How Technology Is Altering The 2010 Landscape 6:54 AM

This past Tuesday night, I had the privilege of giving the keynote address to the Hillsborough County Republican Executive Committee - the largest Executive Committee in the State of Florida.  My speech focused on how technology is being harnessed by insurgent candidates across the country to upset the political establishment.  The timing of the speech could not have been more appropriate.  As I was speaking, polls were closing and votes were being counted in Massachusetts where soon after, they would announce that Republican Scott Brown had been elected to succeed Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate.  Needless to say, the crowd of 300 was fired up and ready to learn how to leverage technology to win elections in 2010.  Here's the full speech:

Round-Up of MA Senate 'Online Politics' Stories 3:16 AM

Scott Brown's insurgent candidacy in Massachusetts has produced an onslaught of stories this week about how the GOP is pulling even and even surpassing Democrats in online politics/organizing.  With everyone linking to these individual stories across the internet, I thought I would do my best to compile them all in one easy-to-navigate round-up:

• Real Clear Politics: Online Strategy Fuels Brown Surge 
• Wall Street Journal: How Scott Brown Used Google to Get Results in Mass. Election 
  
• Tech President: Massachusetts Special: The State of the Brown vs. Coakley (Online) Race
• Huffington Post: Scott Brown's Massachusetts Insurgency Shows How Online Organizing Has Shifted the Political Calculus 
• Wall Street Journal: Atwitter in Mass.: Brown’s Social Media Strategy Tops Coakley’s
• ClickZ: Massachusetts Senate Election Could Inspire a More Digital GOP 
• AdAge: Coakley Ignores Obama's Digital-Media Playbook in Massachusetts 
• ABC: Is Scott Brown Closing the GOP Technology Gap?
• New York Times: Internet Politics From Both Sides Now
• CNN: GOP candidate dominates social networking in Massachusetts
• CNN: GOP candidate saturates Google with ads
  

If you know of a MA Senate online politics story not included above, please leave a link in the comments section and I will do my best to include it on this list.

Online Strategy Fuels Brown Surge 8:24 AM

This morning, the eyes of the political world are turned towards Massachusetts.  But win or lose, Scott Brown's campaign will be cited as another great example of Republicans utilizing technology to raise money and win votes.

Real Clear Politics' Mike Memoli has an excellent piece out this morning examining Brown's use of technology as well as other Republicans who are excelling in this space.  Memoli was kind enough to include yours truly in his piece.  Here's an excerpt:

Scott Brown is on the verge of one of the great political upsets in recent memory. And it may have started with a simple hashtag.

Well before many political watchers latched on to his candidacy, the campaign of the Republican state senator was cultivating an army of grassroots supporters online that helped fuel his insurgent effort. Brown has been able to leverage a simmering unease about the nation's direction - even in deeply blue Massachusetts - with the enthusiasm for his candidacy among national Republican activists thanks in part to a new force in electoral politics: Twitter.

"It's absolutely the quickest, most accessible, most open platform for sharing information on the Web," said Jordan Raynor, a Florida-based Republican online strategist. "Twitter by nature makes information valuable, if it's valuable information. If you've got a juicy piece of news it's going to spread fastest through Twitter."

"It has never been easier to be as influential as you can be today," Raynor said. "Information is cheap. Information is easier to produce. And if you have a quality message, it's never been cheaper to get out."

You can read the entire piece by clicking here

Ignore Influential Twitterers At Your Own Peril 9:01 AM

Your campaign has targeted newspaper reporters for decades and bloggers for years.  But what about individual Twitter users?  Can an individual Twitter user reach a large enough number of opinion leaders, activists and voters to make it worth your while?

I have long wondered if there is a way to compare the reach of one's Twitter account to that of a blog.  Blog and website traffic is easily measured with free services such as Google Analytics and other more sophisticated programs used by most web publishers.  These services tell web publishers exactly how many impressions their site is serving and where that traffic is coming from.

