Well, that’s… different. – What Sheep and Youtube have to do with California politics

Posted by wsewell on Feb 9th, 2010 | no comments

For this year’s Senate elections, the question isn’t if politicians will use social media, but how.

U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorna decided a video depicting her opponent as a wolf in sheep’s clothing who needed to be knocked off his pedestal (in the most literal way possible) would be part of her social media strategy.  Some are calling it the “worst political ad ever,” but Fiorna’s happy with the bizarre ad’s results and promises “more to come.”

If your motto is “all publicity is good publicity,” then maybe demonic sheep campaigns are for you.  This ad has certainly created a buzz, but not about the issues.

Here’s an article from the Wall Street Journal about the ad:

When U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina released a video depicting a California Republican primary opponent as a demonic sheep, the near-universal response was: This is baaad.

“Is this the worst campaign ad ever made?” asked a writer from left-leaning Atlantic Monthly magazine. A blogger for the conservative National Review found the metaphors confusing, writing “I think Carly Fiorna just put out an ad in which she tells voters: ‘I am the real sheep in this race.’” Others just felt bad for the guy who had to play the sheep.

But a couple of political pundits say those who are lambasting the ad are missing the point. “The fact that you and I are talking about it means it’s not the worst ad of all time,” says Democratic consultant Kam Kuwata.

Kuwata knows a thing or two about Golden State politics, having help run Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Senate campaigns. “The Fiorina campaign has to be ecstatic at the fact that Politico and the other blogs are saying it’s so bad, let me run it again for you,” he says.
Fiorina is one of three Republicans vying to unseat Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer in the November election.

The three-and-a-half minute ad released this week portrays former Rep. Tom Campbell, the early frontrunner in the Republican Senate primary, as a pure, fiscally conservative sheep on a pedestal that keeps growing taller. The Fiorina campaign’s video knocks that sheep off that pedestal – literally – and calls him a “FCINO,” or a fiscal conservative in name only. The last part of the ad shows a person in a sheep costume and crawling away on all fours, the glowing red eyes in the mask suggesting Campbell would lead the flock astray.

The commercial has generated tons of free press for the Fiorina campaign. Besides going viral online – check this out on Twitter – many national and local TV stations have done segments on the ad. As if to prove Kuwata’s point, MSNBC showed a clip of the ad as Washington Wire was interviewing Kuwata.

“I’m a campaign operative, and I’m not an artist,” Kuwata said. “What I have to do is have people talk about things. I want people to remember it. If you walk away at the end of the week and think, ‘Hey, Tom Campbell is for tax increases,’ it doesn’t matter if I ran the greatest ad of all time or the worst ad of all time. It means that people are talking about it.”

Barbara O’Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at California State University, Sacramento, said she personally found the ad “dumb” and far too long. But she said it was the first ad to get “cross-over” attention on both online social media sites and with the mainstream media. “That’s a new strategy in campaigning,” O’Connor says. “Whether the message itself is effective, the strategy is smart.”

The professor predicts that other campaigns will use the strategy. “You’re going to see more weird, bizarre and funny [campaign ads], because in persuasion theory, it’s an attention getter,” she says. You may not love it, but it does get your attention.”

For the record, Fiorina’s campaign says it’s thrilled about the response. “The whole intent behind it was to create something that’s different and controversial and would break through the clutter,” said spokeswoman Julie Soderlund.. Soderlund said the video was made by Fred Davis, who also made Sen. John McCain’s “Celebrity” ad during the 2008 presidential campaign as well as commercials for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006.

When asked if we can expect more ads in this vein, Soderlund promised with a laugh: “More to come! More to come!”

The Campbell campaign also had fun with the ad in an email blast to reporters Thursday. “Carly Fiorina’s campaign is in full Mutton Meltdown mode, with an increasingly bizarre fixation on farm animals,” said spokesman Jamie Fisfis. “She’s admitted missing a decade’s worth of opportunities to vote for budget reform, but instead of offering solutions, all she has for voters are dogs, cats and demon-sheep.”

The underdog in the Republican primary, state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, went a step further by registering www.demonsheep.org. Poking fun at the clunky FCINO acronym, the site calls itself S.F.T.E.O.D.S.F.O.P.D., or the Society for the Eradication of Demon Sheep from our Political Discourse.

“Please pledge your efforts to stop these Jawa-like, Terminator-esque, Demon Sheep from taking over California,” it reads, before asking for donations to the DeVore campaign.

Social media does it again – looking at Scott Brown’s win in MA

Posted by wsewell on Feb 5th, 2010 | no comments

Here’s a great article from John Cox about social media’s role in Scott Brown’s win.

The swearing-in this week of Republican Scott Brown as the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts caps a dramatic, come-from-way-behind election campaign that owes much, though not everything, to a shrewd use of online information technology and social networking.

