Swing State Project

« VA-Gov: Jerry Kilgore a Tom DeLay Republican | Main | FL-Sen: Cruella De Vil for U.S. Senate »

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Netroots: The Internet is for Politics, Not Just Fundraising

Some really, really misguided people think that the internet should be used to raise money to buy ads to communicate. Others think that the internet can cut out the middleman and simply communicate -- even interact -- with the people.

Simple-minded people prefer to focus on dollars because they can quantify the results. So here's my quantification for all of the those people who insist on spam-fundraising: Bush Won:

SAN FRANCISCO--MICHAEL CORNFELD KNOWS WHY George W. Bush won last year's presidential election. Bush's camp, said Cornfeld, used the Internet to find volunteers and then gave them information to spread--via any medium at hand--to friends and neighbors. "The Bush campaign married software to Tupperware," Cornfeld, a senior consultant with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, said Monday at OMMA West. That Tupperware-software model, also known as word-of-mouth, isn't just used by politicians, said OMMA panelists. Established marketers Procter & Gamble also have been turning to word-of-mouth campaigns where consumers, in effect, become the salespeople.

In 2006, many campaigns could be run over by the cluetrain if they refuse to learn the lessons from past campaigns. The internet is part of the overall strategy, not a fundraising crutch. If the people at the top of a campaign flowchart aren't directing the online plan, then the campaign will probably fail as a post-broadcast strategy needs to be the focus of senior staff meetings, not something the youngest staffer is assigned to do following the meeting. Some people get it, some don't, and the online community will be watching as the contrast emerges.

Posted at 03:03 PM in Netroots | Technorati

Comments

I lost my temper with the Kerry Campaign and the pre-Dean DNC for exactly this reason. They just asked me for money. They didn't tell me useful facts, or tell me what they were going to do with my money. They just wanted my money.

And the DNC emails didn't even allow an email reply for feedback; worse, it was 5 minutes' work to figure out how to give them feedback, and when I did figure it out, it was a form that required that I basically turn over every piece of personal information I had short of a SSN.

Posted by: paperwight at June 7, 2005 08:33 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment