Via: reddit.com

The 2012 election proved that while a well-run digital campaign may not be enough to win you the election, a bad one can help you lose it. And moving forward, any winning national or state campaign must know that to fund-raise, mobilize, and persuade, it has to place a new emphasis on data capture and usage.

The Obama campaign began this cycle with a huge leg up online. Having been running for president for the better part of four years and having been in national office for two, the president had amassed a huge database of small-dollar donors, supporters, e-mail addresses, and Facebook fans. There’s no doubt that the institution of the presidency awarded his candidacy advantages and attention that the Republican candidates could never reach. That said, the Obama campaign deserves credit yet again for an incredibly well-run digital operation, one that broke the barriers that they themselves had set in 2008.

Simply put: The Obama campaign understood how to empower individuals through technology. Arguably the best use of technology this cycle, the campaign's downloadable canvass application allowed users to walk their neighborhoods without needing to visit a local campaign office. While not always perfect, the Obama campaign used various rich data points borrowed from Facebook to send targeted e-mails around Election Day, urging people to help encourage specific friends in battleground states to vote for Obama. Supporters would open up their e-mail to see pictures of their friends staring at them, and with the click of a mouse could write testimony on their digital Facebook walls.

Republicans squabbling about messaging and reaching youth often have a common misconception that only young people are active online. At one point in the campaign, Ted Cruz’s average online donor was 55 and Newt Gingrich’s most active audience on Facebook were people 45+. Certainly issues that motivate a 55-year-old man in Florida to take action online are drastically different than those motivating a 25-year-old woman in New York. Most Republican campaigns this cycle lost out on harnessing the animosity online against Obama into anything tangible. Facebook messages, e-mails, and tweets often talked at voters, and not with them, missing the intimacy that digital communications allows.

Perhaps part of the issue is that Republican campaigns in particular have become focused on ad spending as a metric of success in a specific medium. If you look at tracking polls, the truth is that 90+% of the electorate was always polarized and already decided in this election before a single ad ran. Billions of dollars ran on television from super PACs trying to persuade and reach a small percentage of the electorate in each swing state, while virtually nothing went into creating forward-looking technologies that would be around to help the movement regardless of election results.

Sure, the Obama campaign spent money on television, but it also understood the marketing power in using others to advocate its brand. It knew that a voter sharing an advertisement on a friend’s wall was ultimately more powerful and a better use of money than costly and inefficient broadcast buys. There’s no doubt that television continues to be the dominant place people consume media, but does that necessarily mean it is the best place to persuade a voter? Pollsters, often among the smartest people working on campaigns, can help answer that question, but sometimes even they might need a little help.

A question I saw in the field this cycle asked, “What social network do you use the most?” with answers of Google, MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter. The results came back skewed heavily toward Google. Not because Google is dominant but because the question confused the voter by implying that Google’s search engine was a social network (Google’s social network is dwarfed by Facebook, in reality). The fact that MySpace still appeared as a serious answer also highlights the hard road we have ahead.

Another question I saw multiple pollsters ask this cycle was, “How often do you use the Internet to consume political news and information?” The responses came back unsurprisingly bleak and in one case was used to slash the digital budget. But is the voter watching Dancing with the Stars in Ohio consuming political news and information? Is the voter listening to country-music radio in Iowa consuming political news and information? A more relevant question would ask how voters use the Internet in terms of time and media consumption patterns.

In many cases consultants continue to hold digital to a higher standard, refusing to give money without knowing the immediate return on investment. Republicans cannot run successful forward-looking campaigns with this continuing to be the case. The Romney campaign certainly deserves credit for being able to utilize relationships to get digital properly funded, something that hadn’t been done in the previous cycle. The Republican Party as a whole, however, should yet again look to Obama’s use of technology as a means to empower individuals and figure out the best way to spend its money. We simply can’t afford not to.

A Pew Research Center study released this week spurred a round of inaccurate news stories claiming that the Obama campaign is dominating the Romney campaign online. Pew has a stellar reputation both in the academic and media communities, one that it has built up with a fantastic assortment of research and information relevant to many fields. This specific study though has a flawed data set, one that could hardly have been better designed to tell a positive story for the Obama campaign.

