The annual Personal Democracy Forum was Monday and Tuesday in New York, and it was very good. As always. You can read more about it at TechPresident.
Naturally, there was a great deal of conversation about the imbalance between the Left and Right online. The general consensus is that Republicans are behind on the internet, though there is a great deal of debate over how and why. The least convincing answer was offered by a PDF audience member, and it basically boiled down to “Republicans suck. Democrats are cool. So we’re better at the internet.”
Yeah, well, those who forget history…
Democrats race to catch up to GOP online
The Democratic National Committee relaunched its Web site Friday and appointed its first technology adviser in an effort to match the Republican party’s success in using the Internet to build its constituency. [...] “We realized that the Republicans were ironically peddling their Stone Age ideas with modern-day technology tools, and we were just not at their level in our dedication to technology,” Buck said.Insiders say it’s widely acknowledged that the Republican committee has done a better job than the Democrats’ committee in creating an online strategy. The Republican committee “is far and away ahead in securing a large constituent of online activists and does a better job of using the medium to move their message,” said Pam Fielding of E-advocates, an Internet advocacy consulting firm based in Washington, D.C.
That was 2002.
What changed? Again, that’s the subject of a great deal of debate, but I would argue that it was two things:
- Republicans got comfortable.
- Democrats got entrepreneurial.
In 2016, there’s no doubt that the online landscape will be very different. The Right will be much more effective. The only question is how they will do it. The balance of power on the Right will depend, in large part, on who the new entrepreneurs are and how they build the infrastructure.
By Jon Henke on TheNextRight.com
Let’s take a glimpse at the evolution of the role of technology and so-called “new media” in politics. In the early years, there were “Web” departments — for example, my colleague Patrick Ruffini served as the “webmaster” for Bush-Cheney ‘04. The new jargon for this role has become “new media,” which typically serves as an umbrella for all forms of “new” communication, such as the Internet and mobile technology. The problem lies in the fact that we are still using the adjective new, which inherently distinguishes it from other forms of traditional media (i.e. TV, radio, and so forth). Accordingly, the people who oversee new media are called “New Media Directors” and work in “New Media,” while the people who oversee traditional media are given the title of “Communications Director” and work in “Communications” or something along those lines. The bottom line is that not only is “new” media no longer new, but even more importantly, “new” media is rapidly replacing “traditional” media. If the right is going to become the side on the cutting edge, then right-of-center campaigns and organizations must ensure that the separation of traditional and new media comes to an end.
The decline of traditional media becomes clear when you look at recent polling trends. For example, a substantially increasing percentage of Americans turn to the Internet for their news. Moreover, a poll taken in 2008 indicates that nearly 70% of Americans consider traditional journalism to be “out of touch,” and as a result the plethora of respondents use the Internet as their primary source of news and information. Twice as many Americans said they “regularly learn[ed] something about the [2008] campaign from the internet” as they did in 2004. And of course, millennial voters almost universally turned to the Internet as their primary source for 2008 election news.
In addition, there were two Presidential campaigns whose profoud impacts demonstrate the importance of integrating all forms of media. It goes without saying that President Obama ran an incredible web-based campaign, raising two-thirds of its money online and peer-producing 200,000 offline events, 400,000 blog posts, and 3 million phone calls. Likewise, Ron Paul’s campaign was almost entirely organized and built around the Internet, using existing tools like Meetup.com to build an incredible yet extremely low-cost national infrastructure. What was the differentiator between these two campaigns and most of the others from the past cycle? They didn’t separate “new media” from their other operations; instead, they allowed it to serve as a sort of circulatory system that fed and empowered every other part of their organization. “New media” wasn’t a part of their campaign; it was their campaign.
The line between traditional and new media is disintegrating, and therefore, separating the two puts the right at a disadvantage. So let’s embrace this change. “New media” must become “media,” and must be embraced as the heart and soul of our campaigns and organizations.
Original Post by Aaron Marks at NextGenGOP.com
Colin Delany makes a crucial point at e.politics (and techPresident) about the importance of (a) integrating new/internet/social media with the rest of the organization rather than siloing it as one department among many, and (b) treating new media as a force multiplier for existing goals.
[Former Obama new media director Joe Rospars said] his department was NOT a part of the campaign’s tech team. Instead, it was coequal with communications, field/grassroots, finance, etc., and was in fact just as much a client of the technology folks as, say, the press team was.
His remark jumped out at me because it’s true so rarely. More often, online organizers and online advocacy staff are put in the technology box rather than allowed to be communicators … And online communicators are often the last people consulted when messaging and outreach strategy are being planned, when they should be a part of the process from the beginning. [...] [I]t’s not the tools, it’s the people and how they’re organized and directed to USE the tools.
The Obama campaign used the internet as well as they did not because they employed tools that were particularly new (database-driven field organizing, email fundraising, online video and social networking have all been around for years) but because they worked out human systems to put those tools to work effectively.
It is important that we don’t put the technology cart before the mission horse. The internet simply changes the scale at which we can productively do things that people already want to do. As I’ve written previously, the Leftosphere is not effective because they can fundraise and mobilize activists. They are effective because they can communicate and organize people around a message. Fundraising and activism is a product of communication and organization.
I’ve outlined the correct course and order for rebuilding the Right as follows.
- …better information organization, which helps create coalesce a movement around…
- …the organizing agenda, out of which flows…
- …the storyline, narrative, which motivates…
- …the grassroots/netroots to get engaged, mobilized and donating, all of which is channeled effectively by…
- …the infrastructure, both online and offline.
Notice that the first 3 steps are really about information organization, ideas and communication. It’s not until we get to step 4 – when people are actually motivated to do something – that new, innovative technology really becomes necessary to turn information into more tangible results.
The key: new media operations need to be service-oriented.
The internet is not an organization, full of people to direct. It is a market, full of people who already have things they want to do.
We need to stop approaching the internet with a “what do I want them to accomplish?” mindset. Instead, our campaigns and infrastructure need to ask, “what do they want to accomplish and how can we help?”
By Jon Henke at TheNextRight.com
