David Plouffe: Negative Viral Emails as Bad as Negative TV Ads

Just off a conference call to promote Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s new (and so-far excellent) book about the 2008 race, which I’m currently about 3/4 of the way through — more about that soon. On the call, though, I got to ask a question about the behind-the-scenes smear emails that circulated regularly throughout the campaign — what did the campaign do to respond that was most effective, and how should future political operations reply to similar tactics?

Young Political Candidates Confronted by Digital Past on Facebook

Last spring Emanuel Pleitez, 26, ran for California's 32nd Congressional seat in a special election to replace Hilda Solis, the new secretary of labor.

During the campaign, one of Pleitez's opponents, California State Sen. Gil Cedillo, discovered photos from Pleitez's Facebook profile that showed Pleitez hanging around with various women at parties. The Cedillo campaign used the photos as the basis for a mailer that was sent to homes in the district. The mailer presented Pleitez as a partier, drinker and womanizer, among other smears.

Do Republicans Trail in Using Technology?

At the Republican Governor's Association meeting, former Rep. John Kasich (R-OH) blasted his party for not embracing the newest communication tools, the Washington Post reports.

Said Kasich: "I think Republicans need to learn to communicate with the tools of the 21 st century. The women in Iran have been more effective using Twitter than House Republicans have been getting their message out to the country. We need to embrace the modern tools of the 21 st century.... Let's get with it with this stuff."

New Flip Video Cameras to Have Wi-Fi

Cisco’s popular Flip camcorder has helped sparked a revolution in digital and online video. By making video recording quick and easy to record and upload, millions of random moments have been captured (and then summarily uploaded to YouTube).

And last but not least...a major win for Republicans -

Republicans Get the Bill Online Before Democrats

How's that for transparency?

Today I encountered one of the most refreshing, down-to-earth politicians I have ever met. Jason Chaffetz (Rep. 3rd District, Utah) spoke completely transparent and without pretense at the Heritage Foundation today. He impressed me with his desire to have a tight budget and low spending during his campaign for Congress in 2008, even despite overwhelming odds against a winning campaign. Chaffetz ran against RNC-backed Chris Cannon and won while spending about 1/6 of the money. Chaffetz said he made the decision to run against Cannon because, "he failed us (Republicans) for not instituting conservative principles in campaign finance and sticking to limited spending."

Chaffets attributes his election to his online presence, use of social media and personal calls and visits. He told of a time he drove an hour and a half to visit with three people. "I was willing to do things most people weren't," Chaffetz said. 

In regards to social media, he says too many members in the House are afraid of Facebook and Twitter. That's what I appreciated most about Chaffetz today: He didn't seem to have much of a filter when talking. You could tell he wasn't thinking, "how is this going to sound?," or "is this politically correct?" He was raw, yet well spoken. "You have to be comfortable with who you are," Chaffetz said today in response to a question regarding his succesful popularity. 

He also commented that the managment of a politican's Twitter and Facebook accounts "are not staff jobs, once people recognize it's you, well, they like that." I agree, there's nothing more frustrating than having a conversation with a ghostwriter. Chaffetz personally sends his facebook fans happy birthday messages. He said it communicates care not only to the individual, but also to the 500 potential others who may see it.

His website www.Chaffetz.house.gov is extremely fun and interactive with many videos. There are chances to personally contact Chaffetz, follow him on Twitter  or become his facebook fan. (He expressed disappointment with facebook's policy of a 5,000 friend cap on a profile because he feels his fan page doesn't allow him the personal touch his profile once did). On his website there's even a mini-series called "The Freshman" that documents Chaffetz's first year in Congress.

If I lived in Utah I'd vote for him. In fact, I hope his honest grassroots efforts will proliferate in Congress and inspire more young and truly conservative politicians. 

Today and tomorrow, at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet is holding its annual Politics Online Conference in conjunction with Politics Magazine. 

Besides the obvious networking and educational benefits that come from conferences like this, this year's conference is particularly important in the life of this blog as it accepts the Golden Dot Award for Best Blog for National Politics at the conference's cocktail party later tonight.

I will update later with flip video and pictures from the conference and awards ceremony, but here are a few observations from my morning at the Reagan Building:

- Twitter is assuming a larger role than ever in forming unique conversations: this year's conference organizers, in addition to creating the #polc09 hashtag for the entire conference, have assigned unique hashtags to each of the breakout rooms, encouraging participants to communicate with each other and the panelists during breakout sessions.  Walking around the Reagan building, it's almost impossible to avoid the myriad of signs informing participants of Twitter's vibrant presence at this year's conference. 

