The GOP Online: Turk Responds
by Patrick Ruffini :: April 9th, 2007 10:01 pmWhen your ex-boss fires a shot across the bow like this one, you tend to listen.
I agree with most of what Mike Turk says in response to my post about R’s and D’s online. And while I’ll spend some time picking apart our differences (which are pretty minute in the grand scheme of things) we agree on the bottom line. As a party, we always need to be finding ways to improve. Republicans have always been the most innovative in communicating to and activating their grassroots in political meaningful ways. First through direct mail. Then through talk radio. (The growth of the netroots on the left was a direct response to these phenomena.) After 2000, we had to relearn the art of grassroots campaigning the hard way after we got the stuffing kicked out of us by the unions in door to door organizing. The response was the RNC’s 72 Hour Program, which turned the tables on the Democrats and totally changed the equation of grassroots politics. And just because we’ve relied on one set of media in the past, that doesn’t mean the old playbook will continue to work indefinitely, as George Allen learned the hard way.
Mike believes that fostering greater online community and dialogue is the key to executing succeeding online, and I don’t disagree. I would place the emphasis on email, video, driving buzz through the blogosphere, and big traffic-driving events or apps that get people to come to your site for the right reasons. The bottom line is that it’s all about great content. Nine times out of ten, people are coming to a site to hear what you have to say, as opposed to what a commenter may have to say. And if it’s nothing more than a staid press release, they’ll never come back.
Now to the play-by-play. My point about media coverage driving traffic gets this treatment:
This is really sort of a chicken and the egg argument, however. Do they get more attention because they get more media? Or do they get more media becuase they’re getting more attention? I argue it’s the latter and you can see it very clearly in other things going on online. Case in point, the Vote Different video was stirring things up online long before the first MSM outlet said a word. Granted, once they did say something, MSM drove even more people to the video, but it had been percolating for quite some time.
Yes, more buzz begets more coverage. But I tried to keep my analysis limited to boring MSM “Edwards delivers health care speech” writeups, not blog chatter. And all things being equal, those should balance out evenly between D’s and R’s, because theoretically, each side has a fighting chance to win the White House and each primary fight is just as newsworthy as a result. How do we know that so-and-so is a frontrunner, and so-and-so has momentum? Largely it’s through the media, whether that’s new or old media. True, they can’t make this stuff up out of whole cloth. Anyone who saw “Vote Different” those first few days knew it was going to be big, but that doesn’t change the fact that more than 80% of its views happened after the first writeup. To ignore the media’s role as a driver of search traffic (which is the fount of political traffic and fundraising) misses the mark somewhat.
He also takes issue with my point about traffic mirroring campaign ups and downs:
Even when Bush was running ahead in the polls coming out of the Democrat debate, we were still running behind Kerry in traffic. If campaign trends mirror traffic patterns, that should not have been the case.
Well, first off, while this may be the case, the Bush campaign online operated at a disadvantage. If you wanted to get information about George W. Bush online, there were two places to do it: the White House and the campaign site. We were never the #1 search result for our candidate. I have to believe that hurt us, as official sites are almost always more popular than campaign sites. Since I think search is the better measure of popular zeitgeist, here is Google Trends for Bush vs. Kerry in 2004. The bottom line: Bush won the search war, and the trends on the news coverage meter below track with search traffic. Even if that was our opponents Googling us, that should have fed into the traffic numbers.
One more note on this: I don’t claim that search tracks popularity. It does track buzz and media coverage. A candidate can enjoy more popular support and still fly under the media radar. In most general election polling, the Republican frontrunners lead the Democrats, and yet we’re sitting here having a discussion about a groundswell of netroots support for the Democrats.
On email:
I also disagree with Ruffini about e-mail as the killer app and what I think is a dismissal of the distinct difference between the quality of names versus the quantity of names. An effective e-mail program is an important piece of any good Internet mix, but it is not the most important.
To Patrick’s e-mail point, I agree. If you are trying to get a large number of people to do something for you, the number of people you can reach via e-mail versus the traffic camped on, or possibly looking at your site is usually a better option - though this ignores a few key points.
First, e-mail has limitations. Let’s say you have a list of 1 million people. If you send a message to them, you may get an open rate (on a house file) of 40%. That means 400,000 will open the message. The number who will click through to your page is much smaller (let’s say, for sake of generosity, that 40% holds constant as a drop, though it usually doesn’t). Your one million e-mails mean 400k opens, 160k click-throughs, and assuming a simple one step action, 64k possible respondents. (The real numbers, however, are likely to be much less optimistic than this projection).
On the quality vs. quantity of lists, I agree with Turk 100%. A lot of campaigns resort to buying email lists. They really shouldn’t. With a decent splash page, it would probably take me a few days to get you the same “juice” from an organically-built list than I can get you from a larger paid list. Bought lists are a crutch that give the campaign manager a good talking point about how big your list is, but create unsustainable expectations for how it will perform. Organic growth is still the way to go, and not buying lists (or at a minimum, segregating any names previously bought from the main list) forces you to think creatively about how to go out and get quality email addresses.