Twitter is much more difficult to measure.  Many URL shorteners provide detailed analytics on links posted on Twitter (see bit.ly and awe.sm), but aside from link tracking, there is no universal way to measure how many "impressions" you are serving with your tweets - in other words, how many of your followers are actually reading your tweets.

A few weeks ago, I posed the following question to my Twitter followers:

Is there any way to accurately compare impressions served between a Twitter account and a blog (assuming you have traffic data on the blog)?

Not surprisingly, no one had a solution to my dilemma.

After doing a little more digging of my own, Klout.com CEO and Co-Founder, Joe Fernandez reminded me of a statistic the free service provides that may be the best answer to this issue yet - "True Reach".  Fernandez (who was gracious enough to consult with me on this piece) explained to me that True Reach allows you to, "...look beyond the follower count and understand how many people are actually paying attention to your content."

If you are not familiar with Klout, put simply, Klout measures influence across the social web.  Klout is the only influence measuring Twitter app featured on Twitter.com's homepage and has been cited by leading social media gurus when comparing the influence of various Twitter users.

Klout's "True Reach" statistic is the most unique and accurate statistic I have found to date to compare a specific Twitter user's following to a website's "Absolute Unique Visitor" statistic.  Klout defines "True Reach" by the following:

This is the size of your engaged audience. This number will be smaller than the number of followers you have because we subtract spam followers and inactive accounts. Klout calculates influence for each individual relationship, so we also subtract the people who you have little influence over. For example, if you are followed by a person who follows 5,000 other people and you two have never interacted, share very few common friends, and generally don't tweet about the same topics, it's likely that your tweets are barely seen by this person, and you probably have little to no influence over them. On the other hand, if a person takes the time to put you on a Twitter list, it means they really value the content you produce, and will increase the influence you have over them.

True Reach is broken into the following subcategories:

Reach

• Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience?

• How far has your content been spread across Twitter?

• Are people adding you to lists and are those lists being followed?

Demand

• How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers

• Are your follows often reciprocated?

Factors measured: Followers, Friends, Total Retweets, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, @ Mention Count, List Count, List Followers Count.

So how can Klout's True Reach be used to compare impressions served between a Twitter profile and a website?  Let's look at an example:

According to my Klout profile, my True Reach score is 1,005, meaning that Klout calculates that 1,005 of my Twitter followers, on average, are reading my tweets (a relatively small number compared to other users with much larger followings).  This number, I believe,  is comparable to an "Absolute Unique Visitor" number a traditional website publisher might report.  On average, I tweet 15 times a day (excluding @replies which are viewed by a smaller universe of people).  Multiplying my 15 tweets by my 1,005 True Reach number, my Twitter account serves an average of 15,075 impressions every day.  By comparison, the St. Petersburg Times' Buzz Blog, widely considered the most popular blog in Florida politics, serves an average of roughly 14,285 impressions per day.

This analysis gets even more interesting when you take into account that Klout's True Reach statistic does not take into account retweets of your original tweet - the most viral aspect of Twitter.  For example, a single tweet I posted a few weeks ago reached 8,263 unique Twitter users through retweets, according to TweetReach.com - that's more than 8 times Klout's True Reach number.

As Twitter continues to expand as a primary blogging platform, it will be increasingly more important to measure the reach of influential Twitter users and compare them to the reach of off-Twitter blogs.  This model, while admittedly flawed, seems to be a good start.  Communications professionals inside and outside of politics would be wise to take a hard look at the True Reach of Twitter's most influential users important to their campaign or cause.

I have been impressed by a few political campaigns and committees who have reached out to me and other Twitter users on a regular basis as part of their press outreach - namely Rob Simmons, Marco Rubio, Gus Bilirakis and the NRSC.  These few are the exception, far from the rule.

