The Future Is Now

Politics: The Obama campaign seemed so strong online in 2008. Does what happened in this off-year election suggest the score is evening up a bit?

William Beutler: That assumes that there was a gap to begin with.

Michael Turk: Right, I think all of us were kind of thinking that.

Beutler: I don’t know that there’s anything fundamentally different in the approach of the two parties. I think what matters is whether you happen to be in power or not. We’re at a point now where the right is sorting through a lot of issues. There is some split between the center and the right and that will be worked through the same way Democrats worked through their issues in 2002 and 2003.

Turk: I think that’s exactly right. When I first went to the RNC in 2000, everybody was talking about Voter Vault. Republicans were getting a huge amount of credit for everything they were doing online and everyone was asking, "Where are the Democrats?" Then a remarkable thing happened—we won the election in 2000. And after Obama won last year, I said to a lot of my Democratic friends, "You guys are in a very perilous position now. You rode into office on this wave, but now that you’re in the White House, you can’t do most of the things that got you here. You have to be much more controlled."

Mindy Finn: You need to realize that the tools can’t be successful without the people. And now that Republicans are out of power, people are actually using the tools to make their voices heard. Generally, Republicans are at parity or ahead because we’re seeing more activism online from the right because of the political dynamic. But I still think Republicans should get a little bit of credit. We worked for the McDonnell campaign on its new media effort, and I was very pleased to see the website of one of the local papers identify McDonnell’s campaign manager Phil Cox as one of the "winners" of the election year. And one of the reasons listed was that he was the first GOP campaign manager to successfully integrate social media and online tactics into the overall campaign.

Will Robinson: One of the problems we Democrats have is that we have a tendency to take the tools and forget that it involves the people—not just the activists but also the candidate. And what made it work so well for Barack Obama was Barack Obama. Now, everyone is grabbing the tools, and thinking, "We have Twitter, we have text and we’re hip and groovy." But if you don’t have the person in the center who’s engaged, it’s not going to work very well.

Finn: And I think Twitter is a good example. It was starting to rise in popularity during the 2008 cycle, but it didn’t really peak until after the election. I think Republicans are more active on Twitter because of that. But I don’t think it’s because Republicans have an inherently better understanding of Twitter. It’s just that it was the medium rising in popularity when Republicans were headed out of power so we latched onto that.

Turk: I see countless members of Congress who use Twitter simply to push out a press release or link back to some article on their campaign website that nobody really cares about. They’re not engaging people. They’re still trying to use it as a one-way, top-down message dissemination vehicle. When candidates start to understand that they can use this to communicate one-on-one with people, they can really achieve some interesting things.

Finn: One thing the McDonnell campaign recognized along the way is that they needed the bodies and needed to make some real investments of time and money into the new media effort. It wasn’t enough to hire the college kid part-time to run the Facebook page and Twitter account. That’s what ended up setting it apart: there were people making that effort and engaging with bloggers and activists.

Turk: One of the things that I think is really interesting from a candidate perspective right now is that if I’m considering a run for Congress, I have to ask myself if it’s even worth it to build a website. Is it worth it to spend somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000 thousand building a site when everyone that you’re going to be interacting with is already on Facebook or could be connected to it? Maybe you just marshal your resources toward Facebook and at best put up some sort of fundraising page.

Beutler: Right, and there’s nothing you can’t do on Facebook that you could do on your other website because you can just drop an i-frame in there. You’re not necessarily limited to the general setup.

Politics: All of these things that we’re talking about are at least nominally free. How do you convince campaigns to pay for you all to do this for them and offer the strategic guidance?

Beutler: Every new client is a new challenge in figuring out what their level of understanding is and what they’re ready to do. Even though some of this stuff is free and anyone can technically do it, you’ll still get the most bang for your buck if you have someone who specializes in it and knows it through and through.

Turk: Come January I’ll have been doing Internet politics for 15 years. I remember when I built the first site I ever built back in 1995 for the Republican Party of New Mexico, everything was free. And you rarely had to do any explaining to the people in the building because at that time no one was online anyway. Now that’s long gone, but one of the interesting things I find is that we went through this period where everything became tremendously expensive and now it’s moving back toward free. What I would like to see is for the other piece of that to catch up, which is a time when people didn’t obsess about things. I’d like to see the candidate class get back to the point where they understand that we’re professionals and we know what not to say.

Finn: Back to your question, it is a challenge. It’s much easier to sell campaigns a commodity. For example, our company has an online fundraising system. They understand that, and campaigns will pay for that. But the most valuable piece—paying for our time—is hard for them to understand sometimes. In two or three recent cases, the McDonnell campaign being one of them, once we started working with them, they actually bought more of our time and services because they came to understand the value of it. The other thing that’s starting to happen is that campaigns are realizing that the new media experts are not just technical. You’re starting to see new media strategists being hired for their political savvy now.

