The New Communicators
by Patrick Ruffini :: September 3rd, 2007 11:03 pmLong-time Tennessee blogger Bill Hobbs, one of the guys who practically invented local-blogging, has taken a job as communications director of the Tennessee Republican Party. I want to say how this is disruptional — how it’s proof that new media is evolving into the fabric of campaigns, and how this gets us closer to the point where we will no longer have eCampaign, Internet, new media, etc. departments, where the high command of any campaign will be required to be tech visionaries in the same way today’s campaign managers are required to be field visionaries or media visionaries.
But this is not revolutionary. That’s because Bill is not the first blogger to take a state party Communications Director job this year. He is the third. The other two are Shaun Kenney of the Republican Party of Virginia and Bill Nowling (of Lunchbucket Conservative) for the Michigan Republican Party. (Of course, Nowling’s boss is Saul Anuzis, a blogosphere hero in his own right.) A fourth state party, Massachusetts, has recently seen Rob Willington, a forward-leaning tech-oriented thinker take over as Executive Director. Rob was telling me about all the cool things they are planning to roll out when he came down for last week’s Modern Media Strategies workshop.
It’s significant that neither Bill or Shaun or Bill or Rob serve as “Director of New Media.” They are ED or Communications, basically the #2 and #3 positions in the parties. Bloggers are now shepherding all press outreach, both to electronic and old media. That’s a big deal.
In these roles, they’ll have the opportunity to shape the strategy, rather than just integrate new media into an existing top-down strategy etched in stone. As bloggers, they’ll bring a fundamentally different approach to communications. The imperative to spread the message, loudly and repeatedly, is still there. But these bloggers understand that good meme-building is networked rather than top-down. That means that HQ gets a lot of its raw message material from the grassroots, primarily blogs. It processes it, aligns it with its own strategic messaging, and synthesizes it into a narrative opinion leaders have already bought into. Let’s hope these new media voices don’t lose their irreverence and verve now that they’re on the inside. Fortunately for them, they’re in a job where they won’t have Communications Directors breathing down their necks — because they are the Communications Director!
This is just the first step. Soon, we’ll be seeing statewide campaigns hire truly new media savvy Comms Directors and even Campaign Managers on a systematic basis. They won’t just be operatives from a past generation who are enthusiastic about the new medium, but are not truly of it. As time passes, we’ll see more and more senior operatives who came of age in the era of blogs and social media, who literally will not remember the time when the three evening newscasts held significant sway over public opinion. As most of the people in these jobs range from their late 20s to early 40s, it’s easy to see this happening in a big way in the next election cycle. And hopefully, we’re not more than four years away from when we will have Presidential campaign high commands with similar vision.
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This is more common place than you’re giving it credit for. The Communications Director of the Indiana Democratic Party, for instance, is a long-time blogger who is, in fact, one of the widest read Hoosier bloggers. Hobbs’ new job does indicate what you say it does, but let’s not overestimate how new it is.
JC-
In GOP circles it is a fresh concept; Dems remain a few mile markers ahead of us when it comes to Web 2.0, but we are gaining ground.
Hi Patrick,
It was great meeting out at the conference. The Margolis brothers run HubPolitics up here in Massachusetts and they just posted an interview that they did with me.
http://www.hubpolitics.com/archives/002333.php#more
[…] As Patrick Ruffini recently noted, Michigan Republicans well stocked with modern-media communicators. The state party’s communications director, Bill Nowling, is a former blogger, and Chairman Saul Anuzis was the first state-party leader to have a blog. […]