As reported by the Telegraph, France's President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has taken a step in the right direction with the hiring of Nicolas Princen, "a 24-year old 'cyber spin doctor' to detect and counter Internet attacks and rumours against the French President."

Mr Sarkozy has been under a constant blitzkrieg of cyber-attacks ever since he began running for President, with countless websites and blogs dedicated to satirising and ridiculing the French leader.

According to the Elysee, the new recruit, Nicolas Princen, a graduate from one of France’s top universities, will act as "a sort of Internet early warning system, surveying everything that is making a buzz regarding the President", in order to alert his advisers and prepare a response before irreversible damage is done.
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He will keep his eye on websites, chat groups, blogs and film clips. A handful of these released on video sites like YouTube or Dailymotion have helped to tarnish Mr Sarkozy’s image in recent months.

Good move Sarko.

Last night I spoke with a small group of conservative activists at the Leadership Institute about some of the emerging technologies and tips I offer with regard to fundraising online.

Via my SlideShare account, you can see (and download) my presentation:

| View | Upload your own

Of course, a presentation is only as good as its presenter, and since most of the slides in my deck offer little text, I'll elaborate.

I kicked off the discussion by noting that the Internet has done one major thing, "helped us communicate more effectively with real, live people -- 'smarter, better, faster, NOW.'" We no longer have to wait for checks to be written by our supporter and mailed to our campaign -- instead, we're seeing a trend of folks who are giving donations online.

I use the example of Barack Obama as the latest evidence of this shift from offline giving to online giving. I site Barack's online fundraising numbers that have been reported well by Patrick Ruffini.

With regard to how Democrats have been able to amass so much treasure from previously unturned stones, I always use a personal example to help relate what I call the Long Tail of Fundraising.

Now that the stage is set, I talk about the Left's ActBlue and how Slatecard has helped provide a similar utility for the Right. I then talk about some of the tools that I believe will change the online fundraising space forever like Slatecard's proprietary innovation, Donor Analytics, and our deployment of anywhere fundraising widgets and facebook applications (still in private beta) to help drive donations in popular watering holes.

I conclude by offering four quick and easy tips to help better embrace online supporters.

1. Capture Emails at Every Possible Turn. Use a splash page before folks enter your website to make your supporters make a choice -- join your team or don't -- but the choice must be made before entering a website.

2. Ask for Realistic Gifts. Ask your online community for $25, $50 or $100. Your community will give you what they can afford but the folks that will give you low-dollar amounts online will likely give more to you over time. The point is to lower the barrier of entry and build your donor base.

3. DonationTubes. Have your principle/candidate make the final "ask" via video embedded directly to your secure donation page. Read this blog post for a more thorough answer.

4. Thank Your Supporters. It's hard to believe, but some politicians (and I know from personal experience) do not thank their online supporters. As an example of how to properly thank your supporters, I relate the fact that I received a personal note from Senator Tom Coburn when I contributed a mere $20 to his campaign through Slatecard. The benefit of him taking the time to personally recognize my donation is that, well, here I am blogging about it and I told a room of 30 conservative activists about it last night. In other words, treat every donor on an equal playing field and it will likely yield a great ROI.

The bottom-line with regard to online fundraising is that there's no silver bullet. I can't tell you how to mirror what Ron Paul did or what Barack Obama is doing. But we can keep an eye on the space and help relate what works and what doesn't.

[Cross-Posted at the Slatecard Blog.]

Ask any politician what the best way to get a donation from a supporter is and they'll begrudgingly admit that it's when the politician looks that supporter in the eye (or via a phone call) and makes the "ask." Begrudgingly admitted because all politicians hate to fundraise.

So how do we modernize this concept and capitalize on what we know about effectively campaigning? Common sense, my friends. Let's add an "ask" from the candidate right before someone makes a donation.

As a political consultant, one of the services we provide our clients is the deployment of what I've termed DonationTubes. DonationTubes, quite simply are a short, elevator pitch video message from the candidate to their supporters that can be viewed right before someone enters their credit card information.

You can see how we've incorporated a DonationTube for Lt. Governor Peter Kinder's website here:

A few key things to note when thinking about adding a DonationTube:
* Keep the message short and hit on key action items like giving "recurring/monthly donations." You will only receive if you ask.
* You'll note that Kinder's donation page, of course, is secured with an SSL certificate which gives donors the confidence they need to input their credit card information.
* You can not use a third-party flash video provider (like YouTube or Blip.TV) on secure websites which is why we are hosting this video, and only this video, on our servers.
* Just because we can't use YouTube on this page, we still upload the video to our YouTube channel so that supporters can find it and add it to their website.