Robinson: The other thing I’d like to talk about is how to apply new media techniques to more traditional media. I think that’s going to happen with cable. I think we are headed toward TV sets being the multimedia center with a laptop connected to it. We haven’t reached the tipping point yet, but we’re getting there. You have two-thirds of people with DVRs zapping ads. So how do we get around that? I think that’s going to be where the blend of new media and traditional media is going to be absolutely critical. That hasn’t happened yet, but it may be in play by 2012 and traditional media consultants are not prepared for this.

Turk: Well let me put on my cable hat for a second. The cable industry gets beat up a lot because people say, "Oh, they’re clinging to this model where they charge for content and they don’t put stuff online." But when you look at the content creators who are really having problems now, it’s the people who are giving everything away for free. I think we’re going to get to a point where you have a smaller selection of premiere video offerings online that can charge a much higher premium for advertising. So you’ll end up with a model that looks more like cable, but delivered via the Internet.

Robinson: One of the things that is going to be really interesting is what happens with Hulu. We’ve been experimenting with it and what’s great about Hulu is that it’s TV, it’s Internet, you can do banner ads or you can embed ads. People are forced to watch the commercials, but the ads are also served up in a way that is less onerous. When I mention Hulu to older political operatives the response is usually, "Who what?" They still don’t even know what it is. Now it’s nowhere right now in terms of volume, but it’s positioned to be huge.

Finn: And when it comes to buying advertising on things like Hulu and YouTube, I think campaigns and organizations will actually latch onto it and understand it quickly because it’s very similar to what they’ve been doing for the past 40 years. It’s not hard for them to grasp because the concept is blasting messages. Even with online advertising. You just had a story about the Google surge in your [October] magazine. Now, some campaigns don’t have the budget and don’t end up doing it, but we’ve found that to be an easy sell to campaigns.

Turk: You know some candidates always ask, "How do I grow my list, how do I make it as large as possible?" And then they go out and buy or rent all of these lists so they can get 200,000 names. My response is, "What does it matter if you have that many names if only 1,000 of them are responding to your e-mail?" But it’s that concept of more is better that they’re caught up in. Getting people to actually engage is lost in that.

Beutler: That’s exactly right. We created a Twitter account recently for a trade association client with an issue on Capitol Hill, and at its highest the account had between 30 and 50 followers. But those followers were reporters covering the issue, members of Congress on the right committees, and the client was thrilled.

Finn: That’s one of the areas where the press doesn’t do its job. They write the story on the candidate who has 40,000 Twitter followers and an e-mail list of 250,000 because those are big numbers.

Turk: Well, someone said to Natalie Foster at Personal Democracy Forum this year, "We understand Obama’s list has 13 million people on it." And her response to that, several times, was, "Yes, that’s the number that has been reported." (laughter) So for those of us who work in the business, we’re chuckling and realizing that this is complete nonsense. That may be the number of e-mails you have, but that’s not the number of people you’re actually communicating with.

Turk: I have a question I’d like to throw out there for you all. One of the problems I see with getting Congress to be effective users of social media is the fact that Congress requires this weird distinction between the official channel versus the campaign channel. You have the campaign website and the congressional website, which are two very separate entities and there’s a very clear dividing line there. Then you throw YouTube or Twitter into the mix. Most members are thinking they have to an official Facebook page and then an unofficial one. And I’m wondering when those media bump up and completely obliterate some of these weird distinctions that Congress has set for itself?

Finn: I get this question all the time from people on the Hill. And as far as I know there hasn’t been a decision on this, but it really does need to change. Those rules are written for a reason, they’re trying to cut down on incumbent advantage and that clearly needs to be controlled. But the rules are ridiculous and it makes the Facebook or Twitter presence inherently artificial because they’re drawing artificial boundaries.

Robinson: Part of it is also authenticity. You can tell when something is written by a staffer. There is one member of Congress that I got a tweet from that said, "At the gym, ugh." Clearly, that wasn’t written by a staff person.

Politics: But then there’s the question of whether you really want your clients speaking for themselves…

Robinson: Well if you can’t trust them to do that…

Turk: Then why did you elect them?

Robinson: Right. There was also a member of Congress who complained that someone was following them on Twitter. I would say, "Get used to it." If you’re not smart enough to be careful and watch your mouth in public anyhow, then you’re in trouble. They have to realize that they’re "on" all the time now. There is no "off."