Brown himself, even in his campaigns as a state senator from Wrentham, was an early and enthusiastic adopter of online campaigning, as opposed to merely using the Internet as an electronic brochure or an e-commerce channel for contributions. In doing so, his lieutenants borrowed much from the example of Barrack Obama’s successful presidential online organization.

For his run to fill a U.S. Senate seat held by Kennedy for decades, in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1, Brown invested early in an online campaign that drew supporters, turned them into active volunteers, contributors and advocates, and laid the foundation to exploit a tidal wave of excitement and enthusiasm that rose unexpectedly in the last weeks of the campaign. The image of Brown taking time to shake hands with every single supporter who showed up at his victory celebration the night of the election is an image of how he sees the online campaign: as a way of meeting and connecting with people who want to be involved.

Brown, then a state senator from the small town of Wrentham, about 40 miles southwest of Boston, had been considering a run for the Massachusetts governorship, but Kennedy’s death on Aug. 26 put the U.S. senate seat in play. The obstacles were formidable: Brown, with very limited name recognition, had to first win a primary, and then mount a six-week election campaign in a state where Republicans are as rare as New York Yankees fans. His likely Democratic opponent was state Attorney General Martha Coakley, whom polls showed comfortably leading the pack of lesser-known Democratic candidates as early as September.

Brown declared his candidacy on Sept. 12. His chief of new media, Canadian native Rob Willington, with a background in Mitt Romney’s presidential bid in 2008, promptly called on a new media consulting firm for Republican candidates, Prosper Group. (Willington didn’t respond to requests for an interview for this story.) Its job was to put together a campaign Web site and do it fast, says Kurt Luidhardt, a Prosper founder and principal.

Key to success: online organization

Brownforussenate.com was ready in less than a week, and it was designed with specific goals in mind, says Luidhardt, who provides his own glimpse inside the new media efforts here, and details of the “moneybomb” online fundraising project here.

“Rob and I both understood if Scott was going to be successful, he was going to have to organize effectively online,” he says. With an initial budget of just $1 million for the entire campaign, “they wouldn’t win via a TV ad blitz.”

But Brown had a different kind of capital. “Scott had [already] invested in online media,” Luidhardt says. “He had about 4,000 Facebook fans and a decent-sized e-mail list already.”

That was the foundation. “We made a conscious effort to focus on building up his social media following and the ‘Brown Brigade,’ a new social networking organization,” Luidhardt says. The Brown Brigade was created on the Ning social network platform, which provided a key way for volunteers to come together, coordinate and organize, entirely on their own.

The campaign Web site was designed for these kinds of people, those already favorably disposed toward Brown, and for the purpose of turning favorability into footwork. “We didn’t try to explain the policy positions or try to win over undecided voters. It was about building up the online supporters,” Luidhardt says.

Turning enthusiasm into action

And turning them into frontline organizers. There simply wasn’t enough time, or money, for traditional, on-the-ground, town-by-town organizing, Luidhardt says. The goal was to support his online supporters in organizing themselves, and recruiting them for specific, key campaign operations such as VoIP-based phone banks, including an innovative technique that let volunteers make VoIP calls from their own homes to targeted voters, with scripts, hints, follow-up details all captured by software.

Prosper Group’s software was loaded onto a server, creating instant phone banks for hundreds of volunteers at a rented hotel conference room, or via home broadband connection. Display-screen phones ran customized call scripts, had the ability to track online metadata about the calls and features to minimize some of the tediousness of constant calling. The techniques were used in last year’s Republican gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey.

Too often, Luidhardt says, candidates see and treat their Web site as an online brochure, with position papers, policy statements and photographs. “My experience is that the single most common characteristic of anyone visiting the campaign Web site is that they are supporters: they go because they want find out how to help or how to contribute. A lot of candidates waste way too much [Web] real estate trying to win over people who aren’t even coming to the Web site,” he says.

The Brown online resources were designed to move visitors to find a local campaign office; join the candidate on Facebook;  join the Brown Brigade; contribute or volunteer for a phone bank; tweet their followers; or post in their blog. The target audience for the Brown online campaign was the relatively small number of activists “who put in all the hours and work and contributions to fuel a campaign,” Luidhardt says.

About 1 million visitors found their way to the Web site. The Brown Brigade grew to 7,000 volunteers willing to work, friend, tweet, blog, phone and contribute. Ten thousand people volunteered for the “Phone from Home” campaign, who called at least one other prospective vote on Brown’s behalf.

The viral campaign: people “just ran with it”

The official Brown online presence spawned independent online activity. “What was missing is that they were getting local supporters but there was no [broader] visibility,” says John LaRosa, an independent Boston-area business and political consultant, and a Brown supporter. LaRosa began his own active Brown tweeting, as @jslconsulting, creating the Twitter hashtag #41stvote, a reference to the fact that Brown’s election would break the Democrats’ 60-vote filibuster-proof Senate majority.