The donation page is our last opportunity to connect with our most valuable and committed supporters. Use what you have and succeed online by thinking creatively about the nuts and bolts of the process.

At POLC, one of the panels I attended that I want to discuss in this space was titled "Developing Mobile Social Software Applications." One of my clients wants to push in to the mobile/SMS space so I figured it'd be a valuable use of my time. I was right.

The panelists included:

* Justin Oberman (moderator) – Communications Consultant, Digitism
* Katrin Verclas – Co-Founder and Editor, MobileActive.org
* James Eberhard – CEO and Chairman, Motellus
* Doug Busk – Vice President of Industry Relations, SinglePoint

The top 6 take-away points that I'll be working in to my next presentation:
1. Keep in mind: All mobile is opt-in. You can't "buy a list."
2. Must have a contest or excitement to get people to sign-up for text messages.
3. Messages are limited to 160 characters – be precise.
4. How often do you communicate? When you have something important to say.
5. Always include an “ask” in every message.
6. With regard to embracing mobile: Focus first on SMS/text, then build a mobile website, and then downloads (wallpaper/ring tones).

I'll save you from re-hashing all of my notes, but I do want to focus on two quick points:
1. Doug’s company works for Barack Obama and said that his job is provide the “tools” to help Barack's campaign get their message out through mobile. In other words, they're not consulting with message but are providing another way for Barack to get that message out. Doug noted that your Text-campaign must have a holistic approach to be successful -- the message through your text must be consistent with the direct mail, phones, candidate message, etc. This is common sense to me as a communicator but still important to think about since you're adding another element to the pie.

2. Case-Study: Oprah/Barack appearances. The Barack advance team made a very serious effort to ensure that the audience and event organizers understood how to teach folks to send short-codes/opt-in to receive SMS alerts. 30 minutes prior to an event– the advance team would take the stage, taught folks how to send a short-code from their cell phone, and then offered a prize to come to the front-row to meet Oprah (the winner was selected from folks that signed up for SMS alerts).

To conclude, I'll end with noting that I was left asking myself why no campaign had started thinking of using SMS/text as a utility rather than simply a way to communicate a message. In other words, personally I use Google's SMS feature all the time because it's just as helpful as its website. In other words, because it's helpful, I use it all the time.

What I'd like to see as a campaign operative is giving a tool for 72-hour efforts so that organizers could ping the campaign via SMS for things like issue talking points, polling locations for those canvased and other useful items. That way the communications team could ensure that their message is getting out through field organizers/door-to-door efforts.

Dino Rossi, a familiar candidate running to be the state of Washington's next Governor, has launched a new site for his campaign at DinoRossi.com.

Dino is a solid Republican with a great opportunity. I am hopeful that this blog post helps his campaign (and gives you a few ideas for your next campaign website).

Let's dig in (feel free to weigh in on the site in the comments)...

(Note: I have a MacBook Pro and I view the sites in Firefox, Camino and Safari. My viewing experience is probably a bit different than yours depending on your browser, screen resolution, etc. Deal.)

The Good
* As soon as I pop the page, my eyes are immediately pulled to three important action-items on the site: "Donate," "Donate," and "Donate." That's probably a good thing if you're the fundraiser. Smart use of the color red on a dark site.

* The strongest feature on DinoRossi.com is his smart use of web-video. On the homepage, you see a few staged questions under "Man on the Street." Unfortunately, every question is compiled in to one long video so even if you could care less about the question/answer, you're forced to listen/watch or leave. However, Dino's answers are great and he's easy to watch on video so I'd expect this to improve over time. It looks like Dino is going to expand this to a micro-site, "Tell Dino." Of note, Dino has good some good messaging on that page. Stay tuned for more.

* Also, I like Dino's IssueTubes, where there is a video about him talking about the issues under each tab. My biggest complaint is that the videos seem to be using a custom flash player instead of something like YouTube. "Hey, hey, ho, ho, your command-and-control has got to go."

* Lots of syndication options. Content can go anywhere and Dino gets that.

The Bad
* Where is the Queen? As I like to say, if content is King than data is Queen. When you visit DinoRossi.com, you are not greeted warmly with a splash page and there isn't much attention being paid to collecting emails/data on the websites. This is perhaps the biggest flaw of the site as Dino will truly need a "movement" to win his race and emails mean the ability to syndicate his message and financial supporters.

