New Tools

NDN applauds President Obama's demonstrated commitment to reaching out to Latinos.  President Obama began reaching out to Hispanics during the 2008 campaign through his record amount of Spanish language paid advertisements, by issuing all communications in English and Spanish, and by working to get into the living rooms of Hispanics by appearing on several of the most popular Spanish language programs.  NDN congratulates the President on the continuation of his bilingual press strategy throughout the transition, and now as part of the White House Media Affairs Office.  He gets, it - candidates and public officials need to address Spanish language media and speak in Spanish.   

Yesterday, the President fulfilled his promise to grant an interview to El Piolin, during which he discussed recent achievements, the economic stimulus package and immigration reform.  El Piolin, or Eddie Sotelo, is one of the most televised radio personalities in the nation. His show, Piolin por La Mañana, is the top ranking for morning shows in Los Angeles (regardless of language) and its 50 syndicated markets.  Its growing scope makes it the #1 Radio Show in the country.  Studies indicate that Hispanics are suffering disproportionately in this economic crisis, and Obama's appearance on this show indicates his desire to to reach them directly and let them know he is working on solving this economic crisis.

UPDATE: Today, Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post points out that more and more politicians are finally waking up to the fact that using 21st-century coummunication technology is vital in today's political environment. From his excellent piece:

...the GOP will be rebuilding itself at a time when the Democratic Party continues to make inroads in using technology to reach a diverse set of constituents with their message. Today, the New Politics Institute, an arm of the liberal think-tank New Democrat Network, will hold one of its many lunches for Democratic Hill staffers and advocacy folks. The title of the event: "New Tools for a New Era." Simon Rosenberg, founder of NDN, said the lunch is a part of his group's ongoing New Tools series, which tout the use of cell phones, social networks and micro-targeting, among others, in campaigning.

We hope you will join NDN and its affiliate, the New Politics Institute (NPI), today at noon for our first post-election tech event of 2009, New Tools for a New Age -- a discussion of three exciting media and tech tools with tremendous potential for use in politics, advocacy and governing today. This event will showcase some impressive new advances in the fields of social networking, Web video and microtargeting of television advertising.

For those not able to attend, we are excited to announce that we will be providing a live Web cast of the event from our newly redesigned, high-tech NDN event space just a block from the White House. Visit ndnblog.org/livecast today to catch a high-quality stream of the forum. Feel free to tell others you think might be interested in attending or watching. For those watching on the Web, the live program will begin at 12:15 p.m. ET.

Joining NDN President Simon Rosenberg for this forum will be Jason Rosenthal, Senior Vice President of Business Operations at Ning, Inc.; Tim Chambers, Co-Founder of the Media 50 Group and Principal, Dewey Digital; and Amy Gershkoff, co-founder of Changing Targets Media. Jason will talk about how Ning -- a scalable social networking platform -- can be adapted to a huge variety of applications; Tim will show us the new Dewey Digital Radar, which provides accurate and detailed Web video metrics for more than 150 Web video platforms; and Amy will tell us how Precision Buy can make media buys more efficient, from targeting the right cable systems to buying the right television programs.

The forum will take place at NDN's offices from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. Lunch will be served, and seating will be first-come, first-serve. Space is limited, so please RSVP as soon as possible. For maps, speaker bios, and other information, please click here.

For background, feel free to review the following memos and papers from NDN and NPI: Leverage Social Networks, Buy Cable Smart, and shaping and delivering messages with Microtargeting.

A recent post from Personal Democracy Forum reports that the Obama campaign found online search ads had

a "ridiculously" high Return On Investment as a list-builder. Joe Rospars talked significantly more at a second NOI-sponsored event last month, divulging that search and contextual ads (Google Ads) were the backbone of the campaign's online advertising outreach, and that a relatively straightforward strategy had been steadily and consistently effective...when compared with the cost of acquiring supporters via other channels, search advertising absolutely shone, with an ROI Rospars described as approaching 15:1.

The Obama campaign, recognizing the power of search ads, spent a much larger percentage of their budget on them than the McCain campaign did; the Obama campaign spent about $8 million on search ads in 2008, compared to the McCain campaign's $1.5 million. To put that $8 million in perspective, it is reported to account for nearly half of all political search ad money for the year.

