Obama's blue plate special.

Guess who’s coming to dinner? If you said Barack Obama, you’d be on to something.

When the money’s tight and every race counts, campaigns need to pull out all of the fundraising stops in order to insure that interest remains high and money remains forthcoming. With his latest online initiative freshly in my mailbox, Barack Obama is once again taking this advice to heart. Between now and March 31st, donors to Obama’s campaign will be entered into a pool of potential dinner guests who get to share a meal with the candidate himself.

There are multiple reasons to like this approach. For one, it seems to adhere to the idea that the most effective use of the internet as a political tool revolves around digitally organizing people for real-world events. The whole appeal of this fundraising push centers on the fact that donors can share dinner with the candidate and fellow supporters. If the campaign had touted this as a virtual dinner, staged remotely with more winners, the buzz wouldn’t be nearly the same.

Second, the campaign’s tactics reaffirm the idea that people will always be up for a game. Like the office workers who enter March Madness pools despite not following college basketball, potential donors this week will likely be spurred on by the promise of a potential “win”. Though the odds may be long for the donors, the results are the same for the campaign: increased cash flow at a time when opportunities for positive campaign news are at a premium.

Finally, this homespun approach to campaigning reflects the fact that the Obama campaign understands of the power of grassroots and netroots organizing, and provides another opportunity for Obama to appear “of the people, by the people”. In the campaign email that I received was quick to point out Obama’s populist appeal:


While Senator Clinton and Senator McCain have accepted millions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs, this campaign has relied on more than a million individual donors giving only what they can afford. Just last month, more than 90% of the donations to Obama for America were for $100 or less.

Whether or not this gimmick translates into increased fundraising (something that Obama’s campaign has had little trouble with, anyway) remains to be seen. However, as a fan of both political strategy and Barack Obama, I support the fact that the campaign is countering the kitchen sink with the kitchen table.

And yes, I donated today. Fingers crossed!

BOOK REVIEW: Poli-fluentials: The New Political Kingmakers

You know, all good streaks have to end sometime. Over the past few weeks, I've had the opportunity to read some of the reports from George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet, and I've been more impressed by each successive document. That is, until this week. This week, I found that IPDI can completely whiff once in a while. But, hey. 75%'s not bad, right?

It's not that this report doesn't contain interesting material and draw compelling conclusions. It does. The problems that I had with the document stem from two different oversights: a) though it claims to approach its classification process scientifically, the approach researchers use is flawed, and b) it's not telling our class anything that we didn't know thanks to Malcolm Gladwell.

The classification system that the report uses to categorize individuals as "poli-fluentials" is hampered by its limited criteria and small sample size. Setting aside the structural flaws, the report also does a fairly shoddy job of explaining exactly how to take advantage of such individuals, or even how to identify them in the first place. It's like they had a really interesting idea for a report, but then simply lost steam when it came time to flesh it out.

Problematic for our class is also the fact that this report is redundant. Much of the territory covered in this report was covered more engagingly by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. Slapping some specious political statistics on Gladwell basic ideas doesn't make for an enlightening reading experience. Rather, it leaves me scratching my head, wondering what all the fuss is about.

Political Video Tuesday - Raining McCain

Um... what?

I... um... what?

This seems like a mistake. And yet. This might be the most endearing thing to come out of McCain's campaign. If this is actually legit, then kudos. If it's a fake... well, that might be even more impressive.

Easter Break

It's Easter, so no updates for a few days. Also, this.

Cool Sites - Ringtones08

In keeping with the spirit of this week's book review, I thought I'd turn your attention to a site that's pretty much keyed in on the whole mobile politics kerfuffle.

The good folks over at Ringtone08 feel that your phone's ring might as well reflect your politics, catchy Fergie tones be damned. To this end, they've created a site where users can not only find and download ringtones of their favorite candidate free of charge, but create and market their own free ringtones.

While most of the content so far has dealt with the presidential election and recent Eliot Spitzer scandal, I'd be interested to see if any intrepid state or local candidates harness this sort of mobile strategy for use by their supporters. It seems like a concentrated group of people, living in a relatively compact area, could really use something like this effectively as a means of candidate branding. Of course, that also assumes that the ringtone is catchy (an unfortunate prerequisite, perhaps, but present nonetheless).

