Joe and I attended a lunch-time discussion of the book Netroots Rising forthcoming from Nate Wilcox and Lowell Feld at the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. Like the title would suggest, the book is about the up-turning of the traditional political order (top-down campaigns) for the tumultuous rabble-rousing democratic square of the blogosphere.

The event itself was a good cross-section of the people you'd hope to lure in with this topic--old and young, men and women, suits and jeans. Although I do strongly suspect Joe and I were among the few from the right side of the aisle. Not surprising for a book written by two Democratic consultants with an introduction from the DailyKos founder.

What I Didn't Know: Perhaps this is my own lack of schoolin', but I had never paid much attention to the foggy genesis of the "Netroots" movement. The first six-figure internet campaign was in 2002, a race for the Texas governorship. The 2004 campaigns of Howard Dean and Wesley Clark were early pioneers in harnessing the power of the internet--and the blogosphere. Clark's campaign "imploded" over this issue, while Dean's attempted an early in-house social networking system, much like the 2008 candidates are all using.

That means none of the 2008 candidates are doing anything "conceptually" new and different, as Wilcox and Feld were both quick to point out. (Which helps put their efforts into better context.) They're just utilizing more people who are more adept at using technology. And, one would presume, it's better technology, period. I've at least been playing with web design long enough to know the websites of today are much prettier and more powerful than the ones from four and six years ago.

What I Thought Was Useful: Political campaigns need to continue to figure out the best ways to integrate an organic grassroots online movement within the traditional campaign framework. I believe it was Wilcox who suggested that many politicians seem to be using the Netroots community without being in it. The example he used was of campaigns sending out blast emails--but the emails are written by staffers, not the politician. Internet technology is supposed to help people connect to other people. How truly and genuinely connected do we expect our politicians to be? Does it matter?

What I Didn't Agree With: There was, of course, a brief discussion of why Republicans seem to be lagging in their use of technology. One suggestion was that Republicans are inherently "hierarchical" older people. Since I don't consider myself hierarchical or older, I was confused. Especially because I wasn't quite sure what a hierarchical person would be like. Fond of fitting oneself into hierarchies?

Anyway, the explanation I like better is that the use of technology has been due to Party circumstances rather than personal shortcomings. Democrats were out of power and disenchanted with the party elite in the early 2000s; they were looking for new avenues to organize. In contrast, Republicans were riding a swell of victory. So now that the swell has crashed upon the shore, Republicans are scrambling to catch up. It makes sense. I think it matches reality, too.

What I'd Still Like to Know: A suggested 90% of blog readers are lurkers, people who read posts but never comment, never email, never take any action. Who are these unknown they? How do we reach out to them? How much do they have to offer? I'd bet it's a lot, and also I bet figuring out how to expand the "e-base" will be the next big thing.

At POLC, one of the panels I attended was "Optimizing Your Search Marketing Program." One of the reasons I attended was because the moderator was my good friend from the other side of the aisle, Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.

But more importantly, I attended because I'm running a number of search engine marketing campaigns for my clients and I wanted to ensure that my clients are getting the best ROI.

Perhaps the most important quote which jumped out at me regarding why "search" (and your entry) matters was: “Your Branding/Messaging Starts at The Search Engine—not at your website.” Makes sense.

I've broken down my notes on tips and optimization in to two sections -- paid search versus organic search. A number of the points below are directly from the powerpoint presentation that went along with the presentation.

Overview of PPC Search (PPC - Pay Per Click)
• People seek out information on search engines - hand raisers - you want to serve that person an ad for your product.
• Think of Search as a phonebook: Paid is like the Yellow Pages. Organice is like the White Pages.
• You are in complete control of your listing in the Yellow Pages.
*You choose the keywords that trigger display;
*You control the Wording of the listing;
*You choose the web page or destination the searcher visits;
*You decide the price you want to pay per click;
*You set the daily budget;
*You set the geographic region;
*You can instantly change all of these factors in real-time; and
*You can track results and optimize your campaign.

