Gubernatorial Candidate Christian Fong Tweet Has Deep Meaning for Candidates

Here’s a tweet I spotted this morning from Iowa Gubernatorial candidate Christian Fong:

christianfong: WSJ tracks % of people dropping landlines in favor of cell phones here http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/ Are you one of them? I am.

You can explore the data in the WSJ article but you already know the trend.  Cell phones are in the hands of just about everyone today and those abandoning a land line and going “cell only” are on the rise.  This data is census related and years old.  Take a look around now.  I know many families who have given their children phones before their 10th birthday.  Go to any gathering of twenty-somethings and overwhelmingly they’re carrying smart phones.

Bringing it Home

1. Each year more people abandon traditional media in favor of mobile media.
   
2. You can’t spam market to cell phones.
   
3. If you’re not delivering content online you’re invisible to an increasing percentage of society (including me).
   
4. SMS text message marketing is a powerful tool in your arsenal because those people have raised their hand and said YES to one-on-one marketing.
5. When’s the last time you used a phone book? (There isn’t a cell phone – phone book in the traditional sense).
6. What device or mode of communication (or entertainment or content delivery) is typically “always on and always on the hip” of most people you know today?
   

So if you plan on winning your race for mayor, city council, Governor or U.S. Senator do you get it?

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• My Landline (seeingtheforest.com)

Why Hasn’t Obama Given Me Insurance Yet?

I had a chat recently with a small business owner about the use of interactive marketing in her business.  I mentioned ORS and our involvement in conservative politics and technology.  Two amazing things came from the conversation.  Both things blew me away.

1. When I mentioned that I founded Operation Red State and that we’re helping conservative candidates drive to victory…the business owner was stunned.  “Wow I totally thought you were a liberal Democrat.” “Why’s that?” I queried…having never remotely come close to talking politics.  “You’re just young and hip and…” She was really shocked.  First I’m not that young at 37 and my gray hair most often puts me into the “early 40’s” set when people take random guesses.  I know why she assumed this. It’s my use of technology.  She equates knowledge and leverage of modern tools with Democrats.  She has few reasons to think otherwise…but this is part of our problem and mission at ORS.  We’ve met candidates around the nation.  Few are under 45 and most see technology as a “thing to do because we have to” not a critical part of the campaign on equal footing as messaging and traditional communications.  The business owner went on to explain that she’s an Independent and that led to my next shocking moment.
2. She explained to me how she was having a chat with her younger twenty something relative.  The relative explained how she was putting off purchasing insurance through her employer because Obama said he would provide it.  Let that sink in.  The relative explained that she didn’t understand why she didn’t have a free insurance plan yet since Obama said he would do that for her.  She was dismayed and asked, “Do you think this will happen soon?”  Wow.  Double Wow.  I won’t make blanket generalizations about folks in their early 20’s but this is one key driver of why our President is in office.  He drove the youth vote.  Think back to your 20’s.  Did you buy into what politicians said back then with far less critical analysis than you do today? (On both Red and Blue sides).  While I was shocked…I wasn’t surprised that this young person was waiting for her Obamacare policy to kick in at our expense.  Or…rather at her expense when she figures out that “single zero” new workforce entrants pay through the nose ring for services that others use.  Ah the transition from liberal to conservative.  I remember those paychecks getting tagged with a total of 46% factoring in all taxes at that age.  Want to show kids how important it is to be a conservative?  Pay them enough to be put into the “rich” category right out of school.

Wanted:  Young and inexperienced go getter willing to earn $15,000/month gross to demonstrate how fast one can transition from liberal to conservative.

Listening on the Web

Listening on the web is vital to creating, cultivating, and managing your online reputation (ORM).  Today, individuals and companies are starting to realize that their brands are not really their own.  Rather brands are a mashup of what information YOU push out, crowd reaction, blog comments, twitter “tweets”, links from other people and whatever else sticks.  This ORS course is presented with audio and a PDF that will help you the candidate take advantage of listening online.  This could be the MOST powerful tool in your campaign arsenal over the long haul.  Our logged in subscribers will find the audio course and PDF below and in the sidebar respectively.  If you’re still considering a subscription, we thank you for your continued readership and hope to earn your business soon.
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Everybody Wants to be Obama

In politics, when someone comes up with a new secret sauce, the masses are sure to follow…trying to cipher the recipe with a dash of this and a dash of that.  The Obama campaign’s secret sauce was engagement and conversion.  Their team understood that “being there” wasn’t enough.  They got people to ACT.  They got people to give dollars.  Now, others like Vogue Magazine are engaging some of the data wizardry of Blue State Digital, a key variable in the Obama victory equation, to teach them some lessons.

