Echo Ditto

• A social internet

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The Obama campaign's plan to announce their V.P. pick via SMS was a brilliant stroke, and the sheer number of people engaged with the campaign via text has already earned the campaign a place in political history (not that there was any question).

Unfortunately, the announcement didn't go as planned. Both the campaign as well as their most connected supporters have reason to be frustrated, and there are lessons here for all of us in the worlds of online politics, campaigning, organizing, and communications (keep reading!).

I'm quoted in two AP stories yesterday (here and here) about Obama's Biden pick as saying, "This is like finding out from your neighbor instead of your sister that she's engaged: not how you want or expect the news to be delivered."

There's a bit more to the overall story that didn't make its way into the coverage (surprise!), so i'll elaborate below. But for those still bitter about not receiving their text message, I think we'll need to give the campaign a pass on this one, after what was surely a long and bumpy night largely outside of their control.

What Happened
In short, the campaign got scooped on its own announcement by a clearly proud John King on CNN. The much-heralded and long-awaited text message started arriving from the campaign at 3 am ET, several hours after the rest of the major news outlets had confirmed Biden as Obama's pick.

During those two hours, Obama's most die-hard supporters, obsessive political news junkies, and others who worked themselves into a frenzy in anticipation of the announcement (like me) were left wondering why they had been left in the dark. Our date for the dance never showed, but the party was clearly starting. Countless people posted ">"where's the text?" and "still nothing from Obama" messages to their twitter accounts, left notes on Obama's facebook page, and some even emailed the campaign.

The "twitterverse" does not exactly represent a cross-section of America, but they do represent an influential constituency of engaged citizens and pundits. That said, there's a strong argument to be made that a majority of Obama supporters received the message as planned: they woke up Saturday morning to a text message or email directly from Obama and then saw it in print or on TV later on.

What it Means
Obama took an important and laudable risk by promising first-to-know information to supporters and friends. For most any online campaign, the name of the game is to use the new digital mediums to establish an ultra-personal connection between candidate and supporter, in a way that was nearly impossible less than a decade ago. Obama's team has done incredible work on this front, and deciding to send the announcement over text is a case in point. Hats off to Joe Rospars, Scott Goodstein, and the rest of the crew who probably haven't slept in weeks.

Having worked on a presidential campaign myself (Dean 2004), I can imagine a million possible reasons why the campaign's hands were tied from sending the text message earlier, as soon as the news began leaking out -- such as secret service security protocols or technical limitations of the bulk SMS provider.

But i also know that both in politics and in the real world, the "who" and the "when" of delivering news matters. So here are my take-aways, followed by some lessons:

1. Yes, Obama gained lots of phone numbers for later use during GOTV (see EchoDitto co-founder Garrett Graff's explanation in his ">NYT op-ed), but from an online engagement perspective, sending a text message with first-to-know information to such an intimate device only furthers our love affair and affirms our growing personal trust and connection with Obama.

   We were not the first to know, as promised. And the campaign was not first in telling us. Therefore, some love was lost. But only momentarily. The campaign recovers instantly because it should be clear to most people that we were not stood-up on purpose. The story was not broken to the news media by the campaign itself, so there was no betrayal. At least the savvy supporters can logically assume that the campaign was still intending to make good on its promise.

2. Second, as we witnessed from the Howard Dean campaign, one of the primary reasons a campaign invests so heavily in a new media team is to create its own campaign news channel -- through the blog, website, email, text messages, video, online social networks, etc. The goal: sidestep the media who are prone to distorting or repackaging your message. Cut out the middlemen; deliver it directly to your supporters, to the world.

   So, Obama for America took a slight hit in its function as a go-to news source for all things Obama, but easily recovers for the reasons above.

Lessons for campaigners:

1. (The most obvious:) We're now in an instantaneous news cycle. Do whatever it takes to get out ahead of the story, or, better yet, break the story yourself. This could mean sacrificing quality. As we sometimes echo around here, release early and often. If you're sitting on something good, there's a good chance that the mainstream media is preparing to beat you to the punch -- after all, that's their job.
2. Setup to jump and be nimble, because the best laid plans... Setup an organizational structure that allows you to move at the speed of the internet. Fri night / Sat morning was a big (and likely unexpected) test for the campaign team -- to see how tightly the new media team and press shop and campaign leadership could work together given the rapidly changing landscape following CNN's announcement. The campaign needed to move faster than ever to try and close the gap between the news breaking externally and getting their own announcement out to supporters, and that means lots of rapid internal coordination in the dead of the night.
3. Have a Plan B, assuming that technology won't cooperate. If you've ever tried to give a powerpoint/keynote presentation, there's a good chance that you know what I mean. We don't know if the decision to wait to send the txt was political or technical (it may have been queued in advance, for example). But for at least two hours after the news broke, the campaign website was still telling supporters that they could "be the first to know" about VP pick. For every additional minute and hour that passed, more and more supporters were hearing the big news from everyone other than the trusted source that was supposed to deliver it. A possible plan B in this case could have involved posting a message to the campaign blog (which they ultimately did at 2:45a as the SMS was going out) or having the candidate record a quick, unedited web video making the announcement right after the story broke.
4. Take the risk! The Obama campaign still comes out ahead on this one. The campaign stuck its neck out there with a bold proposition, by doing something bold and nontraditional which fit perfectly with their notion of an open and inclusive campaign, and it paid off in spades. Stay tuned for what I hope will be the single largest simultaneous use of political text messaging during Obama's speech on Thursday in Denver.