It is no longer an option (or at least a wise one) to ignore Twitter users in your blogger/press outreach for your campaign.  The numbers don't lie.  Campaigns that ignore influential Twitter users do so at their own peril.  Influential Twitter users with massive reach can be just as, if not more influential than off-Twitter blogs and websites.  Hopefully you can use the above model to determine who those users are and incorporate them into your campaign's communication outreach.

Transcript of Twinterview with @AdamSmithTimes 2:44 PM

Thanks again to Adam Smith of the St. Pete Times for a fantastic interview this afternoon.  Here is the full transcript:

Raynor: Thank you for being with me for today’s twinterview!

Smith: Glad to join you. A real tweet

Raynor: You recently experienced your own ‘Twittergate’ moment (http://bit.ly/53luJl). Has the incident changed how you use Twitter?

Smith: Not really. Probably a good idea to be slower on the Twitter finger

Raynor: Yes, probably a good lesson for all of us. Do you use Twitter to seek out story leads?

Smith: Not so much, at least not yet. I use it more to keep informed, connected, share news updates

Raynor: @TheRickWilson wants to know how the ability of citizen journalists to fact check stories has affected your job?

Smith: I 'd say it's definitely a good thing. The more fact checkers the better. And fast online journalism means readers can point out typos or any mistake I might make before it appears in the print version      

Raynor: You and your team have built The Buzz blog (http://blogs.tampabay.com/buzz) into one of the most read political blogs in FL.  How much traffic does The Buzz generate on average per week?

Smith: fluctuates, depending on the news, but we typically see more than 100,000 visitors weekly

Raynor: What online news sources and web sites do you regularly visit to get news and information?  

Smith: Tons- of different sources from the major media sites to red state to drudge to 538 and lots more

Raynor: Have online news aggregation services such as @SayfieReview and to an extent Twitter done more good or harm for newspapers?

Smith: Anything that drives traffic to our sites is probably a good thing

Raynor: @DJGroup wants to know if you think thoughtful reporting has suffered at the expense of a need for speed via blogs/Twitter?

Smith: Yes, I think probably reporting has suffered some because of the need for speed on blogs/twitter, 24/7 cable

Raynor: Will the St. Petersburg Times have a print edition in 5 years? 10 years?

Smith: I think so. If print was really dead, Times' free tabloid Tbt (geared to younger readers) wouldn't be thriving as it is

Raynor: The press coverage of the FL SEN GOP primary outside of FL has deemed @MarcoRubio a Tea Party candidate yet in-state press hasn’t really bought that label. Have national media outlets gotten this one wrong?

Smith: Yes, somewhat. His support is deeper than tea partiers. Just like Jim Greer...Wasn't tea party that ousted Greer, like a lot of nationl media suggested, but GOP establishment         

Raynor: What is the greatest mistake campaigns make when dealing with reporters/press? 

Smith: Not going first to the St Pete Times.  Seriously, hard question. But honesty (or at least the ability to fake it) goes a long way to establishing cred

Raynor: What one race in FL do you think could shock political insiders on both sides of the aisle in November?

Smith: Hmmm. IA.G. race very unpredictble on both sides. And ag commish race cld be more compet than xpected w scott maddox running

Raynor: Last question - Who do you wish had a Twitter feed but doesn't?

Smith: Stumped. I can't keep up with all the good feeds already out there     

Live Twinterview with Adam Smith 6:04 AM

Today at 2:00 p.m. EST, I will conduct a live interview on Twitter (AKA a "twinterview") with Adam Smith, Political Editor of the St. Petersburg Times.  Political Editor since 2001, Adam was named the best political writer in Florida by washingtonpost.com and one of the country's top 10 political reporters by Columbia Journalism Review.  Adam was the first political reporter in Florida to embrace blogging with the launch of The Buzz blog which has become one of the most widely read political blogs in the State.  Today's twinterview will span an array of topics including the current state and future of the newspaper industry, how reporters are engaging in social media and Florida's top political races.

Here's how it will work. Beginning at 2:00 p.m. EST, I will begin directing questions to Smith via my Twitter account (@JordanRaynor). Smith will then respond to these questions via his Twitter account (@AdamSmithTimes).  If you have a question for Smith, please direct it to @JordanRaynor on Twitter.

