Rightroots: Skipping to Web 3.0

Can the right create its own netroots? - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine

Among the excellent points made in the article are a few that bear refining. Chief among them is that trying to replicate the Obama campaign will FAIL for the Right, because the Right is not Barrack Obama. Now that the message of "running the last successful campaign again won't necessarily work" is finally sinking in, Republicans seem to want to run the last successful campaign of their opponents. Good luck.

The key, as pointed out by Beam, is to move onto the next thing, "Web 3.0" as Karl Rove has said. My opinion is that the "next thing" is facilitating centralized coordination with decentralized activism, which is a whole series of posts for another time. However, that notion follows along the other of Beam's critical points, which is that without an effort that bolsters the entire movement online, certain groups have the opportunity "mobilize online and hold the party hostage," thereby splintering the GOP.

What we need to do as a movement is not only give the tools away that will facilitate group blogging, online activism, fostering community, etc, but make those tools all work together for everyone so that efforts are not duplicate and that the movement can prosper as a whole, in spite of all of its disparate parts. Yes, we need a common narrative, yes we need an army of bloggers, yes, we need inspiring candidates, but without an easy, distributed array of communication, coordination, and activism tools, what we have are thousands of interest groups reinventing the wheel over and over again.

Episodic video: the best your brand can get

From a political perspective I think campaigns are now getting to the point where they are ready to embrace outrech efforts that go past the usual "give me money now," and "vote for me on election day." The article below is a good synopsis of the potential of episodic video content to be the best ongoing representation of a brand (or candidate) available. As production technology gets easier and easier this type of content should proliferate across campaign websites, and candidates and staff should start thinking of their campaign itinerary in terms of opportunities to record and repurpose their offline activity for online gain.

MediaPost Publications Goodbye Banners, Hello Webisodes! 01/27/2009: "Where banner ads simply flash a message, and rich-media ads only invite interaction, good content and Webisodic series hold the customers' attention for minutes at a time, lure them back for repeat exposure, and communicate much more than the often forgettable 'buy me' messaging of a traditional 30-second spot.Where banner ads simply flash a message, and rich-media ads only invite interaction, good content and Webisodic series hold the customers' attention for minutes at a time, lure them back for repeat exposure, and communicate much more than the often forgettable 'buy me' messaging of a traditional 30-second spot."

Hillary supporters: hope you are fans of [insert group here]

Hillary Clinton is renting out her list (Ben Smith's Blog: Renting out the list - Politico.com), hoping to cash in on other "aligned" groups who will pay to solicit to people who gave Clinton their email addresses when they supported her political campaign.

How many of those people do you think anticipated getting hit to participate in completely disparate organizations? How effective do you think that list is going to be the 5th time they rent it? The 10th time? I wouldn't want to be the poor liberal cause that gets stuck at the tail end of that list's usefulness. Nor would I want to be on that list, even if I were a supporter, since my reason for opting in clearly no longer exists.

This is one more reason why: a) rented email is at the very end of the list of outreach opportunities I suggest to campaigns and, b) amassing large lists for strategic campaign use is ultimately futile, once the specific issue that galvanized people to support the cause has become irrelevant.

This is a theme I've been discussing with great frequency of late in relation to the Right's need to scramble toward a model they are familiar with: listing building and rented email. My thought here: focusing on building mammoth lists for use by the entire online Right is a waste of time.

As a means for groups to try to build up their own base and/or identify online activists, a contact cultivation program that utilizes online advertising to bring users to simple online engagement devices is far more cost effective, scalable, target-able, optimize-able, (insert your favorite “able” here) and ultimately brings the organization more qualified contacts.

Not to mention the list churn issue, which will only get worse as a lists get larger, older, and more diverse.

I agree that email is the killer app, but I take issue with the idea that building and holding huge lists that can be messaged by different smaller groups will ultimately prove nearly as valuable as enabling groups to easily access and leverage the kind of tools they need to cultivate their own contact base. After all, no contact is more valuable than the contact that actually opts into your organization specifically.

If what we’re trying to do is shoot fish in a barrel, instead of trying to just make one fish barrel bigger, why not give everyone their own barrel along with all the tools they need to fill it with their own fish? Then we can focus on making it easy for barrel owners to let their fish interact smartly with one another so that all the players gain the maximum amount of benefit from the community of fish.

In other words, we give organizations the tools that they need to identify and cultivate their own supporters while at the same time ensuring that those tools also facilitate the process of leveraging those supporters across the spectrum.

File Under: All good ideas have already been thought up

While discussing the ramifications of social networking pages that have been vacated due to the death of their progenitors, it dawned on me that there could be a social network for dead people. Not an online cemetary (which has been done to death) but an actual network, ostensibly kept up by the living, perhaps on behalf of the dead. But, why bother when the dead people can do all of the networking themselves:
Social Networking for Dead People: An idea refined - The Bing Blog