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At the Democratic National Convention next week, 125 bloggers will hold press credentials and hundreds more will be reporting from The Big Tent. You're probably wondering - how do I follow hundreds of blogs? Well, there's always Memeorandum or Newsjunk where you can watch the river of news flow but you run the risk of missing the more nuanced observations from smaller online media outlets. Try OMPL-a simple XML markup originally designed for outlining that was recently adopted to package RSS feeds. You can download the full OPML file of DNC credentialed bloggers here. Once you have the file, re-upload the file to your RSS reader and you will have the 125 credentialed bloggers loaded into a folder. It's that easy.

If your more of a Twitter fanatic, you can a)watch the hash tag #DNC08 on Twitter search or b)follow a group of users found in this Twitter pack.

SUMMIZE (now Twitter search) queries after launch

If you have other ways to follow online media at the conventions please leave us a comment.

Last week, Google launched the newest tool in its arsenal for web marketers, Google Insights for Search. A take-off on Google Trends, you can now easily compare search traffic across a variety of keywords, categories and regions. Although Google Insights doesn't really give you access to any new data (you could find all this info previously through a combination of Google Trends and AdWords), the new interface to the data -- and ability to chart and export numbers -- makes it an invaluable new tool for understanding the world we live in online.

The benefits of this data are endless. Of course, it's super-useful for planning and tweaking your AdWords campaigns. You'll easily be able to see if the keyword you're targeting is losing popularity over the past few months and you can test other keywords to see if they're gaining in popularity.

More importantly, though, I think it helps us understand the needs and motivations of our customers and constituents. With the ability to chart search volume back to 2004, we can get a (recent) historical view of search trends. We could trace, for example, the popularity of the search term "global warming" since 2004 and we'd see that the term peaked in April 2007 and remained fairly high throughout 2007 but appears to be returning to 2005 levels in summer '08.

Google Insights lets us narrow by geography as well, so we can dig deeper on those searches for "global warming" and focus just on searches in California. We can even pinpoint which cities account for the most searches. Of course this is a gold mine for marketers, but it's also useful for governments and advocacy organizations as something of a proxy for local public opinion.

Insights also helps us to understand how our constituents understand the issues we care about, and how best to speak to them. For example, charting the volume of "global warming" vs. "climate change" over the past 12 months should tell us that "global warming" has more resonance than "climate change".

With all this data at our fingertips, it's easier than ever to actually know what your constituents want and need to hear from you. So I encourage you to play around with Google Insights today and see what it can teach you!

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Last week, Google launched the newest tool in its arsenal for web marketers, Google Insights for Search. A take-off on Google Trends, you can now easily compare search traffic across a variety of keywords, categories and regions. Although Google Insights doesn't really give you access to any new data (you could find all this info previously through a combination of Google Trends and AdWords), the new interface to the data -- and ability to chart and export numbers -- makes it an invaluable new tool for understanding the world we live in online.

The benefits of this data are endless. Of course, it's super-useful for planning and tweaking your AdWords campaigns. You'll easily be able to see if the keyword you're targeting is losing popularity over the past few months and you can test other keywords to see if they're gaining in popularity.

More importantly, though, I think it helps us understand the needs and motivations of our customers and constituents. With the ability to chart search volume back to 2004, we can get a (recent) historical view of search trends. We could trace, for example, the popularity of the search term "global warming" since 2004 and we'd see that the term peaked in April 2007 and remained fairly high throughout 2007 but appears to be returning to 2005 levels in summer '08.

Google Insights lets us narrow by geography as well, so we can dig deeper on those searches for "global warming" and focus just on searches in California. We can even pinpoint which cities account for the most searches. Of course this is a gold mine for marketers, but it's also useful for governments and advocacy organizations as something of a proxy for local public opinion.

Insights also helps us to understand how our constituents understand the issues we care about, and how best to speak to them. For example, charting the volume of "global warming" vs. "climate change" over the past 12 months should tell us that "global warming" has more resonance than "climate change".

With all this data at our fingertips, it's easier than ever to actually know what your constituents want and need to hear from you. So I encourage you to play around with Google Insights today and see what it can teach you!

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