- The "Geek Lab," hands-on demonstrations of technologies hosted by, among others, Google and Politics.com, will be open in the Atrium for the remainder of the conference.  This seems like a great way to translate theoretical knowledge to practical use, and I'm planning on stopping by later tonight to try it out.

-  It's clear that people attending the conference come from a wide variety of backgrounds.  During this morning's breakout session on reaching people via the internet, the woman to the right of me was from the National Association of Realtors and, after I left, I ran into a friend who works in a district Congressional office in Michigan. 

In addition to receiving an award tonight, TechRepublican will also be popping in during tomorrow's session as Joe Mansour participates in a panel on Social Media Analytics at 2PM in the main ballroom.

See you there!

While the Obama Transition Team has made it a priority to provide constituents with the ability to offer their ideas and feedback on issues that are important to them, this communication is usually only one way, and certainly doesn't provide individuals with the opportunity to seek feedback and input from other interested parties.

Obviously, the Obama Transition Team hasn't enabled these features because it would be a nightmare to manage.

However, these voids create opportunities for creative people to roll out their own projects that include features that simply wouldn't work for the transition team website.

In particular, ObamaCTO.org has done an awesome job creating a forum for Americans interested in technology policy and the prospect of the first White House Chief Technology Officer.

This site was created by FrontSeat.org, and is powered by UserVoice, a robust, easily-integration program that allows users to vote on submissions.

For this site, each submission is a user-generated suggestion for which tech policy issue should be a priority for the Obama Administration. As of 11/21/2008, the five suggestions with the highest vote totals are as follows:

1. Ensure the Internet is widely accessible & network neutral
2. Ensure our privacy and repeal the patriot act.
3. Repeal the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA)
4. Open Government Data (APIs, XML, RSS)
5. Kick Start Research and Innovation in Energy

The most popular (no surprise, net neutrality) has already received over 11,000 votes. Since UserVoice enables you to allocate up to three votes per item, this means that at least 3,666 individuals have voted on this item since it was posted nine days ago.

Will the Obama Administration visit this site? Who knows. But at minimum, it provides an opportunity to at least try and have your voice heard regarding tech policy.

The day after the presidential election, when everyone else is celebrating or mourning, a transition team will be working – to prepare for the day the new president will take office. The transition process itself is extremely complex and will happen during a short, three-month period. This handover of power will involve an unprecedented amount of information and will require fast, effective communication. The transition team must make the most of modern social technology to shape, coordinate, and run the process of moving the next president into office. Here are some suggestions on how that can work.

What’s the transition team?

The transition team has many responsibilities. They are concerned about staffing the White House, vetting potential cabinet members, developing advisory councils, recruiting lower-level personnel, coordinating with the outgoing administration, communicating with key outside advisors and leaders in government and the private sector, and drafting an initial presidential agenda. Also, in the executive branch agencies, team members have three main jobs: analyzing the overall organization and function of parts of the executive branch, reassessing key senior personnel positions and responsibilities, and looking at pressing and long-term issues in specific subject-matter areas.

Previous administrations – and ultimately the American people – have suffered from poor communication and coordination during transition periods. For example, the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident occurred in Somalia at the time of the Bush 41-to-Clinton transition, and the “Bay of Pigs” occurred during the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition. Ultimately, it can be argued that these crises, and numerous others, boil down to a lack of communication, coordination, and collaboration between old and new administrations.

Technology in the transition

During the Clinton-Bush transition to the 43rd presidency, we were just past the Y2K confusion and at the peak of the dot-com bubble; Time-Warner purchased AOL; Microsoft released Windows 2000 and was in the middle of an antitrust case; Netscape launched its open-source Navigator 6.0 browser; Wikipedia did not yet exist; and the first true online short film debuted.

Now, presidential campaigns are longer, pricier, and more stressful, and the government is larger. The U.S. is also in the middle of numerous critical world events. In this transitory period, personal connections between the people involved are all-important. How might social technologies, which inherently act to bring people and ideas together (for example, Tip’d, a community for exchanging finance news), improve the transition process?

The Transparent Transition

The transition team will face many challenges. They need to understand the institutional memory of the Office of the President and the executive branch agencies. The president-elect must be made aware of issues that could affect national security and other vital interests. There will be a large recruitment effort – up to 70,000 applications will come in - to seek out individuals with required expertise to staff the incoming administration. The transition team will be overwhelmed with advice from think tanks, experts, interest groups, lobbyists, governors, legislators, and donors. And within cabinet departments, small teams will be preparing materials for cabinet and sub-cabinet heads, teeing up important upcoming issues, and reorganizing resources and personnel.

