In 2006 I volunteered to help a local candidate with her campaign. I came in late, and my original offer, to make a series of Internet-delivered campaign videos, soon extended to maintaining her website. Severely outfunded by her eventually victorious opponent, our candidate had high hopes for Internet campaigning. But her online effort was far too little and came too late to do much good.

For all of the Internet’s supposedly “instant” quality, getting attention for a new website often takes a lot of time. It can be weeks before it is picked up by major search engines. Once noticed, updates are usually catalogued within hours. But without the initial search engine “crawl,” that website will barely get noticed.

In our case, the candidate’s site had an additional handicap: To save time, since it was being thrown up late in the campaign, it was an appendage to a volunteer’s personal blog, not separately hosted on its own. $12 per month would have paid for a Yahoo site, including domain name registration and easy-to-use sitebuilding tools to make a simple “placeholder” site quickly — no technical knowledge required.

There was no reason, besides ignorance of Internet campaign tactics, that our candidate didn’t set up a basic Yahoo (or equivalent) site the second she filed to run for office. If she runs again, I’m sure she’ll have some sort of web presence almost immediately, even if it’s just a photo, a few paragraphs about her, campaign contact information, and a simple link (Paypal is fine) for easy money donation.

A website, by itself, is not a campaign

In 2002 I wrote a book about Internet marketing, and one of my basic messages was that a website is not a business. It is a promotional tool for a business. The political corollary is that a website is not, by itself, a campaign. It is a campaign tool. It can and should be a powerful tool both as a means of staying in touch with supporters and as a way to reach out to voters in general, but it must be part of an integrated campaign.

In fact, I would say that a well-maintained, properly-used email list is just as powerful a campaign tool as a website, and that these two tools, used together, produce four times as powerful a result as either one by itself.

There should also be a separate email/phone/fax media outreach list, along with a “press” section on the website. The media outreach list should get regular, heavy use. Not every reporter will write about every candidate’s every word, but if you throw enough honey against the wall — as the saying goes — some of it is bound to stick.

The candidate’s website should be linked in every email press release sent out, and it is essential for that site to contain easy-to-find resources for reporters, including high-resolution pictures of the candidate in many situations, from many angles, not to mention easy-to-find contact information, including both an email address that is checked frequently and a phone number that is either answered live by a human or that is checked frequently by a human and has all calls made to it returned within an hour during regular business hours and within two hours evenings and weekends.

Start early, then build regularly

The initial campaign website should go up as soon as a prospective candidate even thinks about running for office. I mention Yahoo as a hosting service not because it is the cheapest, but because it is supremely easy to use and supremely reliable. I have taught self-described technophobe artists to use Yahoo’s sitebuilding tools in an hour or less, which means even a candidate who is as computer-unhip as Alaska Senator Ted Stevens can make some kind of site using them. But that initial site should be considered no more than a starting point.

Yahoo and many other popular/inexpensive web hosting services include “ready to run” blogging software at no extra charge. At some point — preferably many months before the election — a candidate’s site should change from a static online “brochure” to a dynamic entity with new content posted at least three times every week, with that new content instantly available through an RSS feed (a standard feature of WordPress and other popular blogging programs) and sent out via the candidate’s email newsletter.

That website, which may use blogging software (for simplicity) but is not necessarily a blog, should be the ultimate resource for information about the candidate. Because it costs next to nothing to make, and more content can be added continuously without the cost of paper and printing, it should be where members of both the media and the public (and those of use who are both) turn for our deepest look at our candidate’s positions, values, even his or her appearance in the form of photos and videos.

Online videos will become an increasingly important campaign tool

Television is possibly the best mass advertising medium there is. It can take you to a place and introduce you to a person in a way no combination of text and still photos can match. But it is expensive, often far too expensive for local candidates just starting their campaigns on low budgets. Online video is not yet a “mass” medium, but it offers two huge advantages over local broadcast or cable TV advertising: Low cost and lack of time constraints.

On the cost side, I (and presumably others) can now produce a political video ad for about one-tenth of what it costs to have one made by a local cable TV operator or traditional-style TV advertising production house. This isn’t because people like me, steeped in citizen journalism and documentary/news video production techniques rather than in set-shot ad production styles, are smarter than our old-fashioned counterparts, but because we take a minimalist approach to the job. We like to see the candidate in natural settings, perhaps not perfectly-lit or wearing makeup, speaking from his or her heart to actual voters — and more important, listening to those voters.

This kind of video is far more powerful than old-style “vote for me because my opponent sucks,” scripted political TV advertising. It gives voters a sense that they know the candidate personally; that the candidate has made an attempt to connect with them one-on-one. And, as I said, this kind of spot is cheap and easy to make. It doesn’t take a crew, just one smart person to both direct and operate the camera — and nowadays that video camera can be a four-pound, $2400 unit instead of an old-fashioned 30-pound/$30,000 Betacam.

