JUMP! New Media

You probably know by now that I head up communications and political strategy for the South Carolina Senate Republican Caucus. My counterpart in the State House is bright communications strategist Jason Zacher. To say we have a large majority of members who are gun shy when it comes to social media is a MASSIVE understatement.

Together Jason and I developed a 10 page white paper to introduce South Carolina’s Republican legislators to social media. This is the first of many, which will dive in deeper to explain each social network, its value to candidates and elected officials, and how to use it effectively and strategically. While it was written for SC’s legislators, we think you’ll find it useful too.

Here is one section of our paper titled “You Can No Longer Afford To Ignore Social Media.” We invite you to fill in the form at the bottom of this sample and a link to the whole white paper will be emailed directly to you with with in minute.

The Benefits of Social Media in Politics

Social Media tools are all about connecting and organizing. In the not too recent past, reaching voters centered on newspaper advertising, 30-second radio spots, direct mail, community events and going door-to-door by relying on instantly out-of-date voter files. Actively recruiting volunteers, soliciting donations and securing support went
the same way. Social media isn’t going to replace these tactics, which all remain an important part of campaign strategy.

But having Facebook and Twitter profiles, and a Facebook fan site, you reach out and remain in touch with supporters and average voters who are interested in the election or current policy. You and/or a member of staff can list events where the candidate or official will be, organize fundraising drives and keep followers apprised of campaign goings-on, policy stances and current legislation. People who have decided to keep up with you will see the updates in a regular feed.

What is truly exciting about Social Media in politics is that it can truly build a “tribe” around you—as best-selling author Seth Godin has coined the term.

Let’s say you’re a candidate in a State House race, and you have a fairly active profile on Facebook—say 500 users. Many of these folks will be family and friends who live out-of-state, but it’s certainly possible that as many as 100 or 200 are people who live in your district or in your community.

That is the direct reach of your Social Media network.

These people are connected to you and connected to their friends willingly. Contacting them isn’t as intrusive as a phone call or even a knock on the door. They’re in a comfort zone with their friends. It’s like the phone bank where friends call their friends. We all know that is much more effective than a paid phone bank, or even you, making the calls.

So you send a message asking them to support you in Tuesday’s election. Or you tell them about the latest vote you cast, op-ed you wrote, or news story about you. You just reached the 200 people who live in your community.

But your network goes much further. Let’s say a quarter of your “friends” – 50 people – turn around and put a message about you in their profile and they know 50 people who are voters in your district. You just got your message out, through trusted sources, to as many as 2,500 voters. If 8,000 or 10,000 votes can win you an election, that is a significant message.

Remember, these are affluent, educated people who tend to be motivated voters. They’re the folks who show up in huge numbers on election day.

That is the power of your social network.

Just fill out this form and we will email you a copy of ‘You Can No Longer Afford To Ignore Social Media‘ right now.

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I couldn’t have been more proud to sit in the back of the room and watch Jim DeMint during his speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee. This was a quiet Congressman I met in 2003 — hired as the fourth staffer on his primary campaign — who has become a national rock star. He’s done good work, but what’s amazing is that he’s become this rock star for a very simple reason: He tells the truth and sticks to his beliefs.

It’s both exciting and sad to see. It’s exciting to see someone like Senator DeMint become so popular, but it’s sad that he’s become popular for something as simple as sticking to our party’s principles. That goes to show how far our party and our nation have gotten off track.

While our party needs people to reach across the aisle to form compromises, it must have a large contingent of people to drive it to the right. If all we have are moderates who compromise, our nation will surely go to the left. By recruiting and standing beside leaders like Marco Rubio and Chuck DeVore, Jim DeMint forces our party to the right, which forces the moderates to compromise far less of our conservative values.

We need to compromise to move our nation forward, but we don’t need to sell the entire farm.  Senator DeMint is one of the only people in Washington reminding us of that. Here’s where the rubber meets the road – you need both moderates and conservatives to get proper legislation passed while in the majority and put the breaks on Democrats’ free-spending ways while in the minority.

It doesn’t make sense to have a party that keeps giving up this or that to mollify Congressional liberals, and it doesn’t make sense to not compromise under any circumstances. The U.S. Congress is not a European parliament. There are 535 members, and they all have a say. Members get elected to get things done.