Social software has many applications here. Tools like blogs, wikis, and collaborative software can be useful internally to make information more widely available, searchable, and discoverable, and it can also promote and aid discussions between relevant transition personnel with areas of overlap. Experts can now also conduct briefings remotely using videoteleconferencing, present information via secure webpages and internal wikis, and conduct real-time discussions and make document modifications using collaborative software and chat tools. Private social networks with blogging, etc. are readily available, whether highly secure like INTELINK, or more causal like GovLoop.

Social software like knowledge management tools, collaborative software, advanced Internet search algorithms, and knowledge of online social networks like the increasingly popular Facebook could also facilitate the vetting of job candidates from outside the government, and possible recruitment and promotion from within it.

With regard to handling all the incoming “advice,” some social tools like CreateDebate allow coordination of formal debates so as to allow actionable conclusions from what might at first seem like the chaos of many opinions. And the new administration might consider using social software like PolicyPitch to reach out to stakeholders as well.

Finally, social software would enable teams interacting with different departments to share information and advice while they perhaps struggle to obtain information or solve problems. Software like CollectiveX can also be used to coordinate informal social networks and organize advisory groups of outside-subject-matter experts to advise the transition team members, keep track of discussions, and include people who cannot attend in person.

Risks During the Transition

Once the president takes office, there is a very real chance of a crisis that will test the new administration. Both World Trade Center incidents occurred in the first year of a new presidency; there are numerous examples of other such incidents in the window around elections from other countries as well.

Social software could bolster formal and informal networks of communication that in turn could help to avert such incidents or react more efficiently to them. This applies not just to intelligence analysts and disaster relief workers but also to “ordinary” government staff. For example, each president organizes his staff in a very personal manner; while surely well-reasoned this has side effects. Staff with insufficient titles cannot go to certain parts of the White House; e.g., the Mess. So, if (say) a senior policy advisor outranks a deputy speechwriter, they might not informally see each other very often. Social media can help create more soft interactions that bypass physical separations. Similar to using Twitter, every morning each staff member could answer the question, “What are you working on?” in 140 characters or less, with the resulting internal data being simple, searchable, discoverable, and archivable.

Governing is very different from campaigning; the president must look out for the needs of the entire nation. Social software can help with this too. Microblog websites – for example, this one dealing with the election – offer real-time information on public discussions people are having on the Internet. Quantifying public sentiment is important for reaching out, listening, and engaging the citizens post-election, and for influencing new policies.

Finally, citizens should be engaged in the transition process, and understand what increased risks there may be during that period. In an increasingly fragmented media and information society, that level of engagement requires more than a press release and newspaper coverage. It means full multimedia engagement using blogging, speeches, informal gatherings, mobile technologies, podcasts, online video, and widgets. The outreach should also use social tools that allow bidirectional conversation, increasing citizen participation and interest in government.

- - - -
Dr. Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow directing the Social Software for Security (S3) project at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government.

I fall into the percentage of people who made up their minds on who they were voting for a long time ago. When it became exceedingly clear that John McCain was the Republican nominee for President I threw my full support behind him. Not because I’ve grown up a Conservative Republican or a knee jerk reaction to tow the party line but because as the clear winner of the nomination, McCain is better equipped and experienced to lead this greatest nation through seemingly insurmountable odds than Barack Obama [and Hilary Clinton at the time] could. Insurmountable odds ranging from terrorism, to war, to rogue nations, to the economy, to energy independence and in turn allowing America to continue in freedom, liberty, and prosperity.

It will take nothing less than a miracle for me to change my vote. It is set in stone, inscribed in steel. After me and others like me, there is a percentage of people who make up their mind of who they are going to vote for between the nomination on up through to the end of the party convention. This makes up the majority of voters and I presume it is hard to change the minds of these voters to switch candidates. Now is the time when the campaigns are not trying to sway us so much as they are trying to sway those that are undecided. According to the ANES, American National Elections Studies, since 1948 to 2004 an average of 19.4% decide post convention, an average of 12.3% decide in the final two weeks, and an average of 4.8% decide on election day. In general, ’04 was even below the average.

Both campaigns are trying to reach these undecided voters through different means, one of which is asking help from us in volunteering to fill phone banks and talk to friends and strangers telling them why we are voting for [in our case] McCain.