This is one area I think Republicans could do better in. For the last six years, we basically controlled everything in Washington. It’s difficult to rile up one’s base for the status quo. People underestimate the most basic dimension of the Left’s recent success online: ANGER. Where do you think MoveOn got all those emails? It was the war — they collected literally hundreds of thousands of anti-war names in early 2003. That’s where MoveOn as we know it today came from. It’s a simple reality of activism: you’re more likely to sign an online petition if you’re against something than if you’re for something.
Now that we’ve lost control of Congress, this is our chance to be “against” and collect lots and lots of email addresses. While it’s not fun being in the minority, we need to capitalize on this moment so we can build an online base that will bring us back to the majority. Unfortunately, I see precious little activity of this kind thus far.
Where are the massive conservative petition drives against defunding the troops? Or against Nancy Pelosi jet-setting to Syria? Or closer to home, against Air Force Three? Where is the NRSC Pledge or the Victory Caucus, except taking aim at the Democrats on issue after issue after issue? Though I was personally against the Pledge, we need to see more tactics like it, and I hope the 30,000+ addresses they collected are being put to good use for the cause.
Free tip: Every single Republican Member of Congress intent on seeking higher office should set up a splash page on their campaign site with a series of petitions on these hot button issues and buy Google ads around them. I guarantee this will pay.
You might ask what good is an online petition? Truthfully, not very much beyond a media hit. But that isn’t the question MoveOn asked — they didn’t stop the war, or Bush, or Roberts, or Alito, or virtually anything they set out to stop. But they have built a membership base for the long run, and whenever Democrats need more activists, they can go just to the MoveOn well for more. (In fact, MoveOn is how Howard Dean and John Kerry jump-started their lists in June 2003 and April 2004 respectively.)
I’m sure this won’t fully satisfy Turk, because what I’ve described is not about building online community (except as an outgrowth of the email list). But if you look at the Left, those campaigns that have empowered online communities haven’t necessarily performed better than those that haven’t. John Kerry raised four times as much online as Howard Dean. The MoveOn list packs more juice than the DNC, which at least pays a lot of lip service to online community. Hillary Clinton, the epitome of top-down message control, didn’t get blown out of the water by Barack Obama online and actually beat John Edwards, who is on 23 social networks.
I feel this debate is getting too meta, too McLuhanesque. The medium is NOT the message. I find that whenever I post about online tools, it’s hard getting folks in the blogosphere riled up, let alone average users. Most people searching out Barack Obama or John McCain have no idea what they will find on the other end, and if I had to guess, they won’t be impacted by the presence of online community when deciding to sign up or donate. I agree community-building tools are vital to securing repeat traffic, user loyalty, and building a better online experience overall, but when it comes to raw donations, I think absolute uniques are the metric you want to look at, and that’s driven by buzz, search, and media.
Tagged: congress 
mike turk netroots online politics
Comments (2) 
Trackbacks (0) 
del.icio.us 
digg it 
subscribe
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
By the way, I forgot to take issue with one point.
Well, first off, while this may be the case, the Bush campaign online operated at a disadvantage. If you wanted to get information about George W. Bush online, there were two places to do it: the White House and the campaign site. We were never the #1 search result for our candidate. I have to believe that hurt us, as official sites are almost always more popular than campaign sites.
While I concede that to a point, I’ve always disagreed with you and Chuck on this. Yes, the White House is a source of information about the President, but for strictly issue/campaign purposes, I don’t believe the bleed off was necessarily enough to put us in first.
A lot of people (tourists, school kids writing civics reports, etc.) go to whitehouse.gov for things that had absolutely nothing to do with the race. To lump them into traffic totals for GeorgeWBush.com overstates the overlap. If Apple told me that searches for mp3 players competed with their iPod page, there’s probably truth to that. However, there is probably a lot of traffic that had nothing to do with them.
My post wasn’t intended as a shot across the bow, and had you included one line in your last post, we probably would have come to consensus sooner.
There’s a lot of this that is coming down to a semantic difference. As I said, for me this isn’t all about blog comments and social networking. My goal for online communities and your goal for “content” are on the same page. The goal of both is to make GOP websites more interesting and more inviting, and to allow the visitor to get more involved.
When I took the job at the RNC, Ken and I agreed on the vision of GOP.com as the focal point of activity for anyone center-right. It was to be what Townhall.com is becoming. MyGOP, in our original conception, was more about distribution of rich content than it was about forwarding stale e-mails and raising $20. The distribution and the money were to flow from the content.
The problem was exactly that - content. GOP.com was never going to be successful as a destination site because the powers that be were unwilling to let go of the message. Everything had to use the right words and conform to the script. They would never allow a HamNation or a Michelle Malkin column.
Townhall is a good example because it is as much about community as it is about content. The content feeds the community - as it should. That’s the concept that Republicans need to understand. You can’t put out a steady stream of stale press releases and expect people to get excited. Even something like MittTV is overproduced and comes across as the video version of a stale press release instead of reality TV.
There is a fire-and-forget-it mentality at work that assumes talking points will have a life of their own. There is a belief that a video will get legs simply because the candidate is in it.
You’re right that we agree more than we disagree. Content, community, e-mail list size, list quality, traffic drivers, etc, are all part of a world the GOP doesn’t want to dive into. They want the benefit without the effort.