11 web technologies political campaigns should consider

I have a couple of friends working on different campaigns for different people. I have been asked what technologies they should be using on their site. This is a very interesting question and while the answer varies based on the campaign itself, below are 11 different technologies they should probably consider using. This list is in no particular order:

1 - Brightcove. While many campaigns will lean towards YouTube, and they should still use YouTube, Brightcove offers more control, higher quality, scheduling and syndication settings for content. Being able to pre-record a message and schedule it to go live at an exact time can give your campaign the extra edge it may need vs waiting for YouTube to convert your video whenever it darn well pleases. Once the video is live on your site, then you can publish it to YouTube, Google Video and the other several hundred video sharing sites. Yes, you should publish your videos to all of them.

2 - Twitter. Get people fired up about what your candidate is doing, where they are speaking and what's on their mind. Set up a twitter account and make sure to keep it up to date. Twitter at least once daily, but don't abuse it either.

3 - Adwords. Buy the candidates name on AdWords as well as the office they are running for, the city, state and anything else you think people may be searching for. Buy words that are relevant to what the platform the campaign stands on. Also buy mis-spellings of the name and heck, while you're at it buy the name of those running against you and the misspellings of their names too. Make sure that everyone's campaign points back to yours.

4 - Misspelled domain names. If I was running for office I would buy benhigginbotham.com, benhiggenbotham.com, benheggenbottom.com so forth and so on. All of these domains would point to my primary site BenForGalacticOverlord.com. This would ensure that no matter how poorly someone butchers your candidates name, they can easily find the info they want on the person, party and message. For the record I am not running for Galactic Overlord.... this year.

5 - Video. Have a ton of video. Do weekly fireside chats. Show rallies. Make sure that people know the person behind the campaign. Keep it short and exciting. Remember that the Internet community has ADD and can easily get distracted with shiny objects. Make sure that the audio is great. I suggest finding someone who really knows a lot about good video production to do this, if they don't know what a key light is or what the rule of thirds is, pass them up and move on.

6 - Grand Central. Get a free Grand Central number and send all calls directly to voicemail with a custom message from the candidate. With Grand Central you can easily take voicemail messages and place them on your site or download them for use in your weekly fireside chats. When someone has something nice to say, post it on your campaign site. When someone has a question, download it and add it directly into your weekly fireside chats. Use the persons original question with their own voice. That creates a much better rapport than having the candidate simply ask and answer the question themselves. You'll get crazy callers. Delete those messages and move on.

7 - UStream.tv. Broadcast it all live! If you have a campaign headquarters that is bustling with activity from noon to 8pm every day, then broadcast that office sans audio on UStream.tv from noon to 8pm. People love to see the behind the scenes stuff (but be careful on camera placement). Use CamTwist and bring in your Twitter feed as a news ticker in the video. If your candidate is speaking somewhere, broadcast that live on the Internet. Any event, anything that's interesting, broadcast it live then twitter that you're live and have people join in. I suggest turning off the chat room less it will spiral out of control with trolls.

8 - Google mashup of people supporting your candidate. Have a nifty little map that allows people to place a pin on a map indicating that they will be voting for your candidate. Most people love to be in the majority, so if you do this make sure the map is not empty.

9 - Blog. Have a blog and make sure to update it. Don't have a lame "we did this today" posts every day either. Mix it up, be a wee bit controversial. Have a voice.

10 - RSS. Have an RSS feed for your video, twitter, blog, events and main page. Make it easy for users to find the information they are looking for be it via Bloglines, Google Reader or just your main website itself. IE7, Firefox 2 and Safari all support RSS directly in the browser, so this is no longer a nice thing to have, it's a necessity. Make sure that your RSS is not only available as a link in the site but is also available in the header of the HTML. I would also suggest using Feedburner to burn your feed for tracking purposes.

11 - Google Radio. Get your audio ad on Google Radio to reach the masses. It's inexpensive, easy and a great way to get your word out.

Great post; we’ve been hearing a lot of similar questions from candidates as well.

Another web technology for candidates to consider is The NewsMarket (www.thenewsmarket.com) for access to a number of the technologies you mention. The NewsMarket not only helps candidates post and control video on their timeline and in a branded player, but enables the video to spread virally and be shared with any blog (all while candidates track and maintain control).

More than 12,000 global news outlets are regsitered at The Newsmarket - including thousands of U.S. journalists, that use it for broadcast and streaming quality video to use for TV and online stories. Media outlets stay on top of available content through The NewsMarket’s email alerts and RSS feed – that’s a lot of reach for not a lot of buck.

Brightcove has a major drawback, namely, they can begin slapping ads to quit smoking, refinance your mortgage and more at the end of your videos whenever they choose, as they did for a client of mine a few hours before a press event.

Their vague response as to when or for what criteria they choose to add ads to a custom player caused us to move everyone of our clients off the platform that week. We work with congressional thru presidential candidates and I'd have to say that the cost of the ad free version probably doesn't make economic sense for anyone but Presidential campaigns, and deep pocketed self funders...

Steve, good point. I had forgotten that Brightcove is now doing ad inserts into the video. Last year it was all ad free and I just didn't really pay attention when they popped up. By chance do you have a good replacement that has all or many of the features of Brightcove?

Comments

1. Posted by: Graeme Thickins on June 15, 2007 6:54 AM:

hey, Ben -- great post! and I don't even like politics...
all I care about is, do they surf? :-)

excellent writing, and great advice

I'm voting for you for Overlord

cheers,
Graeme

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