The headline from Pew’s website reads, “Obama Outpaces Romney in Social Media, Web Campaign,” and the findings of the study are summed up in one of the opening sentences of the report: “The Obama campaign is posting almost four times as much content and is active on nearly twice as many platforms.” According to Pew the Obama campaign is “outpacing” Romney online because he is posting more content on Twitter/Facebook and because his campaign has more accounts on different social media sites. The study’s results have been featured over the last 48 hours in CBS News, Politico, The Hill, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, and more.

There’s no doubt that Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla this election cycle. Every study shows that Facebook dominates where Internet users spend their time and my own campaign experience has proved it can be used as an effective fundraising tool. As of August 16th Barack Obama has a whopping 27 million fans of his Facebook page compared to only 4.3 million for Mitt Romney. Many in the press would use these raw numbers to crown Obama king of Facebook — but in reality this should just be where the analysis begins.

A closer look of the pages shows the exact opposite conclusion. Facebook’s public “Talking About” figure showcases the number of people interacting with content on a Facebook page. This is the sum number of people who have liked, shared, or commented on page’s content over a seven-day period. As of 12:30 a.m. Thursday, Mitt Romney had 1,579,476 people talking about his page compared with 1,354,550 for President Barack Obama. This means that more people are actually interacting with content on Mitt Romney’s page than Barack Obama’s page despite Obama’s having an almost 7 to 1 advantage in total fans over Romney. This is a remarkable figure, one that I believe reflects the grassroots enthusiasm around the Paul Ryan announcement. If Obama were really “outpacing” Romney online he would need seven times as many people talking about his page than Romney has simply to remain proportional. In reality though, Obama has fewer people talking about his page.

Researchers and reporters should take down this important note: it’s impossible to know how many posts/updates that pages are actually posting unless you are a page administrator. Facebook allows administrators to target posts by city or state. If the Obama and Romney campaign’s are using Facebook effectively, they’d be posting state specific status updates and graphics/videos, etc. into individual states. These posts would not be public to the average visitor to their pages but the interactions with these posts would count in the overall “talking about” number. As campaigns continue to geo-target posts, the ability of the press and academic outlets to properly analyze pages will greatly diminish.

The Romney campaign has been incredibly aggressive and innovative with their use of Facebook. Not only are they running many different fundraising ads but this week they even begun using “Facebook Offers” to sell yard signs and raise money for the campaign.

Twitter is mentioned frequently in Pew’s summaries as well as in many of the related press stories. Let’s be clear: Twitter is a tool for hyper-engaged politicos and grassroots activists. According to a study released by Pew only a few months ago only 15% of U.S. Internet users use Twitter and only 8% use it daily. Compare this to Facebook where over 75% of U.S. Internet users have accounts, with the average user spending more than 8 hours a month on the site and more than 40% of American users log in daily. Those at the Pew Research Center do themselves a disservice by comparing Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to each other when their scales are an order of magnitude or more apart.

The Pew study’s failings reflect a new challenge for those of us who try to understand digital content. Now, targeting is everywhere. Even content on websites can be personalized to a user based on such things as cookies or previous visits to the site. For example a first time user to Mitt Romney’s website might see a different message and different content than someone who donated at the site or who signed up for a coalition. The Obama campaign also for example could highlight a certain “constituency group” (a term from the Pew study) based on geography. Someone in San Francisco could see “Californians for Obama” where someone in Iowa could see “Farmers for Obama.” I’ve worked with candidates who have created subpages on websites not easily accessible to any site visitor but that exist to serve as landing pages from online advertising which is also targeted based on a variety of different data points. Because of all of this, it’s unfair to visit two websites and make a blanket statement about the effectiveness of their functionality and content.

There is one area where the Obama campaign does seem to be outpacing Romney: Email. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google, seek, and draw, a large share of media attention, they represent a relatively small portion of campaign fundraising. Pew didn’t mention the best evidence that Obama continues to set the pace: His campaign’s sophisticated use of split-tests and micro email campaigns.