Best Practices in PPC
• Good campaign structure is the foundation of good campaign performance. In other words, spend a lot of time thinking out the intention of the campaign, what success means, and how best to achieve it.
*Think of lots of keywords that constituents would use to find information on your candidate or cause (Lots = thousands or more);
*Group similar keywords together into Ad Groups, making things as granular as possible;
*Write ad copy that is relevant to the keywords in each Ad Group;
*Select landing pages that are relevant to the keywords in each Ad Group; and
*Tailor campaigns to geographic regions, if appropriate

• Estimate the value of a visitor, and set prices accordingly.
• Track activity and performance (conversion tracking, Google Analytics, maybe others).
• Focus on results, and optimize campaigns based on results.
• Expand once you are successful with core campaigns.

Best Practices in Organic Search Optimization
• Benefits of organic:
*It’s free (except labor); and
*Perceived as more objective (people trust Google more than advertisers).

Baseline Optimization Techniques:
• Web Development/Technical: make sure your site can be read by search engines;
• Site content: Incorporate well-researched keywords onto your pages;
• Off-site optimizations: Get other sites to link to yours; and
• Close the Loop: Analyze visitor behavior.

Top Three Things You Can Do To Improve Organic SEO:

1. Keyword Research Tools (Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and Google's AdWords program has a free service);
2. Basic Site Assessment - Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to see what pages search robots can read and incoming links; and
3. Build content around keywords (check trends.google.com every morning to see what people are searching for and write content about that issue if it fits with your message).

Some random notes:
The best opportunity to get a high-pagerank item is to upload video to Yahoo!, YouTube, Google Video, and title/tag it correctly.

Free Search Engine Marketing for non-profits: Google Grants Program.

Panelists/Experts:
This panel included Jerome Armstrong, Ben Weisberg of Google, Mark Evans of Ionic Media, and Gravida Couzin and Jennifer Grappone who are both SEO experts.

It's day two of IPDI's Politics Online Conference and I just sat through a great panel titled, "Practical Data Strategies for Mobilization."

The Panelists:
*Dave Leichtman, Technical Project Manager, Blue State Digital
*Clay Johnson - Founding Partner, Blue State Digital
*Ben Self - Founding Partner, Blue State Digital
*Judith Freeman - Co-founder and CEO, New Organizing Institute

The panel talked about practical ways to manage and use large amounts of data.

Ben on integrating data:

Integration is not a family value. Unless there's a good reason to integrate different data, it's an easy to waste a lot of time and money.

Accountability:

The beauty of the Internet is that it's brought a new level of accountability to politics. You no longer have to wonder if an ad is going to work. Upload it to Youtube and see if people watch it.

Four principals for managing data in politics:
1. You need to be able to draw a straight line between what you want to do and if gets your candidates elected.
2. What do we already have that gets us there? As opposed to reinventing the wheel.
3. How do we measure success?
4. Do a small, cheap test. Speed should take priority over almost anything else.

Julie

Organize data in a way that makes testing analytics as easy as possible.

Clay

The first thing an organization needs to do is know, what data do you have? And then, who needs the data?

SQL

SQL is easy to use. Sit down and learn SQL, even if you're just a blogger.

User-Interface Matters

User interfaces really matters, especially on the editorial side. A bad UI makes you want to use the program less. It's the difference between taking five seconds to approve a comment vs. one second. Those four seconds becomes extremely valuable over time.

The panel was one of the most informative I've been to at this conference, and now I'm motivated to learn SQL. Apparently it's easier then learning French.

A personal gripe for conference attendees:
I think it's extremely rude to ask a highly personalized question to a panel/speaker and expect a highly personalized response while the rest of the audience is forced to listen.

My organization wants to build application x - what should we use to build this?

Seriously? Can't you just wait until after the panel to ask your question and not waste everyone's time?