South Carolinians seem to have figured this out. Our state is a tried-and-true conservative bullwork, sending two men to the Senate who represent both wings of the Republican Party. Lindsey Graham is more willing to compromise to get legislation passed. While Jim DeMint and others like him keep up the pressure to make sure those compromises are in the best interest of our state and nation.

Without Jim DeMint, we’d all be in a much worse position than how things are right now, and he’ll be a leader to turn it around when the GOP regains the majority. And that’s why I’m proud to stand with Jim DeMint.

This week, the former speechwriter for former Gov. Jim Hodges – and current associate with Qorvis Communications — Wyeth Ruthven, came up with an analysis of Twitter use in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial campaigns, as well as the special election for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts.

No matter your political stripe, it’s possible to take some lessons from what he put together. One main takeaway is to look at everything Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds did, and do the opposite.

According to the analysis, the Deeds campaign had three separate Twitter accounts – one for the candidate (@CreighDeeds), one for attacks on Republican nominee Bob McDonnell and connections with rural voters (@DeedsCountry) and one attacking McDonnell’s thesis and controversy surrounding it (@BobsThesis). Needless to say, doing a three-pronged Twitter strategy is not a good idea.

Ruthven makes the point: “Campaigns should resist the temptation to create a new Twitter account for each issue or micro-campaign that they are running. Multiple accounts breed message dilution. Staff should limit their own tweeting on campaign topics. Recurring issues and themes can be highlighted by creating appropriate hashtags on a unified Twitter feed.”

And while it’s great to hear that Deeds is such a big fan of groups like the Drive-By Truckers and The Band, having your candidate for governor tweet about how he’s listening to the bands while on the road, as opposed to thoughts on topical issues, is not a good idea, either. According to the study, over a three-month period, Deeds tweeted about music 39 times, and talked about his transportation plan – a major issue in Virginia — once.

As I’ve said before, the Internet is a tool of a wider effort. Scott Brown’s campaign in Massachusetts seemed to understand this. There was a period between the end of the primaries and when the general election campaign began in earnest. Shortly after the primaries, the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, went dark on ads and on Twitter. Brown did not. While continuing his free and paid media blitz, his campaign also kept it up on Twitter. In the first month of the general election campaign, he out-tweeted Coakley by about two-to-one.

It’s worth pointing out here that Brown had 15,827 followers, as opposed to Coakley’s 4,361. He also happened to tweet more unique news, “calls to action,” and “self-promotion.” Again, here’s why Twitter can be an effective tool. A “call to action,” as defined in the analysis, consists of requests for donations, volunteers, voter registration and get-out-the-vote. A campaign isn’t meant to be on Twitter to be your pal, it is supposed to be organizing to win. Brown did that.

If you want your tactics on the Internet to be effective, don’t play around with Twitter like it’s a toy. Sure, it might be fun to think that a few people would like to see the personal side of your candidate, but that isn’t going to convince them to help you stuff envelopes, knock on doors, write letters to the editor or contribute.

PNN’s Happy Hour with Phil and Wesley was sponsored this week by Ragley Public Affairs. Please follow Jay W Ragley at twitter.com/ragley.

A big thank you to our special guests:

Brad Warthen: bradwarthen.com

Wes Wolfe: wolfereports.com

And a big thank you to Wild Hare Sports Cafe in Columbia, SC for hosting us. Visit them at wildharecsportscafe.com.

PNN’s Happy Hour: Episode 2 from Wesley Donehue on Vimeo.

Some political Internet “experts” think that the Internet is the end-all be-all of campaigns, but it’s only one part. Successful campaigns aren’t built around the Web alone. They are built around strategies that use a wide variety of tools and tactics including television, direct mail and the Internet.

Recently, a study was released by the Pew Research Center. The news, as it was cribbed from the study by the mainstream media and blogs, was that the entire nation was moving over to the Internet to get its news. According to the report, about 61 percent of Americans get at least some of their news from the Internet.

Hearing news like that might make some campaign consultants concentrate on the Web as a strategy on the level of a get-out-the-vote-effort. That would be a mistake.

