On Copycatting
by Patrick Ruffini :: July 9th, 2007 11:48 pmPlease, please, PLEASE don’t talk to me about building the MoveOn of the right.
Talk to me about building something that will leapfrog MoveOn.
When did innovation on the political Web die? Why must we talk about everything in the context of yesterday’s Internet smash? Doing so quietly, working to tweak an opponent’s breakthrough innovation, is sometimes necessary. That’s how direct mail was born on the right. But doing so openly — and outright bragging about the MoveOn clone you’re about to unleash — is nothing more than a crutch. One that shows you have little idea of how the Internet works.
In June, Mother Jones profiled two groups on the right vying to be the next MoveOn. One is “The Vanguard” — nothing like an obscure historical reference from Communist Russia to mobilize the grassroots — and the other is RightMarch.com, which has been around for a while. The MoveOn clone market is about to get another entrant, as the Politico reports that another new venture backed by lobbyists is raising “millions” to play in the next election.
Does anyone else see the problem here?
Did MoveOn ever give us the courtesy of announcing itself? Of laying out its master plan for all to see? “Hi! We’re a bunch of software programmers from Berkeley, and we’re about to take over the Democratic Party!”
Never mind laying out their master plan. The point is that there never was a master plan. Impeachment kind of happened, and that gave them the opening to get a bunch of signatures on a petition. For four years after that, they languished in relative obscurity. They were hardly a factor in 2000 election. Then Iraq just kind of happened. And the rest kind of organically evolved. First, they got lots of names on a list. Then they asked them for money. Only then did the big donors follow.
If I were to write a prospectus for potential donors telling them I was going to build a grassroots organization with that kind of growth trajectory, I would be laughed at. In fact, I shouldn’t even bother writing it in the first place. Because I’d be better off hacking away at my basement at something, quietly launching it and hoping it catches on. The odds would be long — but they’d still be a heck of a lot shorter than trying to lay down organic grassroots from the top down.
In fact, there’s a word for that latter approach. It’s called “astroturf.”
This all feels very 2004. Then, the emergency was Soros and the 527s. Fortunately, that one was easy to fix. Just start our own 527s and get a few rich people to open their checkbooks. The result was Progress for America and the Swift Boat Vets, which outhustled their Democrat counterparts by any measure. And perhaps that’s what this group described in the Politico will wind up being, and if so, Godspeed, because the D.C. types have that model nailed down perfectly.
Now, we have decided the emergency is small donors. But this time, the problem isn’t our tactics or obscure FEC regulations. It’s the fact that we’re not inspiring our own people with optimism or big ideas. It’s crafting deeply divisive legislation in the back rooms and having the arrogance to ram it through as a fait accompli. Our base, in direct mail, on the Internet, and even some of the high rollers, smell the rat. In other words, the problem is strategic, not tactical, and that will be harder to fix.
Right now, Silicon Valley is teeming with entrepreneurs looking to build the next Google, the next Facebook, the next MySpace. They all have very detailed, very ambitious plans — and 99.9% of them will fail. Because real game-changing innovation is not about being “the next.” It is about being “the first.”
Am I suggesting that the functionality that MoveOn or ActBlue have developed should fall by the wayside? That we should work on projects that are completely different just for the sake of being different? Of course not. Unlike eBay, MoveOn is not a natural monopoly. By design, it doesn’t cover half of the political spectrum, leaving that half ripe for development.
But what I am suggesting is that the business of copying, particularly when we embrace it so zealously, is debilitating. It locks us into a vicious cycle. While MoveOn is busy building their 2.0, we’ll be working on our 1.0. So, by all means, develop the functionality. That’s the easy part. But also be on the lookout for ways to leapfrog the delivery vehicle, to fundamentally change the game. MoveOn was first developed almost nine years ago. Do we seriously believe nothing has changed since then, and that the job is just to copy? Let’s explore the weaknesses in MoveOn’s model, and work to exploit them. Let’s work on being the Apple to their Big Blue — one that evolves into an even stronger market leader by tapping on just the right leverage points.
I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers here. But let me throw something out there. MoveOn is based almost exclusively on email. By Internet standards, that’s an aging medium, though it still is king. (It’s not by coincidence that MoveOn itself is relatively top-down by leftist standards.) Even if you get beyond the problem of inbox churn (@25% a year), you’ve still to go wage war with the ISPs to get your message to the inbox. Email is a constant war of attrition, and in a mass marketing sense, it is very much like direct mail. It’s the most un-Internet-like thing on the Internet.
Which probably means that it’s peaked.
If you were building something today to compete over the next 5 to 10 years, would you build it so heavily on email? Email will continue to be very important, but looking at the Facebook Platform, I have to wonder whether something hasn’t fundamentally changed and that we now have the ability to do viral right. When an App can go from 1 coder to 8 million user in a matter of weeks based solely on passive friend-to-friend referrals, that puts email to shame. Contrary to the myth that everyone forwards every email they get, 90% or more of the reads on even the stickiest mass emails will be from first generation recipients. That doesn’t mean social networking will soon overtake email — but I have a feeling that just like email and IM, which were irresistible when they first came out, socnets will find a way onto the political mass market (i.e. the people who vote) sooner than we think.
We are never going to win by playing the Left’s rules. We have to invent our own. That doesn’t excuse our slowness when it comes to social technologies — that’s a problem, though not as big a problem as not having a message. What it does mean is that we aren’t exempt from thinking — that the task at hand is more than taking screenshots of other sites and coloring them red.
We are the party of the entrepreneuer, so let’s starting acting like it.
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moveon online politics technology
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Bravo post Patrick. Bravo.
I think some will catch on. Others like my group, eConservative.org, and people like you and David All will usher the Republican Party and Conservatives in general into politics 2.0.
Thanks for the inspiring read.
Patrick,
I am confused as to why conservatives and other supporters of the Republican Party have been so myopic when dealing with innovation on the internet. I have always thought that the Republican Party was the party of big ideas-how did we narrow our scope to copy catting liberal special interest groups and online communities like The Daily Kos?
Great topic-seriously depressing.
Aside from all of the technical issues you raise, the main problem with MoveOn.org is that it stopped moving on January 20, 2001. We don’t need the equivalent of a right-wing hate machine; we need a way to give people hope, and not hate.