Picking over the bones: finding strategy in a post-mortem

Rayne Today

The big boys are picking through the bones, sifting the flesh for the cause of death. By big boys I mean A-listers here in the blogosphere and the political world, the kind of people with single-name cachet.

Gill. Lebkowsky. Trippi. Exley. Steele. Hynes.

And by death, I mean the Kerry campaign online; yeah, you know what I mean, that push-broadcast, top-down, centralized, uni-directional email thing that represented the online community outreach effort for the Kerry presidential bid.

Jock Gill, former Clinton Administration media guru, discusses at GreaterDemocracy.org what went wrong with the Kerry campaign approach, comparing the Kerry "master/slave" model (it's a term of art, folks) with "peer-to-peer" community building used by the Dean primary campaign. There's obviously a gap where more communication was needed between the idea folks, but more importantly there was a culture gap, a synapse that wasn't bridged. Make your own guess at the cause of the Kerry online community's demise by reading Jock's post and the exchange with Zack Exley (Kerry Campaign), Joe Trippi (Dean Campaign), Aldon Hynes (CivicSpace), Jon Lebkowsky (Polycot & WorldChanging.com), Robert Steele (OSS.net).

By now you're asking, what's this got to do with Michigan*? OMG. EVERYTHING.

In my opinion, today's political environment requires candidates to successfully navigate not one or two, but THREE types of media:

1) Master/Slave (M/S) -- emails pushed out to subscribers containing a unifying message or content, ideally containing a way to provide feedback or pull more content from a website;

2) Peer-to-peer (P2P) -- blogs that encourage discussion and participation among interested community members, with blogrolls that link to other like-minded folks;

3) Traditional broadcast media -- television, radio, newspaper (print, not online); your father's and grandfather's media, the kind that only permits an extremely limited feedback like letters to the editor, or none at all, a media where the message and content is highly structured.

Each of these media types has a natural constituency. M/S is likely to be preferred by users on dial-up who may be more frustrated by their internet experience, as well as seniors who are more comfortable with email than with using interactive websites. P2P will naturally be preferred by folks who've cut their teeth on the internet, who expect the internet to be a major communication channel and relationship mediator as well as a news provider. Traditional broadcast will have a broader appeal to those who are not wired or internet savvy, who trust these staunch if stale outlets for most of their news. But each of these constituencies have a voting profile -- the older the voter, the more consistently they vote, for example. (See Pew Internet Life PDF-format memo 01/22/06, Generations online, for demographics by age; for broadband distribution, see Pew Internet Life project report, Digital Divisions dd. 10/05/05.)

Until we reach a point where there is true convergence and everyone is wired, relying on the same point for news, communications and relationships mediation, there will be a need to serve each of the constituencies attached to these medias. The recent spate of television ads by the gubernatorial opposition candidate are a perfect example of reaching to a constituency with consistent voting reliability, ultimately impacting opinion polls. The percentage change since the ads began suggest the size and impact of this one leg of media. Can we Michigan Liberals obtain a corresponding percentage change in the other direction? Certainly not if we rely on only one leg of the media; certainly not if a race is so tight that a couple of percent difference in turn-out and vote will make or break a race.

And definitely not if we don't learn from history by picking at those bones.

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* Michigan is my home state. ~Rayne

[Originally posted at MichiganLiberal.com]