John McCain, Vlogger
by Patrick Ruffini :: March 13th, 2008 10:55 pmHow does John McCain go up against the $3 million-per-email Obama machine and the $2 million-per-email Clinton machine? It’s a big question with serious implications for the future of the Republican Party. And the answer is not incrementalism.
First, let’s look at the fundamentals.
How did Clinton and Obama get 20 to 30 percent of their voters to sign up for their lists? At a fundamental level, it’s because they did the big things online. They created a sense that the Web was The Place for anyone to come and show their support. They channeled their offline activity into email addresses and online donations. They did videos that were at once viral and strategic, and not just the expected bio pieces.
These newsworthy events early in the campaign forced hundreds of thousands of people to go to BarackObama.com or HillaryClinton.com to see what was up. While they were there, tens of thousands signed up for the list. And thousands gave donations, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in single days in the sleepy 2007 months.
Yes, one can argue there was more organic interest, more Google searches, more media interest in Clinton and Obama. But the big events were force multipliers. When Romney, Thompson and Paul staged big online events during the primaries, their supporters responded in record numbers.
All of this launched a snowball effect. With the Clinton and Obama lists in the millions, it’s just a numbers game. They could send out crap emails and people would respond. And McCain could send out great emails and people wouldn’t respond because his list isn’t organically as huge.
The traditional political answer to drive people to your website is to go out and find people. To advertise to them.
That’s too expensive to do in any scalable fashion, particularly when the metric is signups and money. Online, it’s much easier to let people come to you by making them organically interested.
To wit: John McCain should do a daily video blog from everyday now until the election. And don’t make it “behind the scenes” fluff. More often than not, make it dead serious. Have him break news and introduce new messages and lines of attack. When he challenges Obama to debate, don’t do it in a speech, do it on the vlog.
In short, do what Fred Thompson promised but never eventually delivered on. Let people see the real straight-talkin’ McCain, and do it in a serialized fashion so that people come to expect it (there’s a reason why Buzz Out Loud #680 and TWiT #135 get big audiences).
This is also a strategic move on McCain’s part. If the footage next eight months against Obama is set-piece rally speeches, we lose. If the setting is more intimate and conversational, Obama is less of a threat, as we have seen from his uninspiring performance in debates.
In 2004, the Bush press shop would send around the paragraph or two in every stump speech that was different. Since most stump speeches were pretty much carbon copies of the last one, these inserts were news likely be the lede on an AP writethru within the hour.
In 2008, there is no reason not to launch many if not most of these messages on YouTube, or if one wants to follow the evil Peter Daou strategy, on an unembeddable JohnMcCain.com player with a huge signup box next to it.
In fact, campaigns that go the traditional route are missing out. By doing things mostly offline, they are missing an opportunity to drive people to the website to sign up and eventually donate. Do it on TV, and it’s an ephemeral one day story. Do it on the Web and, true, the message won’t stick around any longer, but the e-mail addresses you net that day will.
Plus, it’s not an either-or strategy. You give B-roll to the nets and force them to credit the URL. This drives even more traffic, while getting your message out in the same medium that would have seen your offline message anyway.
This ”Big Moments” strategy calls for John McCain to break his campaign’s most provocative news online. And start doing this now, so it can have a chance to snowball before the convention.
They’ll say this is too time consuming. No, it’s not. It’s two minutes of the candidate’s time everyday, speaking from the gut, with minimal editing. The staff time would invariably be less than what it would take to craft two minutes of a candidate’s speech that no more than a few thousand people would see live anyway. The less scripting and post-production the better.
They’ll say this is somehow unpresidential. No, it’s not. For one thing, John McCain is not the President. He is a candidate who is trying to be President. And McCain excels in natural, more intimate settings. Shooting the breeze on the back of the bus is also “unpresidential” but McCain does it anyway.
They’ll say it screws the media out of exclusives. Yes, it does. But with the web, campaigns have a viable distribution channel of their own, and as a Presidential nominee, the media is to some extent forced to repeat it. A medium like this actually gives the campaign a greater opportunity to shape the message. And is it in a Republican campaign or White House’s strategic interest to enable the New York Times’s continued relevance by giving them exclusives that give them a leg up over competitors? A campaign can break its own news through the medium it chooses.
At the end of the day, the goal is simple: to create a content magnet that sucks in any reasonably interested McCain voter, gets them on the email list in short order, and gets them organizing (and self-organizing) right away.
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Patrick this is it! This is what has been missing all along. Now, how do we get McCain to adopt these strategies?
Absolutely.
In fact, given that McCain has been doing all these town meetings, I think he already has all the content for a killer site:
ask.johnmccain.com
or
straightalk.johnmccain.com
Just take video at every town meeting stop of the person asking the question, and a video the answer/discussion, organize the videos by issue then date.
I think this could be totally huge. His website already pushes the straight talk express thing, I think they can take it even farther.
Hell, I’d even build the damn site if they sent me the video.
> They’ll say this is somehow unpresidential.
No they won’t. They’ll say that it’s un-John McCain. Which it is. The guy is stodgy.
They’ll say that it’s un-John McCain. Which it is. The guy is stodgy.
What? Stodgy? You do realize that he was among the first, if not THE first, Republican elected official to contribute to a blog, don’t you? He holds bi-weekly blogger calls, too, and will take any question from anyone.
Stodgy? Hardly.
I think if he has time, he’d be open to it. This IS the same man who tirelessly does town hall meetings, after all–it’s not like he’s averse to talking to people.
Meanwhile, from the public service/none of them are really qualified department, regular citizens can do their part by doing what Pierce Wetter suggests, albeit with the twist of asking McCain or the others the questions the MSM refuses to ask.
For instance, someone asked McCain one such question recently: youtube.com/watch?v=tIK9ZawRMlg
Now, imagine that the questioner had been more familiar with the topic, had been more willing to push the issue, and had asked a question like this: youtube.com/watch?v=YRWRzZ_yPnk
I’m going to guess it’s because of MAD that Ruffini hasn’t suggested asking Obama and Clinton the questions the MSM won’t ask, but perhaps others could put country before party.
Right On Patrick! To instill excitement, we need to have info flowing from the campaign but not buried in packaging or controlled by the campaign. We have more readers combined than they do. Besides the campaign sites are all alike and after a while boring. You go there and even their own news is often outdated.
One thing some of the other campaigns did right was to welcome the bloggers. The McCain site neds to do this. The Republican National Convention 2008 website appears to moving in the right direction. They are even going to stream the entire event for us and are already trying to get bloggers online with them.
John McCain is getting the word out “as he goes” but his campaign needs to allow us access to these same events along via video, press releases, sound clips, live feeds by Internet streaming. There is an old saying in business that if you are doing something good and the customer sees it, you do not need to pay a PR man to tell that customer that you are doing something good. We just need to be given access to look in an open window to hear and see John McCain in action and then share it with others on the Internet through via our own viewpoints on our blogs.
We could just setup the site with giant blank spots where Obama/Clinton are supposed to answer so they look like wimps.
Who has the better fact checkers: The McCain campaign or Democratic activist. Senator McCain’s staff has not demonstrated the competence necessary to put out policy statements are fully fact checked, that are defendable, and that will not give Democrats an entirely new set of talking points to show McCain as a tired old man who does not grasp the fact and who has poor judgment.
I guess 2012 will bring blogs on Palmtops, iPhones and PDAs.
Sean
McCain needs to make more statements along the lines of Al Qaeda winning if he loses the election.
Vote for McCain or the terrorists will eat your children alive!
Vote for McCain or Osama Bin Laden will have a happy day!
And so on.
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