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.

Over the weekend, Michael Deaver, the PR strategist and campaign manager known best for his work for Ronald Reagan, passed away. John Fund has a nice tribute in today's OpinionJournal that focuses on Deaver's innovative work, beginning during the time Reagan was governor of California.

When Reagan became president, Deaver continued to innovate, arranging such cinematic settings as the famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" moment and finding out ways to get around the endemic liberal bias inherent in most of the elite press corps.

Where is that innovative spirit today within the conservative movement?

Sure, people like Karl Rove and some of the other Bush staff have been innovative--but only in an electioneering way, forever winnowing America into increasingly smaller demographic groups and not trying to appeal to us as a whole. You can't fault Rove for that. Campaign managers are supposed to find out who the key swing demos are and know how to appeal to them.

Who you can fault is today's Republican messaging machine which has learned all the wrong lessons from the Reagan era.

One of the most important things Reagan practiced in the art of public relations was to ignore the opinions of the liberal media. Today's GOP has learned that lesson well but has forgotten its important corollary: While left-wing journalists shouldn't be taken seriously from a policy perspective, they should be taken seriously from a communications perspective.

That may seem like a simple point but actually it isn't.

One of the things that Deaver and others in the Reagan White House were famous for was their ability to bypass the mainstream media by giving news scoops to local outlets or conducting interviews with lesser-known media organizations. That strategy worked well for them and was an innovative idea back then. It no longer is today.

In today's media world, reaching out to talk radio and local television is the minimum standard. Today's alternative media didn't even exist when Reagan was president. If blogs, online communities, file sharing services, YouTube, and Wikipedia existed then, you can bet that Mike Deaver and the rest would have mastered them--and the left would have whined and complained about being bested yet again. That isn't what we have today. On the one hand, we have a political elite class that has its head in the sand, blithely ignorant of the power and multifarious nature of the blog world, unwilling to engage the YouTube generation.

Not everyone on the right is similarly ignorant about the power of the new media. I've run into a small-but-growing number of people who think that yes, having a blog is good and posting things on YouTube is important. They balk, however, when it comes to investing the time, money, personnel, and thought into making such outreach efforts effective. Simply "having a blog" is not enough in today's political world. Sending press releases to bloggers is not enough. These things are but a small part of a comprehensive modern communications strategy which sees blogs as both media entities in and of themselves but also as members of the conservative grassroots. As such, you cannot treat them like you would supporters but neither can you treat them like you would a member of the liberal press.

An effective online communication strategy also includes grasping what the point of having a blog really is. It's not simply to exist. Thinking that once you have some sort of blog on the internet that you're finished with your online efforts is a mistake because unless people are reading it, you're blogging into a void. Effective new media means recalibrating your communications strategy to not only beating the media but also becoming the media. We've proven at NewsBusters that with enough time and effort, you can start a major blog in a short amount of time. That success can be duplicated by any policy or political group with enough vision and commitment to recapture the Reagan-Deaver legacy.

For a blog that's dedicated to teaching Republicans how to use the internet to achieve electoral success, that may seem like a strange title. But it's true. Zack Exley writes about the problems of hiring a Director of Internet Communications in a time when a Director of Communications should know about the Internet.

“No, don’t hire an Internet guy,” I say. “You need to make your senior leaders, campaigners & organizers responsible for the Internet just as they’re responsible for everything else. The Internet is the biggest, greatest opportunity you have—so why would you outsource it to some Internet person you’ll just stick in a closet anyways?”

But it usually feels like I’m wasting my breath. They call back a few weeks later and say, “We’ve taken your advice and decided to hire an Internet person…do you have any recommendations?”

Frustrating, sure. But it's exactly what I face when pitching services to corporate executives. Those of us that live and breathe online are comfortable with mixing our daily work with the internet. When we think of contacting people, we don't think - let's go to the internet - we just use what's available.

Executives aren't like that, and neither are politicians. It seems like work to have to learn something new, and so it's easier to hire an "expert" to do the work for you. The problem with that model is that the experts are expected to do all the work, when the only way to truly reach a constituency online is to model your behavior on what works offline. Social networking is still about connecting with people - I preach that social networking isn't hard - it's doing the same things you do in your normal life, but it's using computers to broadcast your personal message to a wider audience.

A Tech strategy works when it magnifies what the candidate is doing. It fails when it's a separate piece of the puzzle.  Think of the online strategy as your advertising department. Do you want them to make a commercial without talking to your product people.  The purpose of the commercial is to sell more product.  And the purpose of the online strategy is to increase donations and bring in more votes.  What's the point of a brilliant online strategy that doesn't deliver victory?

So take Zack's advice. When someone wants to hire you for your internet skills, take the time to explain that your tech ability is not magic - and that it doesn't work if it isn't integrated into the full campaign.