Nuts and Bolts of Digital Political Strategy

After reading Colin Delany’s Online Politics 101 and Ben Rigby’s Mobilizing Generation 2.0, one thing became crystal clear about online campaign strategy: this is very new stuff. Both writers freely acknowledge this and give practical examples of organizational strategies that worked and those that didn’t. At the same time, they remind us that there isn’t a sure fire method to use online tools to deliver results.

Because best practices on online strategies seem to be changing daily, ROI is often fleeting. An organization might spend loads of money and time building a wiki, virtual world, blog, etc, but be left with few measureable outcomes. HOWEVER, as Rigby and Delany stress, just because we can’t solidly measure all the results of a digital campaign doesn’t mean that it’s done in vain.

The world has alreay begun a new way of communicating and every digital step organizations take keeps them more in synch with these emerging strategies.

One thing that is not new is having good content. Rigby and Delany both emphasize that “content is king.” No matter how proficient your organization is with online technologies, if you don’t have the content no one will care. From my own experience, it seems that this is a real stumbling block for organizations looking to establish an online presence. They either have not thought about how to repurpose their content or they simply don’t have the content to begin with.

Three key takeaways from these readings:

Mobile phone campaigns are here to stay and have amazing potential.

Rigby has an entire chapter dedicated to mobile strategies—and the subject matter certainly deserves it. Mobile strategies are delicate, because the last thing you want to do is spam your members on their mobile devices. But as networks improve and mobile internet browsing advances, it certainly seems plausible that the phone will be as important as the PC for connecting to the internet (it is already is for some people!). By creating strategies using mobile devices that can gather data or send out key information, organizations can capture people right at the moment they are thinking about the topic. If done right, mobile technologies should make it super easy for people to interact with your organization.

Online “gardeners” keep your online presence fresh, healthy and growing.

Rigby talks about “wiki gardeners,” (the people who maintain an organizational wiki). I like the idea of this role a lot, and it will only become more and more important as these strategies mature. I might even take the idea of the wiki gardener and broaden its scope and suggest that all organizations need digital gardeners to monitor and tend to their online presence. The online gardener can monitor comments on organizational blogs, work on social networks to build friend bases and keep good communications flowing, tend to the wiki, make sure that online communities don’t languish, keep content updated, and basically do the lion’s share of the digital upkeep. Unfortunately, until 2.0 technologies reliably generate quantifiable ROI, organizations probably will not justify a full time position for this (but they should--some already do). I think we’ll see this quickly change in the coming years—it’s already started.

If content is king, INTEGRATION is prince.

As Delany writes: “If you pick up one idea from this website, let this be it—integrate or die.” The power of these tools lies in the fact can all work off each other. The more they are integrated the more powerful they become. An add can encourage you to text in some information, which can lead you to a blog, which you can put into your feed, which eventually leads you to join an online community, which makes you like the organization more and more until you bequeath your life savings to them. Well, it’s not that simple, but that’s the idea. If your organization is good, and fights for a good cause, or provides some key service, and you can properly place the content in the right tools the right way, you might be on your way to riches—or at least a more sophisticated communications plan.