Given the Obama campaign's solid grasp of new media tools, their emphasis on search ads is not surprising. Nor are the results - NDN and the New Politics Institute have been pushing the use of online search ads for years now precisely because they are so inexpensive relative to their impact. For tips on how to use online search ads effectively, check out our excellent papers, Use Search and Advertise Online, or watch the video below of Google's Peter Greenberger speaking at one of our NPI events. Of course, not everyone will get the kind of return that the Obama campaign did - few people have been searched more in the last two years than Barack Obama. But as people get more and more accustomed to using Google whenever they need information about anything, search ads become more and more effective.

Finally, to learn about other great ways to improve your advocacy or campaign, be sure to drop by our NDN / NPI event, "New Tools for a New Era," this coming Tuesday, where we'll look at new advances in social networking, microtargeting, and web video. Anyone interested in technology and politics is guaranteed to geek out, and we'll be debuting a few new toys of our own; stay tuned for more info. 

Several factors combined to propel Barack Obama to the presidency in the historic 2008 election including America's rapidly changing demographics, a redrawn electoral map and the use of new tools and media that changed the way candidates communicated with voters.

Join NDN and NPI Tuesday, February 17, for our first post-election tech event of 2009 -- a discussion of three exciting new tools and media with tremendous potential for use in politics, advocacy and governing. This event will showcase some impressive new advances in the fields of social networking, Web video and television microtargeting.

NDN and its affiliate, the New Politics Institute (NPI), have long advocated and helped facilitate the use of new tools and media with our New Tools series. We are excited to bring you these new developments.

Joining us for this forum will be Jason Rosenthal, Senior Vice President of Business Operations at Ning, Inc.; Tim Chambers, Co-Founder of the Media 50 Group and Principal, Dewey Digital; and Amy Gershkoff, co-founder of Changing Targets Media. Jason will talk about how Ning -- a scalable social networking platform -- can be adapted to a huge variety of applications; Tim will show us the new Dewey Digital Radar, which provides accurate and detailed Web video metrics for more than 150 Web video platforms; and Amy will tell us how Precision Buy can make media buys more efficient, from targeting the right cable systems to buying the right television programs.

The forum will take place at NDN's offices from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. Lunch will be served, and seating will be first-come, first-serve. Space is limited, so please RSVP as soon as possible. For maps, speaker bios, and other information, please click here.

The big news in geek-land this week is the recent release of Google's new location-based mobile application, Latitude. Latitude is a mobile social networking app for smartphones that allows your friends to see where you are in real-time, and vice-versa. Users see a little mug-shot of the people nearby, and have the option to text, call, email, or IM them by tapping their picture.  

NDN and NPI have written a lot about the importance of mobile technology and its effect on the political landscape. Location apps will add another layer of complexity to the picture. Today, location-based mobile social networking is still an emergent technology, with most users being early-adapters and geeks. Google's entrance into this space is likely to help get location-based networking off the ground (although tech reporters are quick to point out that, without integration with the main social networks like MySpace and Facebook, these apps remain limited in their utility).  

In this experimental stage, the uses and etiquitte for location-based services have not yet been fully identified and codified; for a fascinating and slightly creepy introduction to the location revolution, read the recent Wired feature, "I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle." Novelty aside, they are mostly limited (for now) to random meet-ups with friends in bars. However, I believe they have real untapped potential for organizing purposes, potential that we are really only beginning to understand. 

One of the challenges for progressives of all stripes (not just politicians) in this new political era is to understand how technology can broaden our reach and our horizons while making our world phenomenologically smaller and more inter-connected, and how we can utilize these advances to enhance solidarity and promote political and civic participation. So go get Latitude (or Loopt or WhosHere or Brightkite), play around with them, and start thinking about what comes next.

Bridging the gap between winning an election and governing with the help of the Internet and other new political tools has been one of the most interesting subtexts of the Obama transition. President Obama has of course made the weekly YouTube address a fixture of his administration, but in the past week, the Obama administration web team has taken their economic message online with new web sites: strongmiddleclass.gov, the website for the task force led by Vice President Biden on the middle class, and recovery.gov, a web site to be used for tracking the expenditures of the still-to-be-passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Here's what recovery.gov looks like now: 

NDN has discussed the Wired White House quite a bit. Click here for more of NDN's work on the topic.