There’s no doubt that the Obama campaign’s use of digital remains incredible, and certainly Obama ’08 showed that the right digital campaign tied with the right candidate at the right moment can have its place in history. Journalists, academics, and others pontificating on the use of digital media in the 2012 Presidential election should read up and understand what they’re writing about before diving deep into subjects and writing misleading headlines read by millions of people. It’s just simply not true that Obama is outpacing Mitt Romney online. And even if he was, researchers, journalists, and competitors like me might not even know it.

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Not just for taking pictures.

Via: Ethan Miller / Getty Images

On Monday night, the Federal Elections Commission unanimously approved text to donations by campaigns, and the political world was forever changed.

Perhaps no campaign will benefit as much in the immediate future as that of President Barack Obama. At the end of Obama’s 2008 campaign the campaign had more than 1 million mobile numbers, and they’ve continued to gain numbers for the past four years through their website and other digital media. How long will it be until the campaign turns its famous $3 email ask into a $3 SMS ask and raise millions from an untapped medium?

Mobile’s rise is the latest challenge to the still-dominant small dollar medium, email. E-mail solicitations have faced new rivals in the form of social media platforms and companion ads, but email’s ability to bring in large masses of small dollar donations is unmatched. That’s why I chose e-mail over SMS to release the name of Rick Scott’s Lieutenant Governor pick in 2010. And, it was largely because of a large, robust in-house email list, and money spent renting large external lists that helped Newt Gingrich raised more than $1.5 million online in the 48 hours following his South Carolina victory earlier this year.

But if e-mail is king in terms of small dollar fundraising in politics, then after Monday’s decision, it is a king whose best days are probably behind him. The FEC decision fundamentally changed how campaigns should view small dollar bundling. However, the outcome of the decision isn’t as simple as it sounds. The Hill’sMegan Wilson outlined some of the restrictions that stem from the decision:

Text donations would be capped at between $10 and $50 per billing cycle and campaigns would enforce that restriction through tracking donations from a single user’s mobile phone number to a single premium short code assigned to the political committee. The short code would also enable the aggregator and carriers to ensure “the $50 limit is never exceeded for one political recipient.”

With the peculiarity of these rules, it seems likely that many of these limits and restrictions will change in time.

Why are mobile donations so important? To “Millennials” their mobile device is the center of the universe. They’re not only listeners of streaming radio, and rabid Facebook users, but they are also rapid texters. A Pew Study released last year highlighted some of the age gap: "For instance, most cell phone owners only use two of the main non-voice functions on their phones: taking pictures and text messaging," the report states. "However, most Millennials also use their phones to surf the internet, send email, play games, listen to music, and record videos." While usage among the youth is much higher, even usage of mobile devices among older Americans is quickly increasing.

The ability to accept donations via text will greatly increase the percentage of donations coming in from mobile users as a whole. On the Gingrich campaign mobile users made up 18% of visitors to the campaign website but only 8% of our donations came via mobile users. The ability to text in a donation should help close that gap. In 2009 I ran the mobile operations for Bob McDonnell’s gubernatorial race in Virginia. We briefly tried raising money off of our opt-in list and had users text back a donation amount that was followed up by a live caller who took credit card information. If we had used the technology discussed on Monday, our program would have been much more successful.

Text-to-donate’s success will largely be tied to campaign’s willingness to integrate a short code/donation ask into television advertising. One recent study found that only an estimated 1.5% of the roughly 10 billion dollars spent in political advertising this year will be spent online. The estimated 6.6+ billion spent on television ads could bring in money from voters sitting on their couches watching television while texting on their smartphones.

There’s no doubt that Monday’s decision will fundamentally change campaigns’ ability to fundraise. The ability to raise small donations with simply a single text message donation amount will certainly help fuel insurgent/grassroots candidates and add power to average citizens’ involvement in the political process. It remains to be seen if campaigns will be willing to add the ability for text-to-donate throughout their paid media program, and most importantly, on television. Until then, I will wait expectantly for that text from the Obama campaign asking me for $3.

Vincent Harris ran digital operations for Speaker Newt Gingrich and Governor Rick Perry's 2012 Presidential campaigns. He is the founder and CEO of Harris Media, a digital firm based in Austin, Texas.