How do we go about telling others why we support and are voting for McCain? I’ve spent the last several days poring over articles written by or linked from primarily Patrick Ruffini and David All [found in various locations]. It has been a confirmation of what I and others in the Republican party have noticed and have been frustrated about for some time and that is Democrats have been more adept at spreading their message across utilizing new mainstream/cutting edge technology. Using technology to get our message across is something we Republicans need to start tapping in to.

I think I’ve found a way that we can tell our personal reasons why we are supporting and voting for McCain/Palin that can far outreach our neighborhoods and cities, reaching the nation and trickling past our borders. A grassroots ad campaign starring regular Americans like us saying why we are for McCain/Palin. It would be through a little service called 12seconds.tv. What is 12seconds? Think twitter with video, where you upload a video but are limited to 12 seconds.

How would this work? Details can be found at the 12sec.R.ads website but as a quick run through: Record a 12 second video saying why you support the McCain/Palin ticket, e-mail to 12sec.R.ads, follow the 12sec.R.ads channel, and add @12secRads on twitter. Record and send in as many as you would like. If you can say why you are voting for McCain/Palin in 12 seconds, you can have your own ad in support.

You can always try requesting an invite from 12seconds.tv to create your own channel. Any videos that you upload that you would like to be an ad in support for McCain/Palin be sure to include in the tag or description “12secRad”.

I’d like to thank techRepublican for providing the exposure for this endeavor because as described in “How to Get On-Air, All the Time” by Patrick Gavin in Politics Magazine, techRepublican is “…a site dedicated to helping conservatives utilize Internet technology and opportunities…”.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Game Platforms as Politcal Platforms, TechPresident

John McCain's campaign release of the online game "Pork Invaders,"
as a Facebook application, wasn't a game changer but a prelude of
future message strategy. Video games will be added to the multitude of
political channels that a political campaign must have a presence on.
Microsoft has now announced what could become the "YouTube" of video
games -- Xbox LIVE Community Games.

...

In the 2008 presidential election campaign season, more channels of
communication than ever before have been used to reach us. It is not
unfathomable that a future political message strategy incorporates an
addictive arcade game to their arsenal.

Barack Obama Still Leads the Online Buzz Race, but McCain is Gaining Some Ground, LA Times

The place where McCain really gained ground was website video streams. Possibly because of McCain's controversial ad comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears,
total streams viewed on JohnMcCain.com more than doubled in July to
1.01 million, Nielsen said. (The ad was immensely popular online,
although it didn't appear on the site until July 31). Videos viewed on
Obama's site dropped to 502,000 in July from 967,000 in June.

...

While Obama's website prominently touts the VP announcement messages on
its home page ("Who will be Barack's VP? Be the first to know"),
McCain's site offers no similar feature. A McCain spokesman said today
he was unaware of any plans to reveal his vice presidential choice via
e-mail and texting.

The House adjourned this morning without considering energy legislation. Nancy Pelosi and company were quick to make an exit, turning off the lights and the microphones in their wake. But some House Republicans stayed on the floor. At 3:30pm, they're still on the floor staging what's being called an "uprising" and a "revolt."

The lights are off. The microphones are off. CSpan isn't taping it. Nancy Pelosi "sent Capitol Police to clear the press gallery [and] lock the doors" according to news on RedState, but "Reps. Bunt, Shadegg, and Hoekstra have been taking turns remaining with media in the gallery in order to keep it open."

This revolution is not being televised. But thanks to online communication we know about it. It's on blogs like RedState, it's on the Twitter feeds of Reps. Culberson, Boehner, and Hoekstra. And now it's spreading as one person brings it up to another. I just mentioned it to a non-political friend in Texas. Her response? "Wow. This is like old school politics. This is amazing!"

This revolution is not being televised, but who the hell cares? To borrow from Rep. Culberson's tweet this morning: "Here is a powerful use of social media - when they turn off the mike we can still communicate."

Writing in the Boston Globe recently Dan Gillmor states in a lenghtly piece. about using technology to save the Presenditial debates.....

"A second approach would be even more ambitious: A debate that would unfold online over the course of days, or even weeks and months. Imagine that one candidate takes a position and poses a question. The opponent would answer with a written response of some predetermined length, but with the help of staff, experts, and the general public. Then the first candidate, again with the help of anyone who wants to join the process, would dissect the response and reply with (we'd hope) a truly nuanced update. Continue this process at length - and repeat it with many other topics.

What would the site look like? What technologies would we use? I have my own ideas, and have posted them on my blog (citmedia.org/blog), but I'm just one person; we need a collective effort to figure this out, using much the same iterative process. The specific tools are less important than the willingness to deploy them."

His follow up suggestions at his blog are posted here.