Oh, if you're curious, I'm now sporting the "Yes, We Can" Obama tone. I'm not only a Ringtones08 advocate - I'm also a user!

BOOK REVIEW: The Politics-to-Go Handbook: A Guide to Using Mobile Technology in Politics

As far as politics and technology goes, the one medium that I had little exposure to before coming to Georgetown was the world of mobile politics. While the combination of widely available mobile technology and political action seems like a natural fit, it wasn't something that I'd had any kind of personal relationship with. That all changed upon reading yet another of IPDI's fantastically effective handbooks. Like most of IPDI's work, this handbook is designed for practical application, and is generally free from both the Utopian technological determinism and over-skeptical Luddite warnings that poison many works on political technology. The authors of this book realize that, like everything else in the world of political action, mobile technology represents one possible approach to political media. While not a magic bullet by itself, mobile technology can be used effectively in tandem with other technologies, and is particularly well-suited to organizing specific actions and alerting supporters of opportunities for independent activism.

While much of the book deals with ways in which campaigns themeselves can use mobile technology as part of their digital strategy, time is also devoted to examining the effects of mobile proliferation on things like citizen journalism. In a world where everyone has a camera/recording device in their pocket, the opportunities for event-related spin are reduced. One only needs to look as far as George Allen and the infamous Macaca moment, or even to the "Don't tase me, bro!" debacle at the University of Florida, to realize the potential that unfiltered transmission grants to the world of news coverage.

Time is also spent examining the United States' relative lack of mobile penetration, an interesting read for anyone interested in the quagmire that is the American telecom industry. With our current tangle of service providers, it's no wonder that the potential for mobile activism in the US is nowhere near that of other, more effectively linked countries like Korea. However, that is a diatribe for another day.

For anyone who doesn't have time to read the entire handbook (hint: make time.), here's a handy executive summary that hits the highlights. Pay special attention to numbers one, three, five, and eight. Just sayin'.

Political Video Tuesday - The Living Room Candidate

If you're a complete political advertising junkie like me, you're probably in heaven these days. With the emergence of cheap broadband and a new commitment by campaigns to capture the internet market, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some well-done, persuasive videos. Some are amazingly aware of their audience (Mike Huckabee's fabulous Chuck Norris ad), while others sort of... miss the mark (basically any Hillary Clinton video targeting the youth vote). However, for some, this glut of new content isn't enough.

To all of the true geeks out there who want some honest-to-God historical context for today's ads: your time has come. Thanks to The Living Room Candidate, a feature that's part of the compelling Museum of the Moving Image, American Presidential election fans can get their fill of campaign advertising from Eisenhower forward. Each race is treated to a general overview, and ads from both candidates are presented for comparison.

Cooler still, the site allows users to use preset categories to view similar ads from different races, making categorization and trend-spotting even easier. Plus, full transcripts of each ad are available, which came in handy once I got the following song stuck in my head:



Sadly, the site's one drawback is its lack of embedding options. Head on over anyway, though, and get ready to lose a couple of hours.

A belated valentine to Ron Paul

I know this is a bit late, but here goes.



Ron Paul, you're a crazy person. A crazy person with ideas, but a crazy person all the same. I'm sorry that my roommate accosted you about Facebook. He's quite a handful. I wish you weren't a mad scientist, but alas.

Happy belated Valentine's Day,
Tyler

BOOK REVIEW: Person-to-Person-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Online Social Networks and User Generated Content

We're up to another one of those fantastic IPDI reports on today's book review, a treat for you and I alike. Today's covers topics that I have become intimately familiar with over the course of the past academic year: social networks and user-generated content. While there's no question that these areas are having a definite impact on the world of political campaigns, this report examines exactly how campaign managers can replicate and profit from an essentially organic political process.

The report is amazingly comprehensive, running the gamut from digital effects on traditional media forms (Chuck DeFeo's chapter on talk radio's transition into the blogging community) to encouraging offline contacts and action once online communities are established (Brad Fey's chapter on the shifting nature of word-of-mouth advertising). All of these chapters are presented in plain-speaking, easy-to-implement forms, which seems to fit IPDI's commitment to producing applicable handbooks rather than starry-eyed book of theory.