* Newsletter Sign-Up is Broken. Three times I tried to sign-up for email updates for Dino Rossi. I used three different emails, @davidallgroup.com, @slatecard.com, and @gmail.com. Every single time, I received the following error message: "Sorry, sending the email to request your confirmation failed, please click "Reload" to try again. If it still does not work, it may be because you are listed on our "Black List", which means that you cannot receive emails from our newsletter system. In that case, please contact the administrator." Obviously, this is a fatal flaw.

* Wasted real estate. Dino is a real estate guy so he should get this. In the world of preview panes, it matters what you put above the fold. I've re-sized my Firefox browser to 1024x768 in this image (click to enlarge). As you can see, there's nothing but static content -- CHANGE. I think Dino should dump the flash image and push everything up a bit, but hey, that's just me.

* No blog. Need I say more?

* Give me pretty URLs. It's a simple re-writing mechanism to change ugly URLs to more intuitive URLS. For example, this is the URL for Dino's "About" section:
http://www.dinorossi.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=4&Itemid=26.

* Issues. I'd like to see more issues -- particularly some of the "Long Tail" issues that he can articulate his stance on - for free - through the Internet.

CONCLUSION
All-in-all, Dino's site is a strong step in the right direction. It's open-source and has most of the ingredients to making an effective campaign hub. Room for improvement? Absolutely, but we're getting there.

What do you think?

This story begins two days ago in South Carolina, where on an impromptu campaign stop a woman asks Senator McCain a fairly, shall we say, pointed question. The woman's question was this: "How do we beat the bitch?" Pan, zoom, and in the crosshairs is a candidate facing a potentially explosive situation. Cue the YouTube video. (Let me say upfront that I'm a McCain-booster, and am enthusiastically supporting his candidacy).

Now, we all recall the "macaca moment", and in fact, that memory keeps many GOP communications directors on edge, I'm sure. And it should. The Allen campaign's ineffectual response has become emblematic in many ways of the understanding deficit on the Right when it comes to the Internet and new media.

Back to the tale of the tape: McCain reacted with his trademark humor. Aided by a man in the audience who asked whether the woman had meant his ex-wife, McCain used the question to make a savvy point: he is beating Hillary in several national polls. (See this PDF from the campaign for specifics.)

In the hours that followed the event, the video surfaced on fairly liberal Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo, in truncated form. Overnight, the video went from Internet obscurity to the cable news circuit, and even made the rounds on many local news channels.

Enter CNN's Rick Sanchez, and his shameless attempt to turn the video of McCain's reply into a "gotcha" moment. Sanchez seemed to think McCain didn't do enough to defend Mrs. Clinton. He even went so far as to get Whoopi Goldberg on the phone--who actually weighed in with a modest defense of McCain. Sanchez wasn't having any of it; he was unabashedly trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. (Note: for more on this strange strain of logic, see this inane post at Daily Kos: Cindy McCain Is A Bitch)

Some of you may remember that the term "Clinton News Network" came about in the 90s. Leaving aside that gobs of Time Warner PAC money has flowed into Hillary Clinton's campaign, CNN on its own merits isn't held in high regard by too many conservatives. McCain's Camp undoubtedly recognized this, and dutifully prepared a response.

In what must be record time after the last GOP debate, McCain's campaign cut an ad featuring McCain's major applause line of the evening (See: Tied Up). It's that bit of brilliance that sets up this next move.

Yesterday, the campaign fired a volley back at CNN in a letter to supporters from Campaign Manager Rick Davis using the CNN attack as a fundraising peg. The letter itself became newsworthy, as papers like The Hill and others began reporting not just on the South Carolina McCain-supporter's choice of words, but also on the looming CNN vs. McCain dustup.

In a post at Red State, Soren Dayton amplified an interesting point: "CNN Goes Where Whoopi Won't." Adam C. also filed a report mentioning the CNN attack on Sen. McCain. Then came an AOL poll showing 67% of readers believed McCain "did a good job answering the question."

Just as blogger's like John Hinderaker at PowerLine were speculating about the meaning of McCain's comeback, the CNN story took another turn.

Enter Wolf Blitzer and The Situation Room. Blitzer delved into the McCain counterattack, the highlight of which was his guest Howard Kurtz succinctly stating that Rick Sanchez was way off base in his earlier comments. Sanchez tried to come back last night with a brief retort, but it was weak at best. Today, Whoopi brought the question back up for discussion, on The View, no less--but again, there she was offering a defense of John McCain.

