Electing with clicks March 10
Last night I managed to drag Alex up the hill to NCAR to go to the bimonthly RMIUG talk - Electing with Clicks: The impact of the Internet on Politics today. It was quite interesting. The two men that spoke, Matt Statman of Motive Design+Interactive(the design company that did the DeanForAmerica.org website) and Bobby Clark, a recent alumnus of Dean for America, talked about the process of creating Dean’s online presence.
The talk focused largely on their “branding strategy”, and how they focused on creating an online presence for Dean in a similar manner to one created for a product or company. I think for me, the most interesting part was the discussion about how they dealt with two way communication - people posting comments to the blog, creating fan websites, contributing software, etc. They’re policy, pretty much from day one, was to embrace it. They weren’t worried about linking to pro-Dean blogs that might post something controversial, or deleting comments to the blog that were intentionally inflamatory. Instead, they focused on building on the momentum, even if it meant a few glitches along the way.
This building on momentum carried over to the content they created as well. Rather than constantly focusing on getting each little piece perfect, they looked more at the big picture, and just kept on moving.
I think the most amusing part of the talk, though, was the screenshots they showed of the initial website proposal that Motive did. Since Motive, nor the campaign at the time, had any pictures of Dean to work with, they instead used images of Martin Sheen taken from West Wing for the website mockup. Very clever, and hilarious.
Read on for the rest of the notes I jotted down during the talk.
Dean for America talk notes
- Viewed website as “branding” - creating a brand for a product
- Site needs to reflect personality
- Cornerstones of strategy
- Entice - creative strategy
- approachable and comfortable
- reflection of his personality
- easy to navigate
- creating big stature
- “Created a visual sense that something big was talking place”
- engage - content strategy
- Relevent, updated content (gee, what a concept:)
- customized content to target groups
- video, magazines, new headlines daily
- activate - trigger strategy
- give people ways to interact
- petition doubled database size (petition as means to collect addresses)
- creating tools to allow network to expand
- Entice - creative strategy
- Used brickolage for CMS
- build on momentum - Is it perfect?? But does it have to be perfect?
- Started in January with $160,000
- Set out at beginning of campaign to _give up_ power - nature because Dean was used to “town hall” style of politics
- Locations pay meetup for being possible locations
read Cluetrain manifesto
- “free speech is messy”
- by pushing work out to edges, tapped into existing social networks
- home meetings - show brief video, then no policy discussion - just story telling