As Gary Vaynerchuk says in the video, it’s all about extending the story. The Internet is not an end in itself. For every television advertisement, for every radio advertisement, for every direct mail piece, use that medium for exactly what it is supposed to do. But don’t stop there. That doesn’t mean just linking the website. It means extending the story with an extremely strong strong appeal to visit the Web site. Just think about the GoDaddy commercials. Then you can et people to engage with the candidate via Facebook, Twitter and whichever other social media in which the campaign is engaged.

In this way, you can connect the voters on multiple platforms. Something left out of many of the stories about the Pew research is that only two percent of Americans get all of their information from the Internet. Therefore, having an Internet operation running in a vacuum will not help.

Another statistic from the study is that 92 percent of people in this country get their news from multiple platforms. To repeat a modern political cliché, you have to go to where the voters are. They aren’t all on the Internet, or going to the Internet first. But the people who are most likely to vote and most likely to contribute will end up on the Web. That’s why it’s very important that if you want to win, you have to combine traditional and online marketing strategies.

I’m excited to launch our first Political Net News Happy Hour today with my good friend, and Senate Democrat counterpart, Phil Bailey. Phil and I will be stopping by a local Columbia bar each week to talk about politics, host guests, and answer your questions. We hope you’ll stop in.

I’ll post a much better quality version in the next couple days. For now, here’s our Ustream webcast.

Check out Wesleys CPAC Journey by watching the clips below. What did I do when Wesley was away? Ran the JUMP! show and went on the Joe Means Jobs Tour!

Jump New Media is excited that Wesley worked the bootcamp at CPAC. Watch the video below and look for his words of wisdom.

Last week Congressman Wilson kicked off the Joe Means Jobs Tour around the district to speak with families, businesses and friends about how we can change Washington and create jobs.

On the tour, I took tons of pictures and videos with Congressman Wilson so people who could not join him could hear and see what is really going on around South Carolina.

The tour began with a live Webcast last Tuesday afternoon followed by a Tele-Town hall that had nearly 10,000 people listening in!

If you are interested in checking out more about the tour, all you need to do is visit JoeMeansJobs.com to watch the webcast, listen to the Town Hall, and click on the map icons to view the pictures and videos from the road!

It was a busy week for Team Wilson, but we worked hard and are already looking forward to the next part of the tour.

Recently I’ve teamed up with three different people on three different projects to offer my advice to new politicos looking to launch aggressive web campaigns. It’s very difficult to organize so much into something so streamlined and organized. My thoughts are often all over the place because I’m used to thinking about a specific strategy and how to build tactics using various mediums, but while teaching a seminar a couple weeks ago, a young lady asked me “where should campaigns spend the most time and effort?”

It’s hard to think about just one medium and how it can singularly be used for success. That’s like asking how to win a football game with just a wide receiver and no backs.

Lately my thoughts have centered on Facebook. I love Twitter and YouTube and I have a renewed obsession with Google, but I always come back to Facebook. I think its because over the last few days I sat and watched my mother-in-law spend every free minute on the social network.

I don’t think she’ll mind me louding her out. All her friends saw her there anyway thanks to the snappy little chat feature in the bottom right hand corner.

A recent study showed that it didn’t matter if a person did or did not regularly read a print newspaper – they all are now more likely to get their news from online. A 2008 poll revealed that 80 percent of Americans over 17 say that the Internet is “a critical source of information.”

Here’s the big news folks – as people move toward the web to get their news, they are staying there to connect other people, something that cannot happen with television or direct mail.

According to Nielsen, “member communities” (social networking and blogging) are now the fourth most popular Internet activity, even surpassing personal email. Also, time spent on social networking and blogging sites has grown by three times the rate of the rest of the Internet. In terms of time spent, between December 2007 and December 2008, Facebook saw a massive increase of 566 percent. It’s not just teenagers and college students, either.

Facebook launched in 2004, primarily as a place for college students to get together, get in contact with each other and find students of a like mind. In the past six years, it’s grown and expanded, and now most new Facebook users are middle-aged.

Like my mother-in-law, people are spending much more time on the social networks and as I tell my clients “go where the people are.” People visit blogs, and watch videos, and even fly with little twitter birds, but they play on Facebook. That’s where they get hooked.

That’s what I told the young lady who asked me where to spend the most time and effort. A smart Internet strategy utilizes many mediums, but if you’re going to concentrate on just one, go with Facebook.