So what can we conclude (besides that McCain's campaign has a lot of life left in it, and appears, in fact, to be on the rise)? Well, for starters, it's refreshing to see a GOP campaign have it "together" on Internet strategy and new media. Sure, you can argue McCain didn't have it so tough with that question. But imagine for a moment how some of the other candidates would have answered it...

My point is this: McCain and his campaign adroitly turned a potentially damaging "YouTube Moment" into a terrific fundraising/earned media opportunity. To be fair, they were aided by a sensationalist CNN anchor who appears to be trying to reach Keith Olbermann status. I'm sure there'll be plenty more "gotcha" YouTube moments ahead in the Presidential race. But at the end of the day, how many campaigns will successfully weather the storm, and indeed, come out on top, as McCain did?

WHAT MAINE REPUBLICANS CAN LEARN FROM JIM OGONOWSKI

Last Tuesday, political junkies from across America watched with limited interest as the Special Congressional Election in Massachusetts’ 5th District came to a close. With no Republican having won a Congressional election in Massachusetts since 1994, the talk at the water cooler at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee no doubt consisted of speculation as to the size of Niki Tsongas’ inevitable victory and the location of her new office once she arrived for work in Washington.

Democrats had good reason to be confident. Massachusetts’ 5th Congressional district boasts a mere 14% Republican registration and has not elected a Republican to Congress since Paul Cronin in 1974. Compound that with the fact that Democrat nominee Niki Tsongas (the wife of the late Congressman Paul Tsongas who happened to have been the one to defeat Cronin in ’76) has a “household” last name.

Pile on the fact that Bill Clinton, John Kerry and Ted Kennedy campaigned hard for Tsongas; she received the endorsement of every newspaper within a 50 mile radius of her district; and Emily’s List, the Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO poured money into the district to run up the score on her hapless Republican opponent who ended up being outspent by a margin of 4-1 come Election Day. Insider accounts are that the Tsongas media buy outweighed her opponent by an 80 to 1 ratio. National Democrats wanted to send a clear message that Republicans had no business running for federal office in Massachusetts.

(More after the jump...)

It looks like I was only a little early in my prediction of a Ron Paul $4 million quarter.

In a quarter when non-Hillary fundraising bottomed out, Ron Paul has shown Republicans that there is a price to be paid for not making the Web a central part of your strategy. Sure, top GOPers read the headlines about Obama's fundraising. But they waved it off as a Democrat phenomenon. Their philosophy: Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus -- and nothing about one side could every apply to the other.

Paul's nearly matching a weakened John McCain and quintupling offline darling Mike Huckabee could either be a much needed wake up call, or the morphine drip that keeps this top-down fear of the Internet going until catastrophe forces change.

On August 29, I helped organize the Conservative Modern Media Strategies Workshop in Washington, DC.

I spoke about the importance of effectively using social networks like myspace and facebook on the campaign trail. Here's a YouTube video of my lesson:

The video follows this PowerPoint presentation which you can follow through pretty easily:

Some of the audio is a little light because I wasn't mic'd with a wireless and I tend to walk away from the podium, but you should be able to get through it.

Hope this is helpful.

Mike Allen of the Politico reports on a new study by the E-Voter Institute which confirms what we've known all along: The Internet is the modern campaign trail, and you need to be working it if you're a political candidate (if you want to connect with folks, that is).

You don’t have to be a blogger to be involved. A study to be released by the E-Voter Institute this afternoon found that heavy consumers of online political information have “high rates of activism” that include e-mailing friends and family about a candidate, contributing online and attending events in response to e-mail.

“We detect a trend here,” the authors report. “In the old days, activists had to go somewhere to show their interest in a candidate or cause — attend a rally or fundraiser, participate in a phone bank at a campaign office, write a check and drop it in the mail.”

Now, though, virtual activists in what the report calls “the new political landscape” are telling their MySpace and Facebook friends about campaign rallies and candidate positions.

“While candidates have focused on collecting e-mail addresses, we see the rise of the online social networks as a way for the peer-to-peer communications that grassroots activists strive for to get their messages out,” adds the study, which is called “Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear: Change Is Accelerating in the Political Landscape.”

The only thing I'd change about this report is changing every use of the word "new" to "modern." How much longer can folks seriously call this stuff new?