How can you follow this live twinterview? Here's 3 simple ways:

1. Follow this Twitter list specifically for the twinterview

2. Follow @JordanRaynor and @AdamSmithTimes on Twitter. This will allow you to follow the twinterview in whichever Twitter client you prefer.

3. search.twitter.com (no Twitter account required)

Charlie Crist's Blocked Videos 8:46 AM

UPDATE (March 24, 2010 - 4:35 p.m.) -  This afternoon, the Crist campaign released their first TV ad of the campaign - an all negative spot bashing Crist's GOP primary rival, Marco Rubio.  Because of the information outlined below, originally published in January of this year, I was shocked to see that the Crist campaign left the YouTube version of this negative ad open for comments and ratings.  Less than two hours after tweeting about my shock though, the Crist campaign disabled all comments and ratings on the video, keeping with their previous standard of blocking comments and ratings on all attack ads.  In fairness, it looks like the Crist camp has disabled comments and ratings on all videos - negative and positive.  Here's the ad, ratings disabled and all:



ORIGINAL POST

Yesterday, it was brought to my attention that the comments and rating functionality on Charlie Crist's new web-ad posted to YouTube have been blocked.  At first, I thought this was an honest mistake on the behalf of the campaign, rather than a strategic decision made to keep Rubio supporters from responding to the video.  At the time of this post though, the Crist campaign has yet to respond to questions I have posed both on Twitter and Facebook regarding why the comments and ratings have been blocked on this particular video.

Thus, I dug a little bit more and found that there are actually 3 YouTube videos uploaded by the Crist campaign in which the comments and ratings are blocked - the 3 web-videos the campaign has released attacking Marco Rubio.  The 14 other videos the Crist campaign has uploaded to YouTube are open for comments and ratings - all of these videos are positive videos focused on Crist himself.  See for yourself:

Blocked comments and ratings:



Open comments and ratings:

The Ideal Internet Candidate? 10:12 AM

A few weeks ago, Patrick Ruffini asked his Twitter followers to suggest qualities they think the "ideal 'internet candidate'" would possess.  We may never see the perfect online candidate, but today's story about Newark Mayor Cory Booker personally showing up at a constituent's driveway to shovel snow in response to a tweet, can help make the argument that Booker is the closest thing to it.

According to CNN:

The daughter of a 65-year-old Newark man...directly ask[ed] Mayor Cory Booker to help shovel her dad's driveway on New Years Eve.

Ravie Rave, otherwise known as @BigSixxRaven on Twitter, was at work and could not help her father shovel, so she sent a tweet to the mayor asking for assistance.

Five minutes later Booker messaged her back.

"I will do it myself where does he live?”

With over 1 million followers, Booker is one of the most active and followed politicians on Twitter, the popular social networking micro blog.

“Please @BigSixxRaven don’t worry bout ur dad,” Booker tweeted. “Just talked 2 him & I’ll get 2 his Driveway by noon. I’ve got salt, shovels & great volunteers.”

Twenty minutes after reading the first tweet, Booker knocked on the father’s door with a shovel in hand. He even had volunteers pitch in to help after seeing the conversation on Twitter.

This phenomenal use of Twitter by Booker isn't his first sensational use of social networking.  A few months ago, Mayor Booker took to YouTube to officially put NBC's Tonight Show host, Conan O'Brien on Newark's "No Fly List" after O'Brien poked fun at the City of Newark.  Booker's hysterical video response sparked a brilliant back-and-forth banter between Booker and O'Brien, bringing hilarious comedic attention to the rising Dem politico in the Garden State.  Here are Booker's three YouTube responses to O'Brien for your viewing pleasure:  

Will we ever see the perfect internet candidate? Maybe, maybe not. But from where I sit, it's going to be difficult to find any politician using the internet more effectively than Mayor Booker.