Personally, my favorite chapter covered the use of video games as a persuasive political tool. The chapter mainly focuses on the concept of adver-gaming, or the use of video games as a medium for message presentation and reinforcement. This approach mirrors game studies specialist Ian Bogost's concept of procedural rhetoric, a topic that I'm keen to explore as part of my thesis research next year. Bogost's argument that games persuade by "running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation" lends itself well to the inclusion of nuanced, persuasive content within the video game system. The fact that the political half of the industry is picking up on the concept is heartening, and suggests that further exploration is necessary.

Political Video Tuesday - 23/6

I'm not sure how many other internet humor fans are reading my blog out there (though, judging by my general friend base, I can sort of assume that there are a few of you), but today's site should appeal to pretty much everyone I know. It's called 23/6, it's run by the Huffington Post and former Daily Show staffers, and it specializes in, among other things, some of the most amazing spoof political advertisements that I've ever seen.

You might be familiar with the group's most famous cast of characters: the Swift Kids. Playing off of everyone's favorite irascibly outraged veterans' group, the Swift Kids ask the tough questions. Witness!



Aside from the Swift Kids, 23/6 has much more to offer. Witness x2!





Aww, who am I kidding? It's all about the kids, man.

Social Network Update VII - For A Good Cause

I thought I'd take some time to plug a social network cause that's actually having a big impact on my out-of-class life at the moment. As many of you may know, we here at CCT are in a potentially drawn-out fight to get another full-time media and politics professor hired for next fall. Without going into too many details, things aren't looking exactly rosy. Thus, in the spirit of online activism, we decided to go to the internet as a means of organizing the masses.

When we decided to go online, however, we were faced with a dilemma: exactly how would we structure our movement, and what tools would we use to get our message out and action taken?

Since our campaign was going to be fairly local and specialized, we decided that a combination of private communications and information offers and public action opportunities would be the best way to alert our peers to our problem and give them a chance to help us out. To this end, we decided to use two tool that have become quite familiar to readers of this blog: Facebook and Care2.

Since our outreach was going to be targeted at members of our specific peer group, the four of us behind the campaign began by sending out Facebook messages to all of our contacts at Georgetown and other Consortium universities. Facebook allowed us to reach people who we were already connected to and to inform them of where the situation stood regarding our need for a professor.

However, Facebook alone was not sufficient. Since it is not designed with activism in mind, it lacks easily adaptable features for action-related activity. We could've had people join a group or an event (which we did create to serve as an advertisement), but that wouldn't have the same impact as something more intuitively designed. It would've also restricted activity to out peers who were already signed up to use Facebook - not exactly the best strategy in this case. Thus, we turned to another website to give our supporters an easy way to help us: Care2's Petition Site.

We created this petition, copying the appeals that we'd used in the Facebook message and event portions of the campaign, and set a deadline for signatures. Once people began to respond, we sent out blast messages to everyone who had yet to sign the petition, and continued to advertise it in away messages and status updates on AIM, Facebook, and GChat. In the end, after circulating the petition around our limited target group for two weeks, we ended up collecting 80 signatures. We've submitted the petition to the head of our program, and are now waiting to hear back.

UPDATE (4/2): Well, a response came down. From unnamed sources come reports of an emergency staff meeting in which the most vocal member of our little group was been labeled "a troublemaker", our petition as "crummy", and our definition of media and politics as grossly lacking.

(Side note: for a program so enamored with technology, the idea that a technology-oriented petition would be ridiculed by the very people pushing these techno-Utopian pronouncements strikes me as off. If we'd written this in a paper instead of targeted it at them, they'd be falling over themselves to help us publish.)

However, for all of the unprofessional cheap shots, we've also heard that a new professor will indeed be hired to teach media and politics at CCT this fall. So, though we may be firebrands, we're at least successful firebrands.

Spring Break!

Just a note to let everyone know that I'll be taking the week of in honor of Georgetown's spring recess. I plan to use the week to finally get around to emptying out my draft log and establishing some order around here.

Wish me luck.