I do believe there are serious challenges in bringing Obama like success to brands.  But candidates and companies alike can take away some clear ingredients albeit without the proper proportions.

1. Engage on many platforms because it’s not up to you to decide where you should be present and engaged.  That’s up to your audience and many of them don’t watch TV.
2. Be methodical about data mining and analytics.  Our team talked about the awesome use of analytics by the Obama campaign recently.  When you have expert Googler Analyticators taking leaves to  help you out…you’ve got a good thing going.  For the rest of us, please study or hire.
3. Understand your demographics.  Sure your race for Mayor or School Board or State Representative of Colorado may have some clear demographic slants but are you willing to jettison “all the others” and rely on what’s “always been done” or the “easy to reach block”?  Don’t.  You’ll lose.  Maybe you’ll squeak one out today or tomorrow…but in the future you will suffer defeat at the hands of better data.

The secret sauce that Obama’s team cooked up reminds me of the song “Everybody Wants Some” by Van Halen.  Sure everybody wants some…But I want some too.

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Thanksgiving and the Ultimate Prime Rib Recipe

The ORS team wishes you all a most glorious Thanksgiving…especially to the men and women home and abroad protecting our country and our constitution.

Since we’re a little non-traditional here at Operation Red State, we’re cooking up a beautiful 12lb USDA Prime…Prime Rib (as in the beef is rated Prime according to the USDA).  We’ll be using my Prime Rib Secret Recipe which isn’t so secret as I’d like everyone’s beef experience to be as good as mine.

Please remember to thank the service men and women that you see during your holiday travels.  They sacrifice so that we may enjoy such pleasures in life.

God bless America and Happy Thanksgiving.

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The state of campaign software and new media engagement

(Please welcome John Burnley to the ORS family.  John brings a vast amount of more traditional infrastructure expertise to our “cloud based thinking”.  His knowledge and understanding of systems and architecture will certainly round out the ORS team as we move forward, expand, and bring you more content aimed at helping you developing a winning online campaign strategy.)

After being in the technology sector for over 20 years, I’ve developed a passion for finding opportunities to integrate technology in ways not envisioned by the original developers. One area that has recently caught my attention is political campaigning. Sure, if you Google political “campaign technology” or “campaign software”, you will get a laundry list of products, services and consultants. There are even some vendors who have built their offerings around cloud computing themes offering their products as SaaS (software as a service). The “Cloud” is another interest, but I’ll save that for a later time.

From the basic research that I’ve done, it appears that most, if not all offerings deal with the backroom functionality of tracking donations, voter lists, the general business of running a campaign etc.

What they don’t address is the integration of all the tools that may be necessary to successfully run a campaign whether at the local, state or national levels.

It’s important to efficiently run the ‘business’ of the campaign, but it is equally important to have an effective strategy for engagement. Constituent message delivery and adoption, volunteer motivation and fundraising are all part of the engagement process. This is where campaigns can fall short. How many times have you thrown away direct mail, hung up on the pre-recorded candidate message, changed the television channel to escape negative advertisements or vowed not to vote for the next candidate that called and interrupted your dinner?

New technology and media tools are changing the political landscape, and candidates who do not embrace these methods may not have sufficient fundraising, volunteer workers or voter turnout to compete with better managed or funded campaigns. Many still solely rely on traditional methods, although some have started to use social media tools. However, having a Facebook page or Twitter account without effectively using them to reach out to the constituency may lead to failure.

The best example of utilizing technology within a political campaign is the successful 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama. Dan Siroker, Director of Analytics for the Obama campaign has just released a video entitled “How we used data to win the presidential election”. Here is a great example of aligning technological tools with strategy and analytics to make good decisions, increase funding and engaging constituents and volunteers. (First 20 or so minutes is focused on the political side of things vs. private sector)

There are other examples of how campaigns are becoming more innovative. Alex Beam, in his article “Beam on politics: What’s Working” writes about candidates using tele-town halls to enable constituents “a chance to participate in a talk-show like exchange with the candidate”. In an interview with the University Of Michigan School Of Business , Michigan Republican Governor Candidate Rick Snyder says his campaign is leveraging cell phone cameras and databases in a ‘get-the-vote-out technology’ that he has dubbed “Rick’s Innovation Network”.