Off to lunch now. Yesterday's meal was gourmet, so I hope today's lunch lives up to past precedence.

For the next two days I'll be at IPDI's Politics Online Conference, in downtown Washington, DC.

I'm looking forward to listening to some excellent speakers and breakout sessions through out the next few days and I'll try and blog about conference highlights as much possible here on techRepublican.

Right now, I'm sitting in the main ballroom listening to a panel discussion on "Pervasive Politics: How Ubiquitous Technology Will Change Politics & Government" moderated by IPDI director Julie Germany.

Adam Greenfield, who describes himself as a "futurist" (what a great job title) gave his pick for the top five technologies (although he only listed four) on the horizon that will shape our everyday lives over the next five years.

1. RFID - Radio-frequency identification
Transforms the way we interact with digital technology, from something we're highly aware of, to something that happens in the background.

2. IPv6
The address space is much longer allowing for almost unlimited internet addresses. Every single object in the world can have it's own web address. This is particularly powerful when combined with RFID because it allows every object in the world to have a location on the internet - from a rivet on a truck to a package at a store.

3. UWB - Ultra wide-band networking

4. WiMAX
Tech standards that replace wi-fi.

On the same panel, Jonathan Taplin while discussing how established entities have tried to put their heads in the sand and ignore the online revolution said,

Mark Penn has tried to ignore power of the internet.

The quip received light applause.

Stay tuned for more.

UPDATE: 4:45PM

I'm sitting in on David's panel on the Long Tail of Politics. David's brought together a killer panel, including: Zack Exley — Co-Founder and President, New Organizing Institute; Matt Salisbury – Republican Candidate for Congress (Idaho-1); Clay Johnson — Founder, Blue State Digital, and Andrew Rasiej - founder of the Personal Democracy Forum. Cyrus Krohn was supposed to be on the panel, but couldn't make it due to a family emergency. But Andrew stepped up and took his place.

Some quips that stood out to me.

Zack:

It's not the cool tools. People are inspired by the message, not by the tools. No one signed up for Barack Obama's email list because his website was cool.

Matt:

For me the Long Tail of politics is that I'm a virus that I'm uploading into the conservative message machine. I can reach Idahoans and conservatives across the country on a limited budget and they can donate a dollar to my campaign.

Andrew:

Our notion of success is getting elected, but it's really a marketplace of ideas.

They may not have won, but they got their ideas out into the marketplace.

On Tuesday, March 4, 2008 at 3:30 PM, I'll be moderating a panel on the Long Tail of Politics at the Politics Online Conference hosted by the George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet. Today is the final day to Register Online to attend the two-day conference.

Last summer, Julie Barko Germany (who is doing a tremendous job as the Director of IPDI), approached me with an opportunity to moderate a panel for POLC on an issue that I thought would be relevant. For me, the choice was simple.

The thought of a panel on the Long Tail of Politics has risen slowly after reading Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, and also based on my experience working on Congressional and Senate races.

In my experience working on campaigns, we would receive polling memorandums focusing on dozens of potential issues/messages that would “move votes.” However, due to limited resources, the focus of our efforts with regard to our paid media campaign was always on the top 3-5 messages that “moved” the most votes. Therefore, most of the candidate’s time on the stump and our earned media efforts focused on those 3-5 messages.

In other words, we spent all of our time and money talking about big picture issues (safety and security, immigration, and spending) because we never had a way to talk about niche issues, like school choice and second amendment rights, that moved votes but did so by the handfuls. Because the tools we used were expensive, it wasn’t feasible to do it any other way.

After reading the Long Tail, I changed my strategy and started focusing, like a laser, on the issues at the bottom of the polling memo. The neglected issues if you will.

We used tools like our blog, effective blogger outreach by issues, YouTube and socnets to target and disseminate our message. We talked about issues like how to keep women and children safe from online predators. We built micro-sites to help amplify our message and push it out to the mainstream.