Despite its lower price, the modern portable electronic news gathering-type camcorder often gives clearer output than its larger and more expensive ancestor. Add in the ability to do professional-level video editing — even high-definition — with a $1000 PC and a $500 software package instead of the traditional $20,000+ AVID rig, and it’s obvious why video production costs are coming down, at least when that production is done by people who have the experience and mindset to do it both well and rapidly.

As to the time constraint factor: Since bradcast and cable TV purveyors sell “time” as if it was the most precious commodity in the world (which it is to them because of the necessarily linear way their programming is delivered), most TV commercials are limited to either 30 or 60 seconds. An “Internet TV” piece can run two, three, five or even ten minutes.

I believe, based on 10+ years of experience working on popular websites, that Internet video segments should never be longer than five minutes. If you have 10 or 15 or 20 minutes’ worth of material, break it up into chapters. In my experience, five minutes is close to the attention-span maximum for most Americans, and three minutes is probably a better “safe” length. But remember: on the Internet, by using free video hosting services and embedding their players directly into your site, you can post all the videos you want, which means that, in three to five minute chunks, you can give voters a full picture of yourself — and of your opponent — not just isolated sound bites.

It’s true that today Internet video viewership is a fraction — probably less than 1/10 — of broadcast and cable TV viewership. In 2008 Internet videos will still not draw anywhere near the gross viewer numbers of traditional broadcast and cable delivery, but there is a major difference: paid video messages on broadcast and cable TV interrupt shows people really want to watch and are often ignored. TV commercial breaks are opportunities to go to the restroom, grab a snack or, for a growing number, something to fast-forward through with a Tivo or other personal video recorder. In contrast, people who watch online videos actively seek them out. This makes each “view” of an online video far more powerful than a theoretical “view” of a broadcast or TV commercial, which may be delivered to 10,000 or 100,000 households but only actively watched by a few hundred of the people who supposedly view it — and for whose attention the broadcaster or cable company charges.

I suspect that the most powerful possible onine video election campaign — especially a local campaign — would be an ongoing series of voter education messages that covered many issues and explained how local decisions are made. Ideally, such a series would be non-ideological and would only peripherally boost the candidate. This sort of endeavor would paint the candidate as an expert in governance, and would give voters and potential voters (and local media) a good reason to sign up for his or her email list and seek out each new video as it appeared. Add this sort of informative content to a candidate’s website, along with a weekly “vote for me” pitch, and you could easily get between 10 and 100 times the attention-grabbing and vote-getting power as an equivalent amount of time and money spent on TV and other traditional media advertising.

Coming changes in online video delivery

Right now free video hosting services predominate. YouTube is without question the best-known and most popular one, but there are dozens of others and more keep springing up. All of them are trying to make a profit based on advertising. Not all of them will succeed. I expect that many of the current crowd of ad-supported video hosts will be gone before the 2008 elections.

“Free” is a hard price to beat, though. I urge all candidates who want to spread their message to post their videos on as many free hosting services as they can. And if I was thinking about a run for any office in 2008, I would start posting on YouTube et al NOW. Think of it as a “can’t hurt, and might do some good” thing. It is never too early to start getting your name out there.

Meanwhile, I personally hesitate to embed YouTubed or other free-host videos in my own website because their delivery quality is generally poor; the videos are small and more than a little blurry. Not only that, before long there will be video ads appended to your videos, even if you embed them — which means you put a little HTML code on your site to make it look as though the hosted videos are part of your site rather than linking to a page on the the host’s site.

There are several “pay for” video hosts out there, but they are generally hard to use — much harder than their free equivalents — and don’t offer markedly higher video quality. The only thing they really offer is freedom from ads in your videos. There is one pay-for site, Phanfare, that offers both high-quality video delivery and a well-made upload utility, and has great prices, but Phanfare’s videos use so much bandwidth that only Interner users with cable modems or very fast business connections can view them. DSL and dialup users are frozen out. This make Phanfare useless for hosting either business or political videos you want to deliver to the broadest possible audience.

There is obviously a market for a service that offers high quality, ad-free video delivery. Lulu.tv is working on this. So am I, along with my partner Brice Burgess, for our Internet Video Promotion startup — although we’re cooperating with Lulu.tv and in the end may use their servers.

In any case, by 2008 there ought to be at least a few high-quality hosting services around that charge between $10 and $15 per month per video, probably with some sort of discount package for volume users. This would — make that will — give political candidates and issue-oriented campaigners a way to have clear, professional-looking videos on their own sites even as they spread their word to the rest of the world through the “viral” free vieo hosting services, some of which will not only survive but will almost certainly become more popular than they already are.

If you want to discuss “Internet TV” and other online campaign tactics privately, please email robin@roblimo.com. My primary current interest is producing low-cost business and news/feature video, but there is no reason political work can’t become part of the mix.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 1st, 2007 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Bradenton/local, Politics, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.