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NDN affiliate The New Politics Institute has become one of the nation's leading experts and advisors on how the rise of a whole new set of media and technology tools is changing the practice of politics. The New Politics Institute has produced one of the most influential and dynamic series of papers in politics, the New Tools series. These papers, along with hundreds of major events and great videos about an array of new tools, have helped many progressives manage the transition to a 21st century media and technology environment.

I'd like to use today's New Tools column to highlight some of this body of work:

• Mobile Media in 21st Century Politics by Tim Chambers, Co-Founder of Dewey Digital and Media 50 Group

• Go Mobile Now by Jed Alpert and Chris Muscarella, Co-founders of Mobile Commons, October 2007

• Mastering Online Search for Politics by Arve Overland, CEO & Executive Creative Director
  Overland Agency, Inc., May 2006

• Use Search by Pete Leyden, September 2007

• Reimagine Video by Dan Manatt, PoliticsTV, October 2007

• Engage the Blogs by Jerome Armstrong, Founder of MyDD and Internet Strategist, September 2007 

• Advertise Online by Henry Copeland and Megan Mitzel of Blogads.com, October 2007

• Leverage Social Networks by Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer and Head of Global Public
  Policy for Facebook, November 2007

• Buy Cable Smart by Alixandria Weise, September 2007

• Microtargeting by Mark Steitz and Laura Quinn, Catalist, October 2007

• Speak in Spanish by Simon Rosenberg, President and Founder of NDN, October 2006

Each one of these must-read papers can teach you how to message, organize, and advertise more effectively using the tools of this new political era.

If you're still hungry for more, or if you can't take the time to read through everything right now, you can also learn more about these new tools by watching top experts explain them here:

Co-Founder of Dewey Digital and Media 50 Group Tim Chambers speaking on Going Mobile:

Chief Technology Officer for Catalist Vijay Ravindran on Microtargeting:

Google’s Director of Elections and Issue Advocacy Peter Greenberg on Advertising Online:

CEO and Executive Producer of PoliticsTV Dan Manatt on Reimagining Video:

For more New Tools videos, click here.

Add one more to the list of firsts from Tuesday's Inauguration -- the event set a new all-time high for internet traffic in the U.S., according to an article in today's New York Times. From the article, "Online Video of Inauguration Sets Records":

Internet traffic in the United States hit a record peak at the start of President Obama’s speech as people watched, read about and commented on the inauguration, according to Bill Woodcock, the research director at the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that analyzes online traffic. The figures surpassed even the high figures on the day President Obama was elected.

“The peak is the highest measured to date, and it appears to be mostly a U.S. phenomenon,” Mr. Woodcock said, adding that it did not appear that global records would be set.

...CNN said it provided more than 21.3 million video streams over a nine-hour span up to midafternoon. That blew past the 5.3 million streams provided during all of Election Day.

In total, a whopping 60% of Americans watched or listened to the event live, and another 20% either saw or read reports of it that day. From a Gallup report today:

The live audience included 70% of nonworking Americans, but also 53% of those currently employed -- suggesting that many workers either took the day off or had the opportunity to watch or hear the ceremonies at work.

Americans were clearly more interested in the inauguration of Barack Obama than they were in George W. Bush's second inauguration four years ago. In 2005, only 40% of Americans said they watched or heard the inaugural ceremonies live.

These record-breaking internet numbers match the record-breaking crowds Obama drew here in DC this week, and are an appropriate marker for the start of the first 21st century presidency.

The news is not all good, however. Many people experienced problems when attempting to watch the proceedings online:

The viewing troubles may have been more a result of the limited Internet capacity coming to offices and houses, rather than a lack of overall bandwidth from the media companies, according to Mr. Woodcock. The United States continues to suffer from less-than-robust bandwidth, which Mr. Woodcock attributes to inadequate government attention and limited competition between Internet service providers like AT&T and Comcast. President Obama, in fact, mentioned the issue in the very speech that people were trying to watch.

Luckily, President Obama seems to recognize the importance of expanding our internet infrastructure so that all of America can join in, and not just those of us that can afford expensive computer equipment and a broadband subscription. Currently, the United States is 19th in the world in broadband penetration, right behind Estonia. The stimulus package currently contains $6 billion to increase access to broadband internet, which will go a long way towards ensuring that more Americans enjoy the advantages of the digital revolution.