With regard to fundraising, the Long Tail has never been more effective. The notion that Barack Obama hauled in $32M in the month of January with 90% coming from online donations only further justifies the point.

In 2004, President Bush was smart to focus on large dollar donors who could tap their networks to help bundle hundreds of thousands of dollars for their effort. But in 2008, we’re finding that it’s those candidates who embrace the low-dollar bundlers (the individual with 1,000 facebook friends who can raise $10 from each friend) who are changing the landscape of politics forever. And by the way, most of those low-dollar contributors have never given to a candidate before and will likely give more over their lifetime.

Now at Slatecard (ActBlue has of course been providing a similar platform for years), we have created quite simply a tool to help encourage low-dollar bundlers and have created an intuitive way to give those bundlers “credit” for the good work they are able to do. We’re in our infancy as a utility, but already we’re seeing signs of great success.

In my opinion, the future of online fundraising and effectively communicating is harnessing the Long Tail supporters and less on “moving” giant segments of the population at once.

That’s the gist of why I think this panel is absolutely critical to any discussion about how the Internet has changed politics forever.

I'm honored to have a great bipartisan crew of panelists to help contribute to the discussion. Here are some details:

LONG TAIL POLITICS: The Revolution of People-Powered Politics
In 2004, Presidential candidates tasked their largest contributors to tap in to their networks to raise enormous sums of money through large dollar contributions. In the 2008 cycle, candidates have improved the model and are focusing on small-dollar donors who can contribute smaller amounts in monthly contributions. What impact has this Revolution of People-Powered Politics had on the 2008 election cycle?

Panelists
David All (moderator) - Co-Founder, Slatecard.com
Cyrus Krohn – RNC eCampaign Director
Zack Exley — Co-Founder and President, New Organizing Institute
Matt Salisbury – Republican Candidate for Congress (Idaho-1)
Clay Johnson — Founder, Blue State Digital

I hope to see you next Tuesday for this important discussion.

Revolution.

Today, IPDI released Poli-fluentials: The New Political Kingmakers, which builds on their Political Influentials Online in the 2004 Presidential Campaign report.

RoperASW's Influentials took politics, especially Republicans, by storm. This study examines those Influentials who are highly involved in politics.

Based on an e-mail survey completed by 10,000 people this summer, Poli-fluentials dug into the nuances of online political junkies (chances are if TechRepublican is on your reader, you fall into this category). This wasn't a random survey, so findings are specific to population. However, if you're running a campaign or promoting or work for an advocacy group, you want to attract Poli-fluentials.

The report helps answer the question that plagues all of us here--are Republicans behind on the web? Now we have some evidence that there's work cut out for us. Poli-fluentials are, "more likely to be Democrats than Republicans (46% vs. 30%). Similarly, more Poli-fluentials were liberal or very liberal (45%) than were conservative or very conservative (33%)."

Another interesting finding revealed that social networking worked best for progressive or social conservative issues. People need to have internalized and have a personal stake in the issue for it to be successful. Business or private issues that don't engage people on an emotional level aren't the juicy topics that socnets attract.

These two facts alone, show that Republicans can make the most impact by appealing to our base. It's acknowledged that the right has far bigger offline networks to tap. It's time to get those groups online. We've touched on the need to get pro-life groups more active on the web before, and these numbers just show us where the holes in the rightroots are.

Poli-fluentials also overwhelmingly volunteer:

Our research indicates that volunteers to political campaigns come almost exclusively from the ranks of Poli-fluentials. Our study finds that people who make contributions but who do not actively promote candidates and causes are much less likely to volunteer--only 12% of them did. Similarly, among the people who publically promote candidates and causes, only 10% volunteer. Candidates and causes in search of foot soldiers to perform actual work of campaigns would do well to cultivate Poli-fluentials.

Bottom line: You want these people. Not only do they donate, but they're also eager footsoldiers.

There's a lot more in this study that I'm still weeding through. If you're willing to spend $25 to order it, it's worth the investment.