New Media Mindset Harnessing the Power in Down-Ballot Campaigns

New Media Mindset

.... Harnessing the Power in Down-Ballot Campaigns

By Dr. Joan Van Tassel

“I don’t have a million dollars in my campaign war chest!”

Fortunately, you won’t need it to implement Politics 4.0. New media efforts have associated costs, but they are not necessarily cash intensive – the costs won’t even approach those of traditional

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media. They are, however, labor intensive. So you might need to re-think, re-design, and re-tool some parts of the venerable campaign machinery that has served so well in the past.

The next sections serve as hands-on guides to integrating the new elements of new media politicking into traditional campaign structures and processes. Each part covers a specific area or cluster of activities that a campaign staff can tailor to suit local conditions and needs. Please note that blue or red outlined boxes indicate a new structure or function; boxes outlined in black signify little or no change.

New Media Mindset for Down-Ballot Campaigns

Implementing a new media campaign begins with the strategic staff. The structural changes are small, but the conceptual changes require some adaptation on the part of experienced practitioners.

New media are…well, new – campaigns have to think about them as something different from traditional media. They are interactive, with voters sending, as well as, receiving communications, so there is a need for methods of handling incoming as well as outgoing messages. And there are lots of messages, because new media are multi-point to multi-point (everybody talking to everybody), instead of point-to-multipoint like broadcast and other traditional mass media.

New media do not have the same effects as traditional media, which amplify messages in a short period of time. Republican David All noted that the Obama staff didn’t try to hit home runs every day. Instead, they concentrated on making base hits. This is an important point: New media may not generate the stunning turning point moments in the campaign. But they will help accumulate consistent gains that add up over time. And they will bounce stories to the mass media that do create turning points – think George Allen’s 2006 “macaca moment.”

Campaigns also have to consider how they exercise control. Message discipline contributed to the Obama campaign’s ability to encourage participation by followers. Although they issued day-to-day messages that reflected the news of the moment, they kept the same over-arching umbrella message throughout the entire campaign, “Change you can believe in.” The consistency allowed followers to write about the candidate’s positions and to speculate about unannounced positions, in their own words, based on their own experiences. It fostered vibrant discussions on political blog sites that did not step on or contradict campaign messaging.

The emergence of new media gives supporters the means to participate actively. And they just don’t communicate the way they used to, through polite phone calls and individual emails. It’s not just an age thing – there are plenty of Boomers who use email, have Facebook pages, write on blogs, and depend on text messaging. Indeed, the more politically active a voter is, the more likely they are to communicate in these new ways.

This communicational free-for-all challenges campaign control. Adherents, as well as the followers of opponents, are likely to create unintended, even unwanted, messages or engage in questionable activities. While such occurrences are not new, the enlarged scale of participation means that staff needs to have plans in place to respond quickly and decisively to them.

Forrester’s 2nd quarter 2007 research on adults’ use of social technologies shows that Democrats currently enjoy a 2 percent to 10 percent advantage in all the categories of users. However, it is unlikely that this gap will persist: The new media are handy for everyone, regardless of political affiliation. For example, Forrester reported that in the Republican primary, Romney supporters were the most wired, with only 42 percent classified as “inactive.” On the Democratic side, Clinton supporters were the least wired, composed of about 43 percent inactive.

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To accommodate the changes in messaging and communication, campaigns will need to add a New Media Director to the strategic staff to manage the technology and the message load -- hardware and software, onsite and online. An essential responsibility of the New Media Director is to facilitate the alignment of goals with tasks and technologies. This position is not filled by a technician; rather, it requires someone with a broad understanding of how to use new media channels to connect, coordinate, and communicate. Hiring a 25-year old as Media Director will not ensure that the person can do the job. Again, age is a less relevant factor than is popularly assumed, but recent experience using these channels and the ability to adapt quickly to new opportunities are key.

Another change campaigns might consider is generating more of their own data and using it to track and monitor progress. Candidates have long responded to feedback in the form of survey research, which has provided reliable but expensive indicators. Now, new media turn the trickle of poll data into an informational tsunami.

In addition to traditional sources of census, party-gathered, and campaign-generated data, systems must take in data from the online website, social network site, purchased commercial data, and campaign-generated data from voter registration and canvassing efforts. These data are valuable, but aggregating, analyzing, and interpreting them is a challenge that will probably require the services of outside experts. The continuous transformation of data into information, i.e. into actionable knowledge, is feedback that the strategic staff needs to guide day-to-day decision-making, an adaptive mechanism to make possible daily base hits, doubles, and triples -- and sometimes even home runs.

Joan Van Tassel, Ph.D., Communication Theory & Research.
An educator, author, and multimedia journalist. Currently,
an Associate Professor of Communication and Chair of the
Communication Arts Department at National University. Joan
teaches courses in media story-telling, strategic communication,
communication technologies, content production, and journalism.
Joan can be reached at Click here to contact this Author.