“The 41stvotew hashtag crystallized things, I think, nationally,” LaRosa says. “That created urgency. Without urgency, you have no sale.” A Tweetstats analysis of @scottbrownma, shows that 41stvote was one of the top five words in that tweetcloud and one of the top five hashtags.

LaRosa also began leveraging his own online connections and networks on behalf of the Brown campaign. “I had personally followed some conservative bloggers, and I started commenting on their blogs, pitching the idea that Brown is the ’41st vote,’” he says. “Several of them, with big [online] followings began blogging and tweeting.” They also contacted mainstream media, such as conservative radio talkshow host Laura Ingraham

“I did not have interaction with the campaign staff,” LaRosa says. “I just ran with it. Lots of people like me just ran with it.”

In early January, several events crystallized Brown’s candidacy and brought national attention. On Jan. 5, a Rasmussen poll of likely voters found Brown trailing Coakley by only nine points, an unexpectedly narrow margin. “Rasmussen is on Twitter and that poll got spread by everybody who follows politics,” LaRosa says. “Every political junkie said ‘wow, this guy has a chance in the most liberal state.’ They all became reporters.”

On Jan. 9, Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-affiliated polling firm, reported that Brown was leading Coakley by one point. On Jan. 11, the Brown campaign launched a one-day effort to raise $500,000 online, a project dubbed the moneybomb.

The “moneybomb” detonates

Campaign workers tracked the contributions, reaching the goal by noon, and then topping $750,000 by late afternoon. “We were kind of watching on Twitter, and Facebook, and the blogs, and the volunteers were saying, ‘I think we can go to a million,’” Luidhardt recalls. In response, the campaign chiefs set a new goal of $1 million. By midnight, the total was over $1.3 million. The next day, the campaign raised the same amount again, and nearly $1.7 million the day after that.

“You can’t say social media made this happen,” LaRosa says. “But without it, it couldn’t have happened….It was the network set-up online that responded.”

Over the entire campaign, more than $12 million was raised, with Twitter being one of the largest fund-raising channels, according to Luidhardt. The influx of funds made it possible to pour a flood of money in the campaign’s last 10 days on conventional campaign tools such as TV, newspaper and radio ads.

But the money also went into Google ads, targeted at Republican-leaning districts close by the campaign’s 10 regional offices.  Willington called these “Google blasts” and they asked people to volunteer for the final weekend of the campaign. The offices were flooded with more volunteers than they could handle for the phone banks. Willington quickly had simple cell phone applications created. Volunteers downloaded them to get lists of targeted voters whom they could call with their cell phones.

The poll results and the over-the-top donations electrified the state and the nation. In just two days, for example, Twitter followers of @scottbrownma soared from 11,000 to more than 16,000, according to Twittergrader. The existing online campaign infrastructure was able to leverage that attention, with the local race fueling national commentary, blogging, Facebook activity and tweeting, feeding back through conventional media outlets and a web of interconnected social networks to local voters in Massachusetts.

Brown himself was part of this interconnectedness, Luidhardt says. “My pet peeve is that many candidates use Twitter as a press release distribution system. Scott’s tendency was to reply to posts….This played into the broad them of ‘the guy from Wrentham driving a truck,’ the guy next door, the fact that Brown was willing to interact.” Even before the U.S. Senate campaign, if Brown got a birthday announcement from one of his Facebook friends, he’d send a greeting in reply.

(Brown campaign manager Eric Fehrnstrom was quoted as saying that on election day, Brown was “calling through a list of hundreds of friends and neighbors to ask them to get out and vote.”)

Social media: “word of mouth, on steroids”

That interaction, even though necessarily limited given Brown’s grueling, indefatigable campaign schedule, critically involved Brown volunteers and supporters, on the Brown Bridage site, for example, interacting with each other, Luidhardt says. “We weren’t just sending them an e-mail and they were reading it. They talked among themselves, tweeted among themselves. They took a role.

“The best form of advertising is word of mouth,” LaRosa says. “This [social media] is word of mouth on steroids.”

The morning before election day, by one account, @scottbrownma had 10,214 Twitter follower compared to 3,520 for @marthacoakley; Brown had 76,700 Facebook fans compared to Coakley’s 14,487, a figure which almost sums up what happened the next day: Coakley was in effect left alone, while voters flocked to Brown.

Social networks are another way for you to interact with other people, he says. “There’s more to Twitter than tweeting. Most of the business of Twitter happens behind the scenes, and on phone calls like this one.”

“An engaged following is more likely to retweet, to comment on blogs, to respond to unfounded criticism,” LaRosa says. “They become connected to you and they feel it is in their interest to act. Some bloggers spend hours online posting links and blogging. It became a movement and it just fed on itself. It’s very hard to create that.”