I Am Not a Web Guy

What Zack Exley has written here is truly wise, and bears repeating until every campaign manager and general consultant has heard it loud and clear. Don’t hire an Internet person!

So I think that all of us “Internet people” need to put our foot down. Let’s remove “Internet” from our titles and resumes. The longer we leave “Internet” on our name tags, the longer we’re enabling all this bad behavior—and devaluing our own contribution to the movement at the same time.

I know people who are the future of the progressive movement. Most of them have “Internet” stuck on them. But they are not Internet strategists, they are strategists. They are not Internet communicators, they are communicators. They are not Internet organizers, they are organizers.

Don’t take that “Director of Internet Communications” job. Take the “Director of Communications” job.

Amen.

The question the campaigns this year have struggled with is whether or not to set up an Internet division. By and large doing so is the right decision, because right now, not having one means that the Internet is sublimated to communications-by-press-release hell.

But make no mistake. That shouldn’t be our end goal.

In a 21st century campaign, the Campaign Manager is the Internet Director. He or she isn’t managing the day-to-day, but they need to get the Internet in the same way that they currently have to get communications, finance, strategy, and political. The job of the Communications Director is the communicate using the Web. The job of the Political Director is to organize using the Web. The job of the Finance Director is to raise money using the Web and Salesforce-like tools. The pollster will (eventually) poll over the Web. And the media team will be just a bunch of folks who make cool videos, 80% of which will be released over the Web.

Just look at Hillary’s brilliant sendup of the Sopranos finale. No “Internet team” could have created it from start to finish. What it took was Clinton’s old media team learning how to communicate using new media. It’s not something they understood at the start of the campaign, and their one-way “conversation” with the American people brought them a nasty shock in the form of the “Vote Different” video. But learn from it they did. And now, they seem to understand better than Barack Obama’s team, whose web videos seek to glorify rather than humanize the candidate.

In 2004 and 2006, Republicans actually got this better. Bush-Cheney ‘04 and then the RNC, used Web video to bridge the gap between the Internet and television. We used the Web to drive an overarching strategic objective: humanizing the candidate. (This is what was on GeorgeWBush.com the last week of the campaign.) Old-school strategists probably scoff at the numbers at the Internet generates compared to a low-engagement vehicle like television, but they ignore the fact that (if it’s good) what happens on the Web doesn’t stay on the Web. I was on Illinois talk radio yesterday discussing the Clinton video; I’m sure that was the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Hillary now gets it, and at a broad strategic level, David Axelrod has talked of running an attribute-driven campaign for Obama. With the battle joined and roles reversed, who will be the first ‘08 Republican to really introduce themselves to the American people over the Web?

Tagged: hillary clinton online politics strategy

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