How successful will candidates be? No doubt, results will vary because of differences in the candidates, platforms, issues and specific strategies and implementations. Beam was skeptical on how effective using new media tools are, but did acknowledge there are success stories. The Obama campaign is the only case study I have found where analytics were used on measurement data. I’m still searching for more case studies at the local, state and national levels. However, many of these tools are free, and in the Obama campaign, the ROI was phenomenal.

Campaign managers will need to be careful about jumping onto the bandwagon. Instead of just opening a Twitter account or developing a Facebook page, an overall strategy must be developed that aligns with the campaign goals. As innovative technological strategies are implemented, some type of monitoring and measurement must also take place to help evaluate the effectiveness of actions taken. Sending out blast Email, text messages etc. without purpose or measurement is the equivalent of SPAM, and will in all probability be rejected by the recipients.

As far as our current political party system in the United States, it appears the Democrats are paying more attention and may be further ahead in implementing these strategies and techniques…but that’s where we at ORS come in.  We’re changing the game and providing conservatives the campaigns of tomorrow…today.

Technology and Political Links From ORS 11/20/2009 (a.m.)

• Matt Dunn: Winning Online: 10 Tips for 2010 Campaigns (Part II)

  Here’s part II of this article where Mr. Dunn lays out 10 tips for winning online. These are great tips and you must listen.

  Tags: matt, dunn, social, media, campaigns, interactive, ORS

  • – By Doug Mitchell
  • – By Doug Mitchell

Posted from Diigo. The rest of operationredstate group favorite links are here.

Is Google’s AL-GORE-RHYTHM biased

Yes not algorithm…I said AL GORE RHYTHM.  There has been excellent debate on this topic through the years.  A recent post on The American Thinker brings up the issue again with regard to Carly Fiorina.  While in this case the search results are paid vs. organic  (if you need to know the difference subscribe to ORS)..the question will always remain:  “What factors really make news items, posts, etc. rise to the top?”

We aren’t privy to that secret sauce as we shouldn’t be.  Google is a private company with competitive advantages.  If we really want “fairness”, the government should take over Google as a utility as it plans to do with Al Gore’s Internet via the FCC power usurpation.  Don’t the words “Net Neutrality” just FEEL good and make you want to jump on board?  Anyone against Net Neutrality is obviously a shill for big Corporate America right?

Perhaps when Google is managing our health records in the cloud and they’re protected by a friendly inside agency (the FCC) we’ll get a clearer picture of how they do things on the inside.  Or not.

Technology and Political Links From ORS 11/18/2009 (a.m.)

• Why We Need To Regulate Big Google

  Great take on the current net neutrality legislation question. It’s TOUGH to be “against net neutrality”. Does that language just feel good? What an amazing job of positioning the role of the government. Now, I am still digesting brilliant opinions on ALL sides of this very vexing issue…but this post gives a simple example of what one might be “against neutrality” or rather “Against the radical government intervention in what’s right and wrong on the web”. We shall see.

  Tags: net neutrality, ORS, google

  • – By Doug Mitchell

Posted from Diigo. The rest of operationredstate group favorite links are here.

Technology and Political Links From ORS 11/13/2009 (a.m.)

• Matt Dunn: Winning Online: 10 Tips for 2010 Campaigns

  This is a great piece on what candidates should do with tech in their campaigns. We struggle to convince candidates every day that tech is not something that we just “add on” to the “real stuff”. It’s a first step for us and should be treated as such.

  Tags: ORS, online, campaign, strategy

  • – By Doug Mitchell

• Paul strives to engage young people | desmoinesregister.com | The Des Moines Register

  Ron Paul uber Libertarian and “Dr. No” in the Congress understands the power of the under 35 crowd. It will be the undoing of candidates who continue to ignore it.

  Tags: ORS, ron paul, kent sorenson, iowa, senate, district 37, fund, raiser

  • – By Doug Mitchell
  • – By Doug Mitchell

Posted from Diigo. The rest of operationredstate group favorite links are here.

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