

As I’ve said before, the Internet is a tool of a wider effort. Scott Brown’s campaign in Massachusetts seemed to understand this. There was a period between the end of the primaries and when the general election campaign began in earnest. Shortly after the primaries, the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, went dark on ads and on Twitter. Brown did not. While continuing his free and paid media blitz, his campaign also kept it up on Twitter. In the first month of the general election campaign, he out-tweeted Coakley by about two-to-one.

It’s worth pointing out here that Brown had 15,827 followers, as opposed to Coakley’s 4,361. He also happened to tweet more unique news, “calls to action,” and “self-promotion.” Again, here’s why Twitter can be an effective tool. A “call to action,” as defined in the analysis, consists of requests for donations, volunteers, voter registration and get-out-the-vote. A campaign isn’t meant to be on Twitter to be your pal, it is supposed to be organizing to win. Brown did that.

If you want your tactics on the Internet to be effective, don’t play around with Twitter like it’s a toy. Sure, it might be fun to think that a few people would like to see the personal side of your candidate, but that isn’t going to convince them to help you stuff envelopes, knock on doors, write letters to the editor or contribute.

Some political Internet “experts” think that the Internet is the end-all be-all of campaigns, but it’s only one part. Successful campaigns aren’t built around the Web alone. They are built around strategies that use a wide variety of tools and tactics including television, direct mail and the Internet.

Recently, a study was released by the Pew Research Center. The news, as it was cribbed from the study by the mainstream media and blogs, was that the entire nation was moving over to the Internet to get its news. According to the report, about 61 percent of Americans get at least some of their news from the Internet.

Hearing news like that might make some campaign consultants concentrate on the Web as a strategy on the level of a get-out-the-vote-effort. That would be a mistake.

As Gary Vaynerchuk says in the video, it’s all about extending the story. The Internet is not an end in itself. For every television advertisement, for every radio advertisement, for every direct mail piece, use that medium for exactly what it is supposed to do. But don’t stop there. That doesn’t mean just linking the website. It means extending the story with an extremely strong strong appeal to visit the website. Just think about the GoDaddy commercials. Then you can et people to engage with the candidate via Facebook, Twitter and whichever other social media in which the campaign is engaged.

In this way, you can connect the voters on multiple platforms. Something left out of many of the stories about the Pew research is that only two percent of Americans get all of their information from the Internet. Therefore, having an Internet operation running in a vacuum will not help.

Another statistic from the study is that 92 percent of people in this country get their news from multiple platforms. To repeat a modern political cliché, you have to go to where the voters are. They aren’t all on the Internet, or going to the Internet first. But the people who are most likely to vote and most likely to contribute will end up on the Web. That’s why it’s very important that if you want to win, you have to combine traditional and online marketing strategies.

Notes:

According to Nielsen, “member communities” (social networking and blogging) are now the fourth most popular Internet activity, even surpassing personal email. Also, time spent on social networking and blogging sites has grown by three times the rate of the rest of the Internet. In terms of time spent, between December 2007 and December 2008, Facebook saw a massive increase of 566 percent.
 
In 2008-2009 the use of social media by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent. People over the age of 35 are the fastest growing group using Facebook.

Between February 2008 and February 2009, Facebook’s users increased 228 percent, from 20.04 million to 65.7 million.

- Wesley Donehue

I’m on an airplane.

I hate airplanes. Have I told you that yet? If I haven’t, there you go. I hate airplanes.

I hear the stats about how flying is so much safer than driving. And I have a fear of heights, but it’s not the heights that gets me. What I hate is the lack of control. In a car I have control. Sure some one can hit me, but I still have a good bit of control. It’s my hands on the steering wheel and my foot on the gas pedal. That’s not the case in an airplane. I’m completely in someone else’s hands. My life is dependent upon a machine. God controls the weather that could force me to the ground.

All the while I can’t do anything but sit here and type on my computer.

So now it’s this idea of control that I want to talk about for a few seconds.

I’m flying to DC right now to attend CPAC where I’ll be speaking on a panel about web politics. Specifically, I’ll be talking about my web product Voter Fetch.

The biggest and really only complaint I hear from campaigns right now is that they don’t like the lack of control with a call from home product. In a phone bank they can manage the callers. That’s not the case with people phoning from home.

I also get this question a lot: how can I make my video go viral?

Listen folks, in today’s world, you need to let go of the reins a bit. Scratch that….let go of the reins a lot. You can’t be truly successful until you let a movement go viral. You have to let people carry your message for you. It’s been happening forever. There’s no difference in someone talking to their friend at a grocery store and phone banking from home. It’s just now you have the ability to actually target and message. If anything, you have more control by giving up control.

The same goes for video. You can’t make something go viral. You can produce something catchy and you can spread it around the web with social networks, but its viralness depends on the people. We didn’t force Senator DeMint’s Code Pink video to go viral, not that we could. We just came up with a creative idea, sent it to our email list, posted it to our social networks, and just sat back. Like that, you have to let go and pray that things just happen and that people start spreading it around. Concentrate on solid content and creativity, not control.

It’s easy for me to give this advice in politics, but I’ll be jumping out of my skin until the wheels hit the runway. I hate airplanes.

After an enriching conversation with my buddy @treypennington (who you should be following) I've decided that political candidates and elected officials should always refollow their twitter followers.

What do you think? 

- @wesleydonehue

My reaction to a blog post by Vincent Harris which lays out the reasons campaigns should concentrate on Facebook. Read Vincent's post at http://techrepublican.com/blog/facebooks-permanent-place-politics

- Wesley Donehue 

Activists across the nation are calling into Massachusetts this weekend to help Scott Brown's campaign for US Senate. Republicans are finally getting it and creating the online tools for grassroots action. And I'm PUMPED about it.

- Wesley 

I shot this video last week and hesitated to post it because I know I’m going to catch all kinds of hell with even suggesting using purchased lists. But I’m here to talk about the results I’m having and this is what I’ve found.

Purchased and rented lists typically have a HORRIBLE open rate, but you can have some strong success if you use them strategically and very sparingly with the goal of grabbing new organic subscribers – prospecting. NEVER dump a purchased list into your organic list and absolutely 100% never ever ever SPAM the crap of folks with tons of unsolicited emails every week. Use them in the midst of hot button issues only when folks will be spurred to action.

I should have also mentioned stolen lists in this video. This year alone I’ve ended up on about ten new mailing lists because consultants are stealing candidate’s lists and giving them to other candidates. Seriously people…quit with the dumb shiz.

I can't tell you how many campaigns I've seen with fantastic strategy and tactics but with horrible operations. I think Google Wave can really help the communication flow within